Driving Home, page 16
His radio, on the picnic table, was full of advice and instructions. Volunteer sandbaggers were being given assembly points. They were told to bring plenty of mosquito repellent and to swab down thoroughly afterwards. “Remember,” the announcer said, “this is tough, hot, smelly work.” For about seven seconds I toyed with the idea of becoming a volunteer sandbagger in Des Moines—a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the west—but the only thing that I could seriously imagine doing out in the open air was steaming asparagus in it.
As the Mississippi spilled untidily southwards, it added more and more new rivers to the flow. There were the Wisconsin, the Rock, the Iowa, the Des Moines, and—before the river reached St. Louis—the Illinois and the Missouri. There were Indian rivers: the Maquoketa, the Wapsipinicon, the Kickapoo. There were animal rivers: the Turkey, the Fox, the Bear, the Skunk, the Buffalo. There were the Apple and the Plum, the Cedar and the Root, and smaller rivers by the dozen and the score, all piling into the Mississippi—and every one of them in flood.
According to the Corps of Engineers and their Price current meters, the Mississippi was moving at a speed and volume of 130,900 cubic feet per second at La Crosse; 400,000 cubic feet per second at Rock Island; 1,000,000 cubic feet per second at St. Louis. Over the same stretch of river, the current was quickening from about 3 knots to about 10 knots.
The trouble with these figures is that they make it sound as if the Mississippi was traveling downstream with the concentrated energy of a train. But its actual motion was more like that of the contents of a washing machine. It spun and tumbled, doubling back in swirling eddies and countercurrents. The friction of the water against the river bottom put a brake on the stream, making it somersault over on itself like an ocean wave tripped by a shelving beach. At the surface, the friction between a fire-hose jet of deep, free-flowing water and the slow-moving shallows to the side generated a string of whirlpools, some big enough to swallow a small boat. Wherever one looked, the water was moving like smoke in coils and wreaths.
Just below the bridge at Davenport, I passed ten minutes watching a few thousand spent mayflies performing a sort of quadrille. I focused on a tiny scrap of the river’s surface, about twenty feet square. Within this area, dead insects were drifting in every conceivable direction—upstream, downstream, across; describing lazy S’s on the current; pirouetting like tops. Some shot past and were out of view almost as soon as spotted; others dawdled, lolling on columns of water that seemed fixed to the bottom. I narrowed the focus, settling on a single fly, one veined wing standing proud of the water like a windsurfer’s sail. It would … but it didn’t. It feinted, sashayed, zigzagged, confounding my predictions over every inch of the course.
From Davenport on down, cities began taking on water in earnest. Muscatine and Port Madison were in the river up to their middles. Their downtown shopping streets had become canals. Parking meters had turned into convenient mooring posts for the aluminum skiffs that served as gondolas in these strange new Venetian times. The boats moved silently. There was a ban on the use of outboards, whose wake might have toppled the sandbag walls, so people rowed and punted, as if they were doing it for the scenery and the exercise on this broiling Saturday afternoon. It’s said that a change is as good as a rest, and most of the flood victims were in a larky holiday mood.
“Start your own business! Be your own boss! Fax machines! Answering machines …,” sang out one jolly ferryman over the water, as he paddled a cargo of office equipment to higher ground.
The bottom end of each town petered out into a semiotic playground of signifiers, now divorced from their referents and sticking out of the flood. Turn right for U.S. 61. Stop. Railroad Crossing. Business Loop. No Parking. No Left Turn. Straight Ahead for the Museum. One Way. Yield. Exit Only. Some of the signs had been knocked sideways by the current and leaned at forty-five-degree angles to the water. Others were completely submerged. The river ran placidly through the slough of messages from before the flood, making braids around every post.
All the shutterbugs in town were out with cameras, and the jumble of signs was everybody’s favorite subject. People shot the signs wide-angle, like a crazy maze of fishing stakes. They got out zoom lenses and snapped Speed Limit 25 or West 92 brooding emptily over its own reflection, with an out-of-focus liquid sunset in the background. In private albums, as in the special souvenir editions of the local papers, pictures of the signs would become one of the two or three key images of the Great Flood.
Happy pictures, they show the river making monkeys of City Hall, the Highway Department, Burlington Northern, and the rest. They show authority wittily subverted by the water, which has robbed every imperious command of its meaning. They are beautiful—surefire candidates for the Camera Club annual exhibition. They catch something important, about which little was said at the time: the glee that people felt as the river came up and played this gigantic practical joke on their world.
In Fort Madison at dusk, with the mosquitoes beginning to sound like a string band, I was loitering at the edge of a flooded street, watching a line of sandbaggers build a wall around a threatened gas station. An elderly woman with a camera stood nearby, her Oxford shoes islanded. She was waving the bugs away with a handkerchief and smiling hugely. When she saw me notice her smile, she felt called on to explain it. “Well,” she said, “everybody’s got to look at the water, haven’t they?”
On Sunday morning, wanting to catch a good sermon about Noah and the waters that prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, I stopped at the sinking town of Montrose and joined the congregation at the Church of the Nazarene. The piano plonking out the tune of “The Bee Eye Bee Ell Ee” (a hymn new to me) was no match for the crotchety rumble of the pumps outside. When the pastor stepped forward to give the address, he began rattling off texts like crossword clues. “John, Three-sixteen!”; “John, Ten-ten!”; “Romans, Six-twenty-three!” You were supposed to get them before he quoted them, but I was no good at this game, and I could hear the water rising. Certainly the chatter of the pumps appeared to be getting louder by the minute. “Hebrews, Ten-thirty-one!” This was all very well, but the Mississippi was at the door and Pastor Klinger had nothing to say about Noah, his Flood, or this one. I could see him grinding on about sin and redemption even as the river boiled around the knees of his business suit. I slid out of the pew, gained the car, and headed inland.
By Missouri, the thing looked like a war. Each tributary river ran higher and faster than the last. Big creosoted barns were pasted flat against trees, like stoved-in cardboard boxes. Lines of oddly foreshortened telephone poles led out to isolated farms that were sunk to their roofbeams. From a distance, they looked like bivouacs pitched on the water. Things were so bad in towns like La Grange that even the National Bank was in the river. U.S. 61, the main highway to the west of the Mississippi, led down a hill and ran slap into the river. At every turn, soldiers in battle fatigues and camouflaged armored cars manned roadblocks, lounged, smoked, and talked importantly into antique two-way radios. With the sodden fields, the National Guardsmen, and the pensioned-off military equipment, it looked as if one had stumbled into the making of a movie set in Vietnam, circa 1968.
The National Guard was there to deter looters and turn sightseers away. But the sightseers were locals—farm families, still dressed for church; shrunken grandpa figures in straw hats and oversized pickups—and the soldiers shrugged and let them through. Me, too. At one checkpoint, I pulled up and prepared to spin a story, but the sergeant in charge said only, “We’re going to have to start charging admission soon.”
The families formed a slow promenade in the heat, leaving their cars to walk out to the end of a graveled road that was now a pier. The sheet of water ahead, dotted here and there with roofs and treetops, stretched to the horizon, an inland sea. People said very little. There was some nervous joking among the adults, some roughhouse capers from the kids, but the prevailing atmosphere was that of the church that most of us had just left. We squinted at the flood in silence. We might have been at prayer.
Water not only finds its own level; it makes itself perfectly at home. The winding contour line of the edge of the flood had the natural authority of any coast. It looked so right. It wasn’t the water that was in the wrong place, but the strange, angular things that poked impertinently out of it. Wherever the water impinged on the man-made—on a road, or a city parking lot—it described a sweet curve across a surface that one thought was flat. The flood redefined the land, and the dangerous thought came, unbidden, that the work of the flood was a spectacular improvement.
Was this why people were so quiet—because the water roused feelings that were better kept to oneself? I knew that if I said what I really thought, I’d be in trouble.
All the bodies were on the right-hand side of the road. They looked like cuddly toys from an infant’s crib—dead opossums, raccoons, coyotes, chipmunks, fawns. They had all fled west to escape the rising river, and fleeing nature they’d been felled by technology in the form of cars and trucks.
On the whole, nature was doing well out of the flood. The fish were thriving, with even morose professional fishermen admitting to record hauls of carp and catfish. The birds that ate the fish, like herons and ducks, were everywhere, and people said they couldn’t remember a time when so many birds were in residence on the river. The mosquitoes were in heaven, and the lower orders—bacteria like E. coli and tetanus—were enjoying a rare taste of freedom from the constraints of civilization, breeding by the billions in the stagnant swampy water on the fringes of the flood. For the wandering tribes of freshwater plankton (Gr. planktos = drifting) on whom the whole ecosystem of the Mississippi depended, life had never been better than in the summer of ’93.
The flood was making many humans happy too. Door-to-door insurance salesmen were working around the clock, selling dubious policies to frightened homeowners in low-lying areas. On the Chicago stock market, commodity traders were making a killing on wheat and soybean futures. In St. Louis, panhandlers were putting on their best clothes and representing themselves as charities collecting for flood victims.
It was a wonderful time for prophets.
On the car radio, Randall Terry, of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion outfit, was being interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. The floods in the Midwest were, he said, “The first Call. The first Blast of the Trumpet.” There was a triumphant I-told-you-so squeak in his voice, and his tone was that of the mad lounge-bar logician who can prove the moon landings never took place and Richard Nixon was a communist spy. We had, according to Mr. Terry, seen nothing yet. “God has a hundred hurricanes, a hundred droughts, a hundred floods …” and in His wrath over abortion, He would cast them at America one by one.
Ms. Gross pointed out that God’s choice of the Midwest as the locus of His vengeance seemed a little unfair: had He not picked on the most God-fearing region in the whole United States? Why was He so punishing His own home team?
“When God judges a nation, innocent people suffer,” Terry replied with frank relish. “Innocent people suffer—for the sins of the child-killers, and for the sins of the homosexuals …”
A few days later, CNN financed a poll which found that one in five Americans—the same percentage as had voted for Ross Perot in the presidential election—believed that the floods were God’s judgment on the sins of the citizens.
At Louisiana, Missouri, that Sunday evening, a Free Supper for Flood Victims was advertised on the noticeboard of the Masonic Temple. The Masons’ wives had been cooking all day, and the trestle tables in the temple basement were stacked with chicken wings, barbecue ribs, bowls of slaw and tuna salad, cookies, bran muffins, jugs of Kool-Aid, and bright red humpback turtles made of Jell-O. This feast was being scarfed up by six perspiring National Guardsmen, each attended by a Mason’s wife looming with another dish.
I was barely inside the door before I was fending off an avalanche of ribs and wings. I explained I hadn’t come to eat, but that I would like to meet a flood victim if any would be willing to talk to a stranger.
“There aren’t too many flood victims here right now, but you must try these cookies—”
“Are you a vegetarian? We could make you up a special plate—”
I could see the Masons themselves were all men of impressive substance, whose most noticeable clothing items were their belts and suspenders. One man wore a particularly fine belt of strange devices which proclaimed him to be a member of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine—an organization with curiously lax security for a secret society.
“You have to be in the photograph,” he said, and I was hustled into the group of waiting brethren. The picture was for a forthcoming issue of a Masonic magazine. In it, the Shriner and I have our arms around each other’s shoulders; I’m grinning weakly and billed, I fear, as a visiting Knight Templar from London, England. The reason for the picture is that we have all been helping the flood victims.
When the photography was done, I asked the Shriner about the flood victims.
“Those people,” he said. “Most of ’em, they just don’t want to be helped.”
How many people had been washed out by the flood in Louisiana?
“Oh, not too many. Down in the flats … must be about thirty families, maybe?”
How were they coping?
“Oh, those people, they cope pretty good. They’re used to it. They’re the same people got flooded out in ’73. They just move right back in. Hang out the carpets to dry, hose down the furniture, and they’re back in there happy as clams.”
“Are these people black?”
“Oh, no. Some of ’em are—it’s pretty much of an even mixture down there in the flats. Between you, me, and the gatepost, most blacks in this town have got more sense than to live there. The smart ones all live up on the bluff, as far away from the river as they can get. And good luck to ’em!’
The Masons’ wives began, reluctantly, to shroud the bowls of food with plastic wrap, while their husbands folded up the tables and the Guardsmen returned to their roadblock on the flats.
I went for a stroll in the dusk. The cabins of the flats-people were deep in the river. The current skirled through bedroom windows that had been smashed by floating railroad ties. At the corner of Alabama and 6th, a catfish was rootling down the center of the street, its progress marked by the bursts of small bubbles that it sent up at steady intervals. Farther down, where someone’s yard shelved steeply into the river, I spotted what appeared to be a large pale halibut. It turned out—disappointingly—to be a submerged satellite dish.
The flats were on a back eddy of the Mississippi, a natural assembly point for drifting junk, and wherever the river touched dry land, it returned a broad selection of objects to the civilization from which they had been thrown away. On the little beach at the end of one quite narrow street, I counted more than twenty tires, a propane cylinder, a torn-out car headlight, a fishing float, a fifty-gallon oil drum, a glove, several super-economy-sized detergent bottles, numerous soft-drink cans, old lightbulbs, a clutch of aerosol cans, a badly mauled yellow plastic tricycle that was encrusted in gobs of tar, some broken honeycombs of polystyrene packing, and enough lumber to build at least one new cabin on the flats.
In the Downtown Lounge, a spry black man in his seventies was half-telling, half-miming a flood story to two younger white men.
“… And Duval—you know Duval … has that purple house down there? Duval’s up on the levee takin’ pictures …” The storyteller was being Duval, prancing on tiptoe, his right hand curled into the shape of a viewfinder while his left cranked on the imaginary handle of an old-fashioned movie camera. His head jerked to one side; he’d been interrupted in his filming. “ ‘Oh, I ain’t baggin’,’ says Duval; ‘I’m too busy takin’ pictures of the water—’ They’re piling up the sandbags, fast as they can go, but Duval’s busy. He’s walking around his house, around and around, taking pictures. ‘I ain’t baggin’ ’ ”—the storyteller was wheezing with laughter. “ ‘I ain’t baggin’!’ ” He stopped to sip his beer and brushed his forehead with the back of his hand. “And the river, he’s risin’, right into Duval’s purple house. The river’s through the door. Duval, he didn’t get nothin’ out of there, he’s takin’ pictures on the levee. And when it’s too late and the water’s come right up, you shoulda heard him! ‘My TV! My couch! My rug! My clothes!’ That Duval!”
He returned to his stool and hoisted himself up on it, shoulders shaking. “ ‘I ain’t baggin’!’ ”
I asked the storyteller if his own house was safe. Did he live down by the river?
“Where’s my house? Oh, my house is fine. I live way up the hill.”
At St. Charles—in normal times—the Missouri River tucks itself behind a wide and leisurely bend of the Mississippi. For more than twenty-five miles, the two rivers swing in consort, first north, then east, then south, before they tangle violently with each other twelve miles upstream from downtown St. Louis. Now their separate floods met on the northern edge of St. Charles and washed across the flat-land of trailer communities, industrial parks, farms, and townships—a hazy shimmer of water, the same color and texture as the sky.
I had wanted to reach Portage Des Sioux, once on the Mississippi, now ten miles out across the lake but still connected, just barely, to the mainland by a road that was only a few inches underwater. I was turned back at the first roadblock: only residents and emergency workers were allowed to tackle this amphibious route, where jumbo pickups crawled like a line of ants traversing a mirror.
People here looked mugged.
In the small towns along the Mississippi where I’d been stopping, the flood was the cause of a sustaining outbreak of Blitz humor. People knew one another and—more importantly—they knew the river. Having grown up in the company of a famously temperamental monster, they weren’t entirely surprised when the monster roused itself and shambled, on muddy paws, into their living rooms. Many could remember the floods of ’73, ’65, and ’47; some could go back to the legendary flood stories of their grandparents and great-grandparents, in which the river changed its course, swept towns away, ran backwards for a day and a night.
