Hole Digging

The floods have returned, much later this time, but with their usual ferocity; perhaps even more so than usual. But the floods came in June this time, which is very abnormal; at least, it’s abnormal for the three long, arduous years that we’ve roosted here at Jackson Acre. Normally we flood in March, which is an annual rite of passage here at Jackson Acre, much like the spring breaking of the pack ice in the Arctic or the annual return of the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio (Carrion Capital of the World!).
But the monsoon rains came in June. Four and a half inches in less than twelve hours, to be exact. We awoke to the gurgling sounds of the sump pump going off every eight seconds. Waking up to this sound is normally NOT a good sign, no matter how you look at it. Although I suppose you could say that waking up to an absence of that sound would probably be a worse sign, indicating a complete failure of the pumps, backup pumps, backup to the backup pumps, and various alarms that we have established within and around our sump pump pit. Our sump pump has better hazard monitoring than some Russian nuclear reactors!
Ripping open the blinds confirmed the return of Lake Jackson.
It was a short-lived body of water and by five o’clock that afternoon half the back yard had drained out, leaving Jackson Swamp in Jackson Lake’s wake. Coming home from work that evening, the first thing I noticed upon exiting my car, besides the lower water levels, was the unmistakable stench of something dead. It was a road kill smell, the kind that wafts briefly into your open car window on a warm July afternoon as you pass a long dead and bloated raccoon rotting on the berm. And my first thought is, hmmm, there must be a dead raccoon drowned under one of my pine trees around here.
So I walked around the yard and surveyed the flood damage, fully expecting to find a dead raccoon wedged under a tree somewhere. Instead, I was surprised to find an extraordinary number of dead worms all around the yard. I’m talking hundreds of worms, everywhere! I can only assume that the water levels rose so high so fast that the poor worms had nowhere to go and couldn’t escape drowning.
The dead animal smell hung around for a few more days, but no dead animals turned up. So now I’m wondering if the dead body smell might be coming not from a single dead body, but rather from the hundreds of tiny dead bodies rotting about my yard.
Wait til I tell you about the “tadpoles” we discovered in our vernal pools here at Jackson Acre.
Wondering Where To Find More Worms?!








