Chickamauga Creek, serene and gentle.
Serene and lovely, Chickamauga Creek bordered our small farm in McLemore Cove for about 200 yards before flowing on north past the town of Chickamauga, through Chickamauga Battlefield, and on past Chattanooga until it emptied its waters into the Tennessee rifer just downstream from Chickamauga Dam.
On hot afternoons in our early years on the farm, we used to take low-slung outdoor lounge chairs and sit with our fannies in the water and read. Our children and grandchildren swam here and even our great-grandchildren waded in the gentle current.
But it was not always so. Three or four times in a normal year the creek would overflow its banks and flood my pasture -- so much so that I quit trying to maintain a permanent fence and ran electric fence on slim wires to border the area that usually flooded.
On September 21, 2009, a cloudburst on Lookout Mountain
brought the mother of all floods tumbling down the gully beside Daugherty Gap Road
and through the Cove, cutting new channels and wiping out everything in its
path. The experts say it was a 500-year flood, so I guess I won't worry much
about the next one.
Photographs and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
Soli Gloria Deo
For the glory of God alone
My most recent book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is a 304-page soft-cover with more than 200 color photographs. Published by Countryman Press, it is priced at $22.95. Signed and inscribed copies are available directly from me at (423) 240-2324 or djphoto@vol.com.
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