New flood solutions needed

King tides, like pesky mosquitoes, occasionally discomfort those that are having a picnic in paradise. Water runs downhill, right into the lowest places around, saturating the ground, drowning earthworms and roots, making us humans frown, as we put on our boots.

Yeah, a few of us have lived in the lowlands for all of our lives and have never seen a wave of water lapping at the door.

Unfortunately, I have. November of 1990 was the month and year when Fir Island was filled by a failed levee. Yeah, the Skagit River can be a wild thing, all the way to the Salish Sea.

I’ve learned a lot about our dikes, levees and drainage systems. You see, as a lifelong farmer, in these low-lying lands, you better learn a lot about silty clay and sand, how it’s deposited and how the roots of plants extract important minerals and nutrients, for you and I to eat. Heck, even those that come to visit and join us on our streets, should have an inkling of the facts about food and farming, how we create the feast.

Yeah, it’s furious storms and floods that brought all this soil here. Now that we’ve committed to dikes and levees and flood control, the community should seek solutions that are forward thinking, maybe not quite inside the box. There haven’t been any innovations in flood control in quite some time, I think it was a foreign designer that came up with the flood wall for Mount Vernon.

Nope, we don’t seem to think that a local has a solution under their cap. I’m quite certain that my concepts are worthy of consideration, but every time I try to explain it, nobody comes to the show. For more than half a decade I’ve tried, ran for town council, tried to get folks to think I was alright, tried to get this paper to do a story, but letters to the editor is what I get.

Yeah, just enough words to start the conversation. I’m known as a talker but I’m really a teacher, taught sustainable ag to students from across the globe, for 25 years. Unfortunately, the thought of sitting and listening to an hour and a half of entertaining dissertation seems to be too much of an ask for this tourist-dependent town.

Sincerely and sorrowfully,

Glen Johnson

Skagit Valley