High waters are receding now from northeast Indiana, and this time around it didn't get as bad as in some parts of the country -- although you wouldn't know that to see some of the flooded lakeside residences. Up at Pokagon State Park, the problems mostly amounted to a few flooded trails and a lot of mud ... and plenty of mosquitoes. (My wife works at the Pokagon Saddle Barn as a trail guide, and so knows plenty about both mud and bugs.)
This is the spring at the aptly named Spring Shelter, which is along the bridal trail at Pokagon. A sign of the flooding is that the water--which tastes delicious, by the way--is coming out at twice the pressure it usually does. People from all over the park go out of their way to hike down there and fill whatever containers they have. I've been known to haul my laptop down to the shelter for a quiet place to write while my wife works.
Some streams around the park are usually dry, or have just a trickle running through them. Not this year.
A couple of years ago, while researching my book "Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving at All", I learned that when European settlers arrived in Indiana they found it to be about 70% swampland. Kind of makes you wonder why they stuck around, doesn't it? As a result of that, every spring the not-yet-state turned into one big lake, which resulted in the westernmost naval battle of the Revolutionary War being fought here. "Hoosier Hysterical" was a book that pretty much wrote itself.
