This part of the South SK River is notorious for having a butt-load of sandbars, which is pretty amazing because it’s basically like having our own private beach. When we bought the property in May there were no sandbars. The river was very high from the Gardner dam releasing so much water. However over the month of July the sandbars started to reveal themselves.
When we first bought the land, this is what it looked like. Still pretty dang nice.
By mid-July, this is what started to emerge…
Being on the river is different than being at the lake. This goes without saying of course given the strong current that our river has. It’s not really a place to go for a leisurely swim… unless you have a sandbar that you can wade onto.
Still I was pretty apprehensive about going into the water. It wasn’t until about three months after we bought it that I decided I had to experience it – the day we finished the Yurt build. With the heat wave that we’d been having that week, I simply could not resist jumping in the river.
The largest sandbar in front of our land had really come in and was only a short jaunt from were we put in our irrigation pump.
I threw on my life jacket, walked down to the river, and jumped in.
I turned around, swimming to the sandbar and thought to myself, “Oh my god, this is… ours!” It really hadn’t sunk in until that moment that we actually owned this. This was our place. This was our river. And I was swimming in it!
It was a mind-blowing realization. Obviously we had owned this for three months now, but it still felt like we were somehow borrowing it from someone or maybe squatting on someone else’s land. But nope, it was ours.
This realization hit me with a feeling of total unadulterated joy. I started running the length of the sandbar laughing like a lunatic, pumping my fists in the air, and yelling non-sensicals. I might have even skipped and danced and thrown a bit of sand in the air.
-K
(Originally posted August 23, 2014)
Blue Heron EcoHaus 