Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
April 28, 2013

For all of you who live in Michigan, particularly West Michigan, I’m not telling you anything when I say April has been horrific. The second or third wettest month on record, cold, nasty, windy, flooding. The Grand River crested a week ago in downtown Grand Rapids inches from the top of flood walls. Wet basements. Cancelled sports. Closings and postponements. (Grandville actually had a “flood” day off school!) So this cartoon isn’t really so much an editorial cartoon as it is a reflection (and, hopefully, a post-mortem for the crappy weather).

Side note (and in the interest of full disclosure): Somewhere in the archives of my head I remembered doing a similar cartoon. But it wasn’t until I finished this one and sent for printing that I found the cartoon below, which I did for the Grand Rapids Business Journal. Back in 1997, any decent rain would overflow the sewage treatment plant, which would dump nastiness into the Grand River. A huge effort to upgrade the system has largely fixed this, although the record-breaking rains recently did overflow the system. This time, folks were more concerned with the walls of water than a few turds getting loose.