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This is the river ford.
This is the river ford on drugs.
Okay, it’s the river ford in a flood. You can’t actually see the ford at all, but it’s under there somewhere.
Most of the time, the river ford looks like this.
It’s perfectly safe to drive across. I do it every day….and night. I often drive across it late at night in the dark after such things as high school football games where I am indentured selling hot dogs.
It’s only a problem if you make a bad decision and end up like this.
But hey, you wanted a new car anyway.
Or not. (My SUV was, in fact, totalled. Water in the engine and all the computery stuff in vehicles these days. The adjuster estimated 17,000 in damages. This happened over a year and a half ago, before we even finished the house.)
I’m a lot better at judging the river ford now. Experience is a great teacher. I don’t cross it if I’m the least bit leery.
You can drive across the river ford without a 4-wheel drive. It has a rock bottom. You won’t get stuck. When the river is low, as it is much of the year, people even drive across it in regular cars.
Sometimes when it’s a little higher, a truck or SUV is better. I remember when I was a little girl driving across it with my parents in their sedan. My father never had a truck.
Silt “islands” move around when there is a flood.
I really like how the river ford is laid out since the last flood. A bunch of silt moved over so that when the ford is low, there is quite a bit of silt to drive on and not so much river. Once across, we are on the hard road. There are a couple of houses over there and everything. Civilization!
It’s our closest access to a hard road. Our farm borders the river.
Driving out the other direction, we go over the hill more than two miles on a rock-based road before we reach a hard road.
(Hard road means it’s blacktop. Though actually, the rock-based road is the true “hard” road, trust me.) Sometimes in the winter, we can’t get out either way.
The swimming hole is near the ford–you can just barely see the rope (hanging from the tree that leans toward the river on the right bank in this photo) that the kids love to swing on.
There is a deep spot there and it’s a popular place in the summertime. There used to be a swinging bridge. Back in the old days, it was necessary for the population that lived in the area then. School was on one side of the river, the church and a gasoline plant on the other. The swinging bridge got a lot of use. It was still around when I was a kid and it scared me to death. (Have you ever walked across a swinging bridge?)
Have you ever driven across a river? If not, would you?
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