Let me be clear that I am not a meteorologist. I do not have a degree in hydrology. I cannot read a flood gauge or predict the behavior of snowmelt. What I can do is look at a Flood Warning on weather.gov, see the words "Grand River," see the words "15.8 feet," and conclude that today is not the day to walk the riverfront trail and "see how it's looking."
Jasper concluded differently.
It started reasonably enough. He'd seen something online — not a forecast, not a warning, just a photo someone posted of Riverside Park looking "kind of epic with all the water." That was his entire meteorological research process. One photo. No timestamp. Possibly from last week. Possibly from 2019. He didn't ask. He was already putting on shoes.
I showed him the weather.gov alert on my phone. I read it out loud, slowly, the way you read terms and conditions to someone who is about to agree to something they will regret. He looked at my phone with the expression of a golden retriever watching you hide a treat and said, "Yeah, but it says early Tuesday. It's Monday."
It was forty-one degrees. It was sunny in the specific lying way that April in West Michigan is sunny, which is: beautifully, completely, temporarily. The kind of sun that makes you think you understand the situation when you do not understand the situation at all.
I wore my rain jacket. Jasper wore a hoodie because, and I am quoting him directly, "the sun's out."
We made it approximately forty minutes before the clouds that had been staging a very obvious coup on the horizon arrived directly overhead and delivered their terms. It wasn't even a gradual rain. It was a decision. One minute: cold bright. Next minute: cold wet.
Jasper looked up at the sky with genuine surprise, which I respect in the way you respect a golden retriever's surprise at the same trick every single time.
We were also, I should mention, on the wrong side of the trail. Not dangerously, but in a deeply inconvenient way, because Jasper had wanted to "get closer to the river" to observe the flooding. Which is either very curious or very stupid depending on your mood, and my mood at that point was transitioning rapidly.
The river did look kind of epic, I will give him that. Murky and enormous and doing what rivers do when they've had enough of winter and have decided to simply expand into whatever space seems available. There was a bench that was definitely not supposed to be that close to the water. Jasper pointed at it like he'd built it himself.
"See?" he said. "Glad we came."
And here is the thing about Jasper that I cannot fully explain but that is entirely the reason I am still here: he was right, a little. It was genuinely something to see. The Grand River in early April doing its swollen, indifferent, ancient thing, gray-brown and moving fast past the bare trees while the sky dropped cold rain on both of us equally. There were snowflakes starting to mix in by the time we turned back. The Meijer Gardens butterflies were probably inside somewhere warm and dry, doing what butterflies do in a controlled tropical environment, and we were out here watching a bench become an island.
He gave me his hoodie for the walk back, which meant he was just in a t-shirt, which meant I spent twenty minutes telling him to take it back, which he refused to do.
We got home. He made tea. He checked the flood gauge, finally, on his phone, and looked at the projected crest with the scholarly interest of a man who has now decided to care about hydrology.
"Fifteen point eight," he said. "That's a lot."
"Yes," I said. "It is."
"We should go back Tuesday and see the crest."
I looked at him. He looked at me. He had rain in his eyelashes and absolute sincerity in his face.
I told him we'd see how the forecast looked.
He took that as a yes.