Baraboo River Busts Out

Baraboo River Busts Out, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr. Published in the Reedsburg Independent, March 31, 2011. Taken off South Webb Avenue in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, March 2011.

This photo was taken last week Thursday, when the Baraboo River in Reedsburg was much higher and people were starting to get antsy. The June 2008 floods are still fresh in everyone's minds and while I didn't see anyone filling up sandbags yet, I know several people were keeping a nervous eye on the rising river levels. In the photo at the right, the water had seeped over the banks of the river and into some marshy low-spots, typical of spring flooding. I wouldn't worry until it gets across the road to the city's substation.

With a few dry days, the water levels have since gone down, much to everyone's relief. The TV news was making it sound like we had another catastrophe on our hands, with all the snow we got over the winter and the rain now, and everything melting. Maybe in a couple of years everyone will be used to it and resume ignoring them again.

I was looking for a way to take an interesting high water photo when I happened to catch this scene out of the corner of my eye. I'm not a fan of photos of trees poking out of flood water; it's very difficult to make something like that interesting. My editor took a nice one of trees poking out of water that had frozen over, but the one I liked more wouldn't have reproduced well and we didn't have room in this week's paper anyway. My photo above made it in though.

Anyway, there was a high water scene I liked better but as I don't yet trust myself with night shots, I just didn't go for it, scared of the disappointment. I got home late after a school board meeting last night and the streetlights from Main Street and Lakeside Foods were reflecting off the water surrounding the trees and marsh in my parents' backyard, not something you normally see. It was a nice, eerie, golden-toned photo, but I knew I wasn't going to be able to reproduce what I saw, so I chickened out.

The scene above was something I saw a couple days later, driving down South Webb. I stopped anyway even though I knew we weren't going to have any room for the photo in the paper. There's no good spot to park on that street, so I left my car on the access road that goes around the city shop, in front of a sign that said something like "No Access" or "No Trespassing" or "Not a Through Road," something like that. The road was washed out a few feet in front of my car, so I didn't think anyone would mind. I hiked back to this spot and stood on the guard rail that goes across the bridge to get this shot. It was a little perilous but I was fine. It's due to situations like that, though, that I've started to consider keeping a ladder in my car. I'm only five feet tall, and I've been in several situations the last few weeks where that was just too short and I needed another foot or two to get the angle I wanted. Maybe if I can find a small one... anyway, the guard rail sufficed in this situation.

I like the photo above because I managed to get the "Baraboo River" sign (right), the "Got Cheese?" sign (yellow, behind the Baraboo River sign), and the Reedsburg water tower (center, slightly left) all in one shot. You might have to enlarge the photo to see the water tower but I thought it was neat they all kind of lined up like that.

We had to lighten the photo quite a bit for the paper (printed on yellowish paper instead of white), but the photo above is the original before it was edited for print.