In Like Lions

The Friday Newsletter is coming out of its cage and it's been doing just fine

I take the river for granted, until I can’t.

Between my time in Cincinnati in the early aughts and my more recent residence here in Louisville, I’ve lived a stone’s throw from the Ohio River for a third of my life. It’s an indelible part of the landscape—heck, it’s the reason both cities exist in the first place—but as far as my day-to-day life is concerned, it’s little more than that. It’s just background; a thing that’s there, a thing that I cross occasionally—sometimes multiple times a day—but not something I think about often.

It finally feels like winter’s breaking this week; after months of frost and snow and ice and just plain cold, it’s been downright pleasant here the last five days or so, a tantalizing hint of the springtime shift ahead.

It’s around this time every year that the river reminds us that it’s there.

Snowmelt from upstream in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania combines with heavy spring deluges to swell the river well above its normal levels. Most years, it at…