Tag Archives: Terminus Dam

Spilling Terminus Dam

Posted on March 16, 2023 by | 2 comments

 

Road closures everywhere, San Joaquin Valley flooded, haven’t left Dry Creek Rd. for a week. Glad we’re on higher ground.  3.5″ more forecast Sunday thru Friday next week.

I am reminded of Christmas Eve, 1955.  Much to my father’s chagrin and contrary to his good judgement, we celebrated with my mother’s parents, Dorothy and Floyd Cutler in Green Acres, Visalia.  Mill Creek ran beside the home and we all took turns watching it rise on the concrete steps leading up from their garage.  When it was time to leave, my Dad carried us three kids and Christmas presents through 3 feet of water to the car, then got the ’53 Buick stuck.  My grandfather hooked on to it with his Studebaker pickup and we drove back to Exeter through the swamps (Lovers Lane to Anderson Road) on the two-lane highway in two plus feet of water (Kaweah River before the Terminus Dam), wincing every time we met another vehicle’s wake in the headlights.  

 

2 Comments

Posted in Ranch Journal

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Reflections on Terminus Dam

Posted on June 9, 2015 by | 3 comments

 

IMG_4096

 

I was about eleven years old when the US Army Corps of Engineers began construction on Terminus Dam, named, I presume, for the end of the Visalia Electric Railroad line where a resort of sorts was established at Terminus Beach for local music and all-night dancing during the summer. There was also a nine hole sand golf course in the area of this irrigation pond, north of the river, that was accessed by a footbridge across the Kaweah during the 30s. All was erased during the 1955 Flood. The family was embroiled in a Condemnation Action with the Federal government shortly thereafter. Construction was completed in 1962.

Terminus Dam

Currently at less than 25% capacity because of the drought, it was unnerving for me as a teenager working downstream when Lake Kaweah was full.

 

3 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged

TERMINUS 2014

Posted on June 17, 2014 by | 5 comments

P4300010

 

Early morning gather,
we occupy the foreground
close to corrals, the road,
a truck—short April grass.

Sort cows from calves—
weigh, wean and load
for fifty years since
they dammed the Kaweah

with another layer of man
we no longer notice
as we adapt like livestock
to the landscape.

 

 

5 Comments

Posted in Photographs, Poems 2014

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

TERMINUS BEACH

Posted on February 26, 2011 by | Leave a comment

All gone before my feet, the gray Kaweah raging foam
to the rumble of boulders underwater, scent of sulphur
above the cutbank, 1955. A black & white photograph

of lightbulb strings above the dance floor walled by sad,
round eyes of dark cars with real fenders, simple grins and
children, secured in my mind before washing downstream.

A temporary place deposited along the river, croaking cattails
with bullfrogs, fuzzy moonshine shadows, smell of slow water,
gasp of lovers steaming on a warm breeze beyond the fiddling

and motion glowing within a black and buggy summer night,
I imagine I might have liked before the war changed everything,
and nothing, at the same time. The rumble of certain words

resonates beneath the surface, slow roll and grind, a winnowing
of cobbles and sand suspended in floods of feeling – when chunks
of cold, molten mountains remade the riverbed before the dam.

Leave a comment

Posted in Poems 2011

Tagged , ,