Everyday Randomness

Taking Photos On A Rainy Day

*It’s raining it’s pouring! The old man is snoring!*

I wish I was snoring, but it looks like 3 hours of sleep is about all I’ll get. That makes a total of 5 hours I’ve slept since midnight Wednesday. My body is in insomnia mode again.

At least the rain is just about out of here. It poured all friggin’ night. I know we’re in a serious drought. I know the lakes are super low right now. You can see that for yourself here, but I would prefer a nice steady rain that lasts a few days over pouring rain all night. Lake Hartwell is so low right now that it looks like a nasty mud pit in a lot of areas. Thank goodness it’s not summer time. The swamp smell is horrible in Clemson in the summer, and I can only imagine it would be so much worse with the water levels being this low.

I told hubby I want to ride to Clemson today to take some photos. Since Hartwell is so low right now South Carolina decided to do some bridge maintenance on their side of the lake. Replacing 12 Mile Bridge is a $4.5 million project that began in January. Even though the crews finally have all the underwater structures replaced it’s going to be at least another month or two before the project is complete. That’s a big deal around here because the bridge is one of the major routes into one of the larger high schools.

Why am I rambling about all this? Because I’ve been going through old pictures with my Grandma, and she’s kind of shown me that this is something I might want pictures of. I can look back at those pictures one day and say “look how low the lake was. Look at how cool it looks with the bridge completely missing!”

Over the past couple of weeks she’s shown me a ton of pictures of the area around Duke Power before it was a power plant. There’s a great place in Lake Keowee where you can scuba dive down to see the remains of houses that were left in place when the man made lake was created and stuff like that. I’ve seen photos taken underwater, but I had never seen photos of the area before the lake and Nuclear plant was built in the early ’70s. As my Grandma went through the photos she would point out on a map about where the house was located.

I was born about 7 to 8 years after the construction of the lake, so that’s the only way I’ve ever known the land around here. I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like if the lake had never been created, but I can’t. It’s such a part of me and my life that it’s impossible to imagine it not being there. There would be no multi million dollar houses on the lake shores for hubby to build. There would be no lazy days on the beach at the park in the summer. There would be no night fishing under bridges. Most of all there would be no lake loop motorcycle runs circling the lake via the long stretches of bridges.