
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 3, 1994                   TAG: 9404010022
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Steve Kark
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SPRING EMERGES FROM WINTER OF EXTREMES

Through the open window near desk, I hear the spring peepers in the bottom land below the house. Although I first heard them more than two weeks ago, the little frogs seem especially active this evening after two days of rain.

Overnight, Big Walker Creek swelled six feet up its banks. Yet the peepers continue to call, immune to the rain which has been a mixed blessing to those of us so eagerly anticipating the arrival of spring.

It's been a trying winter. Knock on wood, we didn't get as much snow at any one time as we did last year, but we didn't exactly get off easy either.

This year we got ice. It coated everything, top to bottom. And then we got wind. Driving up Rye Valley, I've noted great patches of woodland where no tree escaped the storms untouched. In many places the broken limbs still hang in the trees. Elsewhere, empty stumps stand jagged and raw.

We were among the lucky ones because we lost power only twice, no more than a day either time.

One evening during the last storm, I drove up Guinea Mountain to see how many others were without power. I had to go around trees and power lines that had fallen in the road. Looking across the valley from the top of the ridge line, I saw only darkness where normally there would have been scattered islands of light.

A great oak tree had dropped across Rocky Hollow Road, blocking traffic. Working in the headlights from their pickup trucks, a group of men sawed the tree into firewood.

A short line of cars was backed up on either side of the obstruction. Most of those who waited sat patiently in their cars, but a few, myself included, stepped out to get a better view.

No one seemed to be in much of a hurry. Like me, they were simply curious about the storm. Still, everyone I spoke with had something to say about the weather, about its unpredictability or its uncontrollable nature.

And now we have this soaking rain. A narrow trickle of water in the pasture below our house has been transformed into a rushing stream that flows down the valley to where it feeds into Big Walker Creek.

Big Walker itself has been swollen by such feeder streams all up and down its length; so that by now the water level creeps up its banks, threatening to swallow homes.

People stand next to their houses, hands on hips, keeping a watchful eye on the rising water, but knowing full damn well that there's nothing they can do about it.

Yet, on this night at the end of another day where the weather continues to try us, I hear the peepers through the patter of raindrops on a galvanized roof, and I know that spring is coming.

You see, the peepers themselves are no less a force of nature than the ice storms and the floods. They're just as uncontrollable.

So are dogwood blossoms and redbud. And scarlet tanagers and bluebirds. Daffodils and crocuses, too.

We will have our spring. We couldn't stop it if we tried.

Steve Kark is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for the Roanoke Times & World-News. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow, in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.

by CNB