Friday, August 14, 2015

Spencer Jack Sings To Me In Spanish While The Skagit River Shrinks Below Measuring

Last night Spencer Jack called to wish me a tardio happy birthday in Spanish, singing...

Feliz cumpleaños a ti
feliz cumpleaños a ti
feliz cumpleaños queridoa Durango
feliz cumpleaños a ti.

I tell you, this younger generation and their multi-lingual ways leave me feeling so ignorant.

After Spencer Jack was finished singing a Spanish happy birthday to his favorite great uncle he passed the phone off to his dad, he being my favorite nephew Jason.

Yesterday Jason and Spencer Jack sent me photo documentation of the incredible shrinking Skagit River.

I blogged about this in Spencer Jack Takes A Drive Where The Skagit River Used To Flow on this very blog you are reading right now. And also in Spencer Jack Tour Of Washington's Shrinking Skagit River on my Washington blog you are not reading right now.

When Jason and Spencer Jack read my blogging about the photos that they sent me they realized I did not notice the significance of a particular part of one of the photos, that being the photo of the Skagit River as it flows under the Riverside Bridge which connects east and west Mount  Vernon.

It was the river depth marker that I missed, which you see above. When I went back and looked at the picture I had a Bart Simpson reaction, as in Ay Carrumba!

The Skagit River is flowing below, well below, the river level marker that usually has the river marking how deep it is. In flood mode, if I remember right, I have seen this marker go above the 24 foot mark. Well above it.

Jason told me his and Spencer Jack's photos did not do justice to showing how much the Skagit River has shrunk.

I asked Jason if the river is murky now that it is so low and flowing so slow.

Jason said the river is crystal clear, that you can see the river bottom.

And that there is absolutely no litter, or tossed refuge, exposed on the newly exposed sandbars.

Jason told me the Skagit water is so clear he could not imagine it being a problem drinking water right out of the river.

I asked Jason if he'd read my bloggings about the recent e.coli woes of the Trinity River.

He had.

Jason asked where the e.coli comes from. I told Jason the local propaganda has it coming from farms, as in blaming cows.

Jason then said, but we have a lot of dairy farms in the valley, with a lot of creeks draining in to the Skagit River, but the river is un-polluted.

Jason asked me what I thought the actual source of the e.coli was.

Incompetently run human sewage treatment plants was my answer. It really is the only answer which makes sense in explaining the sad polluted state of the Trinity River.

Yet where is there any effort of significance to clean up the Trinity River? I remember when the rivers of Western Washington were returned to non-polluted status with the building of modern water treatment facilities.

I explained to Jason that Texas is a place which still uses outhouses, that even the Dallas Cowboy stadium is surrounded by hundreds of outhouses.

People who live in the more modernized locations of America have trouble believing the Dallas Cowboy stadium is surrounded by hundreds of outhouses. Maybe I should go photo document this once again.

Methinks maybe it ain't possible to have a river running free of e.coli in a place where thousands of outhouses dot the landscape...

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