Hi everyone. Your Editor watched a house fall into the river this weekend. Um. Anything new with you?
The photo above is of the general area where a house, a half-dozen full-grown fir trees and about 30 additional feet of Earth stood along the banks of the Zigzag River for, oh, who knows, 50 years? More? But then on Saturday, it rained about nine inches in a day in Rhododendron, on Mt. Hood, so the Zigzag River transformed into a fucking muddy, raging beast.
On Sunday, as the rain continued to pour, we walked down a path alongside the river to see if we could catch sight of the trees we had heard cracking and falling into the water. We watched a few trees fall into the river here and there, and then we walked a mile or so up the path until we came across a family and a handful of locals, standing by a house that stood along a car path next to the water. A child ran up to me.
“Hey, that house is about to fall into the river,” the boy said. Oh, the vivid imaginations of children! How funny and heartwarming, I thought. But then I looked in the direction in which the child was wildly pointing. It took me a second to understand what I was seeing. But then I realized: Holy shit. That house was about to fall into the fucking river.
See: A few massive trees had fallen into the Zigzag just a dozen or so yards upstream, bringing their massive root systems and dozens of big, previously-buried rocks with them. The trees and rocks had dammed the river, and redirected the raging water toward the west (?) bank – right where the house stood. By the time we arrived, the river had cut away the ground underneath about half of the house, leaving it half-hanging off of the bank over the river.
We stood with the neighbors for about an hour, watching more enormous trees fall into the Salmon and dam the river even further. Then, in one quick motion, the entire house just tipped, snapped the power line running from a nearby tree, and fell, in one piece, into the river. Then this happened:
A House Falling In The Zigzag River from Stumptown Magazine on Vimeo.
Our good friend Ben has better photos and video of what the house looked like before it fell in the river. I’ll post those as soon as I can. Of course, since we’re morons, no one got video of the house actually falling in. But trust is, it did.
It’s a pretty fucking crazy thing to see, a house falling into a river. Sad, too. The family that owned it had just bought it and spent a lot of time and money remodeling it. It wasn’t their primary home, but still. And we just stood around like assholes, filming the damn thing teetering on the river bank and hoping that it fell in before dark, so it we could still get it on video. But whatever; there was nothing we could have done about it. That house was a goner.
Also: WATER IS NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH. If you see water anywhere – even a puddle or, like, a running bath – GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THAT SHIT because it will devour you, your house, nearby trees, etc.