History In The Making

Do you live near a park that's on a body of water? Did you ever wonder what it would be like if that body of water was gone? Would the park be as fun? Would it look as good?

It was a historic weekend in our little town . . . it was the first time in many, many years the Wisconsin River was drained down to almost nothing. Yup, you heard me correct - they drained a small section of the Wisconsin River over several days to do some repair work on a dam.

I'm not going to address whether or not I think draining a river is a wise decision. I'm not going to preach about the effects on the environment and wildlife when you go and mess with mother nature like that. I'm not going there . . . . . . . I'm not.

Regardless of my personal opinion, of course I had to go see this. I mean if we're making history here I need to document this in photos so I can show my kids when they are old enough to care and appreciate it. So on Saturday we loaded the kids in the car and went to the park.

I have to say that if something happened and one day the river just dried up - that park would never be the same. It was very strange to go there and not see the water. First of all it was stinky . . . almost like wet moldy leaves and a nice breeze was coming off the river - or mud pit - and blowing the stink right in our faces. A park that was once filled with ducks and geese - didn't have a bird in sight. There were people everywhere - it was a tourist attraction . . . people with cameras, people walking out onto the mud to look around, people carrying little treasures they found. - ewww by the way!

Surprisingly there wasn't as much garbage as I thought you'd find at the bottom of a river. There were a lot of glass bottles and we found one really old brick. There was a bunch of rusted pieces of metal that were unrecognizable - We saw what we thought was a hub cap and a bike frame. The river bed was covered in twisted & tangled up pieces of wood and the thing that was strange was it didn't look like trees, it almost looked like lumber from a house or building.

It certainly didn't hit me like seeing Lake Delton . . . perhaps because I know in a couple more days the water will be back. At least I got a little piece of history.