Greetings, from Fargo. It’s a bit wet here, these days.

To give you an idea just HOW wet, let’s compare.

then:

and now.

then,

and now.

These are clearly not the same shots, but, I assure you, they are exactly the same roads. And the devastation is equal from all camera angles. My mind is completely blown

Perhaps the best way to convey the scope of this thing is to try and describe the view from the Red River bridge. Normally, the river burbles along some fifty feet below, and as you cross from North Dakota into Minnesota you can look to either side and see a sloping expanse of rolling grass and trees. To your right is a park, to your left a bike trail, both carved into a wide, long valley that stretches from end to end.

This is us, last May, shooting trains from the bike trail.

Yup, nice. That’s all underwater now.

And this is a terrible picture of me, which I’d never post under ordinary circumstances.

Please ignore my bra as it claws its way through my shirt and focus on the background. See all that space? Yeah. Now it’s all water. Like, if I took that picture today the river would have been mere inches from my feet.

And you know, the thing I never realized about floodwater – it’s not clean. Like, not even remotely. I’m kind of embarrassed that this didn’t dawn on me until now, but when the river floods, it goes through sewage, garbage dumps, farmlands with manure, etc. Basically, when you’re looking at floodwater, you’re pretty much looking at an extremely large septic tank. With a current. We spent about two hours yesterday driving up and down 29, just north of Fargo where the flooding was worst, and at one point the smell actually became chewy.

Think about that.

No, really.

On the upside, I just realized I’m now the proud owner of 1.5 terabytes of portable storage.

On the downside, apparently there’s a motorcycle convention at our hotel tonight, which has nothing to do with flooding but is annoying nevertheless.