Water Over The Dam - Part I

Where do we begin to describe the great flood of 2018?

            There are iconic scenes that will stick with us, recorded forever (hopefully) in today’s technology by anyone and everyone with a phone in their pocket or purse.  

            There is the video of the Red Angus bull standing in the middle of the bridge in Coon Valley with that “I’m here now and it’s a lot better than where I was before and nobody is moving me” look in its eyes. (What ever happened to that magnificent animal?  That question seems to be floating around a week after the waters subsided.)

            Then there is the photo of the highway sign in Ontario that alerts viewers that Highway 131 going to La Farge is a right turn. When the photo was first posted online, some people did not see the picnic table covered with flood trash sitting on top of the sign – indicating the record setting level of water in Ontario. A week after that record setting floodwater, Hwy 131 remains closed between there and Rockton as several bridge areas of the highway received significant damage from the floodwaters. Maybe that photo was trying to say that it would be no picnic trying to travel the road south to La Farge.

            For Viola, perhaps the enduring memory will be that waterline on the brick walls of the Iron Horse Saloon building on the village’s main Commerical Street.  The water line, with the water soaked red bricks below delineates the heights of the Kickapoo’s record crest in that town.  An after effect of the great flood for Viola is another cancelled “Horse & Colt Show” – the second time in three years.  (The 2016 Horse & Colt Show also had to be cancelled because of flooding – which was the first time in nearly 80 years of having to cancel the annual fall festival.)  That celebration is a homecoming for many and will be sorely missed.

            In La Farge, perhaps the scene captured of the yellow storage building located next to Nuzum’s floating in the middle of Highway 82 between the lumberyard and Organic Valley’s cheese factory building is the one to remember.  As the record setting floodwaters receded the building was moved into a spot in front of the car wash.  That building dates back to the railroad days in La Farge (The last train left town in 1939.) when railroad cars could be unloaded of their cargo into the storage building.  Now the concrete foundation piers where the shed sat are a historic reminder of the old railroad days in the Kickapoo Valley.

            The great Kickapoo River flood of 1935 was the beginning of the end (or perhaps the end of the end) for the Kickapoo railroad line. Despite efforts by village leaders in La Farge and other Kickapoo Valley communities to get some flood control measures through federal programs, the railroad was soon a thing of the past. That flood of 1935 was the standard for measuring flood events until the great flood of 1978, which was surpassed by the great flood of 2008, nearly topped by the great flood of 2017, and now has been eclipsed by the Great Kickapoo River Flood of 2018. 

            

When the big floods come, the Kickapoo washes away more than ever comes back.

            That old saying from over a century ago about flooding in the Kickapoo Valley was included in the prelude to Volume I of my La Farge history.  Already rumors are circulating about businesses in Ontario, Viola and Readstown that will not reopen because of the great flood of 2018.  People who lived in flood-ravaged homes along the river in towns from Wilton to Wauzeka don’t want to return to their former residences. How many people who lived in La Farge in 2008 and were affected by the flood left the village?  What will it be like this year?  Some people cannot return to their homes because the damage is so great.  Everyone is beaten down by the terrible floodwaters.  Morale is low for many.  This is the third straight year for bad flooding on the Kickapoo.  When will it ever stop?

            The recent 2016-18 flooding on the Kickapoo is eerily similar to the flooding of a decade past.  In 2007, 2008 and 2010, the Kickapoo Valley experienced bad flood events with the flooding of June 2018 being an all-time record setter until the most recent flood.  At the time, people of the Valley were wondering what was going on.  Was this climate change at its worst?

            At one of the Driftless Dialogue talks held at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve several years ago, a speaker from UW-Madison (we think it was Stanley Temple) discussed the causes and effects of the flooding in the Kickapoo Valley between 2007 and 2010.  The main thing that we took away from the talk was that the Kickapoo Valley could expect more of these flood events because of the changes occurring in weather patterns caused by climate change.  The unique and hilly topography of the Kickapoo Valley also was a factor in the intensity of the flooding.  At the time, I wasn’t sure if this theory about continued flood events in the Kickapoo Valley would prevail, but perhaps it is playing out right in front of us once again. 

            We will have to have more on this flooding on the Kickapoo next time.

"KICKAPOOGIA - A STATE OF MIND"

Many moons ago we checked into a motel in the Eagle River area for a little summer vacation stay in Wisconsin’s “Up North”.  When the owner/clerk saw our address as La Farge, he inquired what we were doing in the north woods.  He said that it didn’t get any prettier than the Kickapoo Valley.  He and his wife were from LaCrosse (they helped run the family owned hostelry in the summers) and said they tried to get to the Kickapoo Valley whenever possible.  I told them I was going fishing on some of the lakes in the Conover area to try to catch some walleyes, which you cannot do in the Kickapoo Valley – and he agreed.

            But what he said, probably first got me to thinking about the natural beauty of where we live here in the Valley of the Kickapoo. That “Up North” conversation probably occurred sometime in the late 1970s or early ‘80s and what the motel operator was saying was already playing out in front of us, but we probably didn’t even see it.

            Many people were visiting the Kickapoo Valley in the early 1970s, some drawn to the area because of the controversy over the La Farge dam project.  Many of the visitors canoed the river and camped along its shores.  Some of those people fell in love with the gorgeous valley and decided to stay.

            In La Farge, the newcomers of that time were known as “Hippies” although most were not necessarily of that “hip generation”. Yes, some of the men had longer hair and beards and the women sported long skirts and a bra was not an absolute necessity as an undergarment.  Some of the newcomers had an inclination towards relaxation with marijuana use (“Wacky Weed”, as the locals liked to call it), but most seemed to fit into the local scene pretty well.  Downstream, in the Gays Mills area, the newcomers of that time became known as the “Back – To – The – Landers”, because of their propensity to try farming on a small scale.  Regardless, all of the newcomers came to the Kickapoo Valley, liked what they saw and decided to stay.

            The stoppage of the dam project at La Farge in the mid-‘70s continued to draw national headlines and that continued to draw people to the Valley to see what all of the fuss was about.  Again, many of those visitors liked what they saw in the Valley of the Kickapoo.  People from the urban areas of Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago started to view the beautiful Kickapoo Valley as a place for a second home – a spot in the country for extended vacations.  When you add in the spectacular increase in the populations of Whitetail Deer and wild turkeys in the Valley at the same time, small acreage spots for a hunting camp became sought after in the Kickapoo Valley as well.

            If you were born and raised in the Kickapoo Valley, there is a propensity to take the beauty of the Valley for granted.  You get used to the surroundings and start to overlook the majesty of the awesome hills and valleys.  When the people who lived north of La Farge were leaving their homes and farms because of the dam project, they were forced to make a decision on whether to stay in the Valley or move away.  For some, who wanted to stay in farming, the decision would be based on finding another farm to keep milking cows.  Many of those farmers stayed in the area, but others left and sought their agricultural fortunes in other locales.

            Harvey and Bernice Schroeder sold their mink ranch to the federal government as part of the dam project buy out in the early 1970s. They were retiring from farming, but they were not sure where they wanted to live.  They traveled around America to other places, in particular checking out some locations where the Corps of Engineers had water control projects similar to the one at La Farge.  They visited many beautiful places, but in the end returned to the Valley and built a new house located just north of La Farge that would be overlooking “Beautiful Lake La Farge”.  Bernice has always said that they could not leave the beautiful hills of the Kickapoo Valley.  (Perhaps that is why Bernice’s daughter, Kathy, has returned to the Valley to build a house on one of those hills.)

            Even after the dam project was stopped and the lake was no longer a possibility, people from away continued to buy property in the rural areas of the Valley.  Whether for a hunting camp or a second vacation home, the people still wanted to be in those hills as much as they could.    

              When CROPP bought the cheese factory in La Farge in 1989, a whole other group of new people came to the Valley.  As the “Croppies” took over La Farge, many bought homes and farms in the area.  Their organic ideals of farming struck a chord with locals, who liked the old-fashioned sensibilities of that type of farming.  Because the topography of the Valley almost demands smaller farms, the “Organic Way” of farming soon thrived.  The old “Two-Story Farms” of the Kickapoo Valley were viable again and the beauty of the Valley was a bonus for the new organic farmers.

            Sometime in the late 1990s a local realtor took a long distance call from a faraway place.  The caller was looking for a house on a small farm.  The search was a little more specific though because the caller wanted a place located in THE “Organic Valley”.  (Who says brand names don’t make a difference!)  When the realtor explained to the caller that there wasn’t an actual “Organic Valley”, a sense of disappointment could be felt over the phone by the realtor.  But the realtor, being a good salesperson, promptly started selling the virtues of the beautiful Kickapoo Valley, and eventually the sale of some Valley property was secured. 

            Today, the beauty of the Kickapoo Valley is wrapped within the overall tourist draw of the Driftless Area.  This unglaciated region of the Midwest is unique in many respects and the beautiful Kickapoo Valley is the poster child of the area.  Since the Kickapoo River is the only river that has its entire watershed included in the Driftless Area, the Valley has historic and geologic reasons for its unmatched beauty and majesty.  Since the Kickapoo Valley has this awesome beauty, then its inhabitants must be pretty special, too? 

            Right?  

            Well??

            Maybe the story of those “Kickapoogians” (or is it “Kickapoojians”?) who live in ultra-cool “Kickapoogia” is one for another time. Don’t forget that those uber-cool “Kickapoogia” t-shirts are for sale at the gift shop of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve Visitor Center.  Get them while they are HOT!  

            Stay cool in Kickapoogia!

Saturation Point!

During September, the Kickapoo Valley was awash in floodwaters.  It was not a record-setter like we had back in 2008, but it was a significant flooding event for the Valley.  If one watched the weather patterns over the last few months, this flood in the fall season could almost be anticipated.  The Kickapoo Valley has a saturation point and once that is attained, then flooding is almost sure to follow.

            The flood of September 22-24, 2016 reached a height of a little over 14 feet as recorded at the measuring station on the Kickapoo River at La Farge.  This is almost two feet below the record setting flood of June 2008, but it still qualifies as a “100-Year Flood” according to the flood measuring system adopted by the Corps of Engineers.  Now, we must remember that the “100-Year Flood” label does not mean that type of severe flood comes along every century or so.  What the designation does define is that type of severe flooding has a 1% chance of occurring on a yearly basis.  Clear as the muddy waters of the Kickapoo, right?

We need to back up a few months to see how this all set up for the Valley’s saturation point to be reached.  That term “saturation point” has been in the state news a lot in the past few weeks.  After the heavy rains in southern Wisconsin of this past September, the National Weather Service office out of Madison has released figures to show that water saturation is at record levels in area topsoil.  Although these measurements have only been kept since 1995, the September 2016 figures are record setters for the month and some of the top saturation levels ever recorded.  Here in the Kickapoo Valley, those record saturation levels have been quite apparent for a while.

Here at our place on Bear Creek, there is a field next to the highway that is jokingly referred to as a hay field.  Filled with weeds and marsh grasses, the field has relinquished several big bales of “horse hay” to cousin, Mike Steinmetz, over the past several years.  Mike even has baled up two cuttings of the marshy mixture in the good dry years.  “Good years” are the ones when it is dry enough to get the hay machines on the field to get the hay crop harvested.  This has not been a good year.

I talked to Mike about possibly baling up the marsh hay before the 4^th of July.  It was a little wet then from several heavy rains in June, so the harvest was delayed some.  That was really not a good idea, as it seemed to rain every other day in July.  Meanwhile the weeds in the field soared to the sky as the harvest was delayed – a bumper crop of Yellow Rocket, Wild Parsnip and Globe Plant.  Finally, on July 25^th, Mike cut the “hay” in the field.  When he was done driving through the marshy morass of muck, he told me that I should grow cranberries in the field next year.  He waited a week for the cut grass to dry out.  It never did.  As he baled up the soggy mass of weeds and grasses, water was spewing from the baler.  Saturation point had been attained – and that was on August 1^st.

The month of August was another rainy one, with some type of rain on nearly half the days – precipitation was much above average for the month.  Then came the real rains of September.

There was 4.25” of rain on September 6-7, another inch on the 9^th, another couple of inches in the week of September 12^th thru the 16^th, on the 19^th we had a rain shower with hail just for a little change, and then to make things really interesting, we had 6.25” of the wet stuff during the week of September 19^th thru the 25^th.  Although we are on the last day of the month as I’m writing this and it looks rainy, September’s rains will total in the 14-15” range – record setting for the month.  And that was AFTER the heavier than normal rains of the previous three months had put the Kickapoo Valley at the dreaded SATURATION POINT!

There was a “Preview of Coming Attractions” for us back after those early torrential rains the first week of September.  The creeks were out of the banks everywhere and Bear Creek went over Highway 131 at the bridge on the south end of town.  That day, September 7^th, was also the day that La Farge hosted a regional conference on development of small towns.  Government officials from though out southern Wisconsin descended on the village for the forum.  I gave a little history bus tour of the town that morning, prior to the forum’s beginning session.  As I herded several dozen people onto the bus in a pouring rain, some mentioned that they had gone through floodwaters that morning to get to La Farge.  Then they boarded a bus with the name “TITANIC” on the side!  When I told them that only special town tours of La Farge included a Kickapoo Valley flood while on board a TITANIC bus, some failed to see the humor in the morning’s situation.

Face Book and IPhones give a whole new perspective to Kickapoo Valley floods.  The photos are much more plentiful and the news travels much faster on a personal level.  The photo of Ken Choninger’s car buried in a washout hole at the bridge in Valley went viral on social media.  Scenes of washed out driveways taken from many different vantage points has an eerie end-of-the-world quality to them.  People who once lived in the Kickapoo Valley, but who now are high and dry in more secure locations, sent frantic messages wondering if everything had been washed away.

 Truth be told, it was a rather run-of-the-mill flood by old time standards.  Yes, the water went across Highway 82 between Nuzum’s and the cheese factory like it always does.  Andrews Flat filled up with the overflow floodwaters of the river and some of it flowed down Mill Street past the new clinic.  The water did run over old Highway 131 at Seelyburg for a couple of days.

But there were NOT any logs floating along Main Street like in 1907, 1935 and 2008.  As a matter of fact, we do not have any sawmill in town any more for the logs to float out of.  The edge of the floodwaters did not edge up to the parking lot of the Co-op like in the really big ones of the past.  It was not a “GREAT” Kickapoo River flood in La Farge although it was much more of a river-flooding event downstream in Viola, Readstown and Gays Mills.  Another reason that this year’s flood had less of an impact on La Farge was that over twenty former residences in town are no longer in the path of the floodwaters.  Those houses located in La Farge that used to sit in the floods’ path were bought out using FEMA and DNR funds after the 2008 flood.  Most were razed and hauled away to the landfill.

Another lively discussion that took place about the flood, concerned the Corps’ dam located north of La Farge.  If the dam had been finished, would it have curtailed the effects of the flood?  OF COURSE IT WOULD HAVE!  The main purpose of that federal project was to control floodwaters in the Kickapoo Valley.  It would have held back the floodwaters coming down from Ontario and that would have meant less flooding for La Farge, Viola and Readstown.  Remember that part of the La Farge dam project also included levy systems to protect the villages of Soldiers Grove and Gays Mills.  If those had been completed and the six retention dams had been built north of La Farge, also part of the federal project, the flood of September 2016 might have been looked at with yawning indifference.  But the big dam at La Farge, the down-river levy systems and the up-river retention dams never were built, so now we just keep backing away from the rising floodwaters.

Quoting from Volume 1 of my history book about La Farge, one resident who had barely survived the great flood of 1935 said, “I will never sleep in that house again.  Get me away from that damn river!”

HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS

(This piece was written about our winter travels,

this one continues to look at our travels to San Diego, California.)

            I find it interesting that when you travel to another place faraway from where you call home, some interesting connections with your home may pop up along the way.  San Diego, California seems far removed from having any ties to Wisconsin or especially the Kickapoo Valley, but looks can be deceiving.  If you start digging into a place’s history, remarkable connections can be unearthed.

            Alonzo Horton is known historically as “The Father of San Diego”.  In downtown San Diego, the Horton Plaza mall is named after the real estate developer who began the process of turning the little mission town into a booming city.  Horton had come to San Diego shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War to make his fortune in real estate development.  He bought the area near San Diego Bay where the harbor was located.  Over a twenty-year period Horton sold over 200 city blocks of land in what became known as New Town.  With its location near the busy harbor, New Town businesses thrived and Horton became a very rich man.  He once said, during the height of the San Diego real estate boom, “I’m getting tired of handling so much money”. 

            Horton’s connection to Wisconsin is that before coming to California, he had made a fortune in real estate development in the Badger State.  Horton had moved west from Connecticut, where he was born, to purchase a large tract of land in eastern Wisconsin.  Horton’s land purchase coincided with Wisconsin becoming a state in 1848 and within a few years, he had developed a thriving town southwest of Green Bay.  The town, Hortonville, bore his name.  In 1851, Horton sold the last of his land interests in Wisconsin and headed to California during the great Gold Rush of that time.  He became a successful businessman in San Francisco before heading south to San Diego in 1867.

            Oscar Millard was known as the “Father of Ontario”, the small village located in the northern part of the Kickapoo Valley.  Millard came from the eastern United States after Wisconsin became a state and purchased lands for lumbering.  He ran a general store along the Kickapoo River and named the settlement that grew up around his store, Ontario, after his birthplace in the state of New York.  Eventually, Millard sold off his store and land interests (after compiling great profits at both ventures) and moved to the American West.  For a time he was located in San Diego, where he operated a general store at the same time when Horton was developing New Town near the city’s harbor.  While he was in San Diego, Millard had a grandson move to the city to work as a telegraph operator for the railroad.

            William and Henry Minor operated a lumberyard business in La Farge in the 1890s.  The Minor brothers also had a lumber mill located in the Town of Clinton, north of Bloomingdale and at the bottom of Perkins Hill.  As was the case with these lumbering operations, a little village grew up around the mill that was called Minortown.  The lumberyard was started in order to sell that lumber from the Minortown mill in the booming village of La Farge.  By 1899, the Minor brothers had sold their La Farge operation and headed north to start lumbering there.  They bought 4,000 acres in Forest County from the railroad and started a lumber camp at a place called Carter.  Soon after the mill at Minortown was disassembled and moved to Carter and many of the men who worked for the Minor brother’s lumbering in Vernon County went north to work there.  The lumber mill at Carter was very successful for the Minor brothers.

            Eventually, the Minor brothers moved to the state of Oregon, where they built another large lumbering operation.  They built a huge store that filled an entire block in Eugene, Oregon.  The Minor brother’s store became the retail center of Eugene.  When they decided to retire from the retail operation, the Minor brothers donated the huge store to the University of Oregon.  The proceeds from the sale of the store were used to create a perpetual chair professorship at the University of Oregon in the School of Forestry.

            In returning to the story of the connection to San Diego, Alonzo Horton found that there was not sufficient lumber available in southern California for the rapid expansion of his New Town development.  In order to get more lumber on hand to build the stores and houses in San Diego, Horton arranged for lumber to be brought down from Oregon.  An efficient highway or railroad system had not been developed at the time of Horton’s need for more lumber.  So, the lumber was assembled into rafts and floating booms in Oregon, then pulled down the Pacific coast by tugboats to San Diego.  The idea of the floating rafts and lumber booms is eerily similar to the early days of lumbering in the Kickapoo Valley.

            We know that the lumbermen of the Kickapoo Valley took the “The Fatal Oak” lumbering folksong north with them.  That song, taken from a poem written to memorialize the loss of three lads from La Farge killed in a lumber rafting accident, was sung in Carter and other lumber camps Up North and across the country.  Perhaps the Minor brothers, who originally worked in that early lumbering time in the Kickapoo Valley, when the rough sawn lumber was bundled into rafts and assembled into booms and floated down the river to Midwestern markets, took that knowledge to Oregon with them.  There it could have been used to enable their Oregon lumber to get to San Diego.  Perhaps, Oscar Millard, one of the early proponents of the Kickapoo River lumber rafts, built his store in San Diego using lumber delivered with that same transportation method.

            Historic connections – San Diego and the Kickapoo Valley – may tie people and places together forever.

Winter of 2014

Thirty days has September,

April, June and November.

All the rest have thirty-one,

Except in the Winter of 2014,

When January and February

Each had two hundred and forty-two.

And March came in like a Lion,

When it was minus twenty-five on the Kickapoo!

            It has been that kind of a winter around “these parts”.  Cold, cold, cold descended on the “Valley” and hasn’t really loosened its icy fingers as March tries to go out like a lamb. 

January was one of the coldest months on record as the average temperature for the month ranked in the top five or so.  There was a week or so in the middle of the month where that little red string of mercury in the thermometer climbed up toward the freezing point, but for the most part below zero numbers were the rule.  We were introduced to the term “Polar Vortex” as temperatures plunged towards the -30 degree mark and beyond in the first week of the New Year.

They used to call them “Cold Snaps” around here.  I think that the term “Snap” was used to capture the brevity of the occurrence.  But this little “Snap” arrived on the first weekend of the month and didn’t depart until the next.  A little long for a “Snap”, don’t you think?  Besides the record-setting cold, another little “Winter Myth” was shattered during the first month of 2014.

“It can’t snow when the temperature falls below zero”.  Remember that little

 “Oldie, But A Goodie”?  By the way, or “BTW” if you’re used to reading in “Text-Speak”, as part of my exclusive contract that I signed last year with my publisher, I am required to use so many sets of quotation marks in these pithy little scribblings.  If I don’t use them up by the end of the year, I end up getting charged so much for each unused set of quotations.  My editor said that there is apparently a whole bin of the quotation marks ready for the linotype and if they are not used, it gets to be a big storage problem at the publishing house.  Last year, I was charged a “pretty penny” for those unused sets of quotation marks, so now I’m making a “conscious effort” to meet my quota.

            Anyway, back to the “It can’t snow if it’s below zero” myth.  It was totally shattered in January as it snowed all the time when the temp was in the minus category.  Mind you, not a lot of snow each day, just an inch or two – enough so that it had to be cleaned off nearly every day as well. 

It warmed up in the middle of the month and usually snowed a little each day, but by the end of January, we were ensconced in another of those damn “Polar Vortexes” and we had more days when positive numbers above zero were not visible to the frozen naked eye.  Those blasts of cold air from the Arctic covered most of the eastern half of the United States, reaching south to Georgia and Florida where frosty peaches and oranges were common.  But it seemed the “Cold Snaps” always started here in the Midwest and seemed to hang on the longest here.  On several days, the coldest temperatures in the region were centered here near the Kickapoo Valley.  Perhaps this could be another glimmer of excellence for local pride and accomplishment?  I think not!  Besides, February had to be better, didn’t it?

Again, I think not!  It took until the 12^th of the month before the temperature stayed above zero for an entire day.  On Groundhog’s Day, February 2^nd, the Kickapoo Valley’s groundhog – “Doonie”, which lives in a secluded hollow near the Vernon-Crawford County lines, was frozen in his burrow.  Doonie did not show on that day for the annual forecast about an early spring, but there was a notice posted in the next week’s edition of the “Soldiers Grove Surprizer” newspaper that the end of winter, kind of like Doonie, was no where to be seen.

It warmed some in the middle of February, but that also meant some snow just about every day and more shoveling.  Boy, my wife’s back was really getting sore from all that shoveling.  It warmed even more and rained on the 20^th of the month.  There was thunder and lightning in that rainstorm and the first thunder of the year always means something significant in the “Old Timers Weather Calendar”.  I started checking around with some of the “Old Timers” about what that first thunder of the year meant.  But they were all sick of talking about winter weather and that I could “Go mind my own business”.

It turned really cold again by the end of February and kept snowing a little every day.  But it is a short month and when March appeared, “Hope Sprung Eternal” for spring to spring upon us.  It was minus twenty-something here on Bear Creek on that first morning of March after Groundhog Day.  “Pogo” gave it up the next day.  The “Winter of 2014” had finally got to him.

“Pogo The Possum” had been hanging around our place all winter.  We had trimmed some bushes and trees in the fall and took the trimmings and made a little brush pile to the west of the house.  I was intending to burn the pile before winter set in, but didn’t get that job done either.  Pogo found the little pile of brush and limbs pleasing to his housing needs for the winter and moved in.  He should have picked a more substantial home for this winter.

  On the few warm days of the winter, Pogo would come out of his lair and amble around the property looking for food.  He would often come up on the deck to sample the birdseed strewn around there by the “Little Missus”.  I tried to run Pogo off the deck early in the winter, mainly because he was a “Prolific Pooper”.  Interestingly, he didn’t “play possum” when I approached with a broom, but instead whirled around and flashed his yellow fangs.  I stopped my attack and Pogo scurried under the water bubbler stored on the corner of the deck.  I left him alone after that little skirmish.

After those several days of brutally cold temperatures in early March, Pogo was back on the deck again.  But things were not right as he could barely walk.  On close observation, we could see that his feet and nose had been badly frozen.  Pogo took one last portion of birdseed, deposited one last poop in front of the deck door and crawled under the water bubbler.  We could see him from our bedroom window.  After several days of non-movement, we surmised that Pogo had moved onto “Opossum Heaven in The Sky”.  Eventually, I scooped up the little critter’s remains in a snow shovel and deposited them in the swamp down by the ponds for final decomposition. 

Pogo just couldn’t make it through the “Winter of 2014”.

PS – After submitting this for publication, I was informed by the editorial supervising board that I had exceeded my “normal quotation marks usage” and would have to pay an “Excess quotation marks penalty fee”.  Oh my, will this winter never end?