I am not a science nerd.
Allow me to clarify: I am not a science nerd anymore. Yes, there was a time when Boyle’s and Charles’ Law held my interest and gave me hope for a better tomorrow. Then got to college and discovered keggers and I was, like, so over it.
Nevertheless, there is a teeny, tiny part of me that envies Bill Nye and his scientific ilk. It manifests itself mostly in the pleasure I take in hand-coding web pages and exploring the embed codes for third-party apps. (I know: express train to Snoozeville.) But yesterday, I kinda went wiggy over something completely different: the temporary opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway.
Those who don’t live in the Mississippi River Basin might not know that the river is currently at or above flood stage along its lower route. To ease the pressure on the river levees–which, for the ten millionth time, were not the levees that failed during Katrina–the now-attentive Army Corps of Engineers has opened the gates to the Bonnet Carré Spillway, injecting Lake Pontchartrain with some of the Mississippi’s silty goodness.
I didn’t think much of it when the floodgates swung open a couple of weeks ago (although some people clearly think about it a lot). But then I drove over the spillway en route to Baton Rouge yesterday, and…well, it’s kinda cool. Water is rushing through little inlets and bayous, and a couple hundred yards into the lake, there’s all this mist–presumably where the warm-ish river water reaches the colder depths of the lake. I didn’t get so obsessed that I pulled over to take pics or anything, but, yeah, it was nifty. See it if you can.
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