Our Picnic at the Dam

Like I said in the earlier post, Saturday we drove up to the dam for a picnic. We did this for my birthday 2 years ago because 1) I thought it would be cooler up there than down here (and being 8 months pregnant at the time, anything cool was nice) and 2) we'd never taken Joshua up there. Now, I've never been overly thrilled that there was a dam holding tons and tons and tons of water back right up above where I live. I didn't really know about the dam and the lake when I first moved here...actually, I really knew nothing about this town when I got hired to teach here 3 days before school started back in '97. Anyway, a month or two after I moved here I read a book (Julie by Catherine Marshall) that had a dam (true, it was an earthen one, not a concrete one) break and the havoc & trauma that followed. It was one of the few books I had at the time since most of my book collection was still in my parents' attic. I liked the book, was saddened & horrified by the book, and was grateful that I lived no where near a dam. Like I said, I didn't know much about this place. In January, shortly after I started teaching, I got sick. Some flu bug or something...I was out from work for a week, and ran a fever, etc. I remember having horrible dreams about the dam breaking (right before Christmas a co-worker had told me that if the dam ever broke while we were at school we were stuck with all those kids because we'd have minutes to get far enough away to be safe) and of course, it was right after Titanic (stupid movie) came out and that lovely song was playing all the time...I'd hear Celine's version, two or three versions with clips from the movie stuck in it, a country version, a musak type version - even a Spanish version! So between my fears of the dam, that song and a high fever I had some very bizarre nightmares. Anyway, I've never liked the thought of this dam up there...especially after 9/11...especially after being in the store one New Year's Eve (I think it was the one right after 9/11) and hearing a couple people talking about how a bomb threat had been called into the dam and they were checking things out. (Turned out it was just a crank call and that happens every so often)...especially after learning that a fault line runs under it or near it...after all, this is the town that has an earthquake festival every August to commemorate the earthquake that leveled it over 100 years ago. But every once in awhile, I swallow my fear and we drive up for a picnic. I didn't take too many pictures up there...there's not much to see :) And like I've mentioned before, our camera can't zoom anymore so that really puts a crimp in my photo taking. But here are a few...