The Mississippi and Mother Nature

It has been a while, hasn't it? For a while my computer was on the blink, then I was, then I was busy again. (Last one was really no excuse. I've been that way all the time, for some time.)

I usually take a walk by the Mississippi River. Heck, you could come with, if you're in the area. I leave my workplace at about 2:30 and return about 3:00. The route is pretty unvarying - down LeClaire Park and back. The River - and if you're from these parts you can capitalize that; there aren't any other real rivers - has been a part of my life and my soul since I was a kid.

The River is in flood now. That's not unusual. What is unusual is that this is the second time this year that it has been in flood. On the Illinois side of the River there have been efforts in Rock Island to put up a floodwall, but sooner or later, somewhere or other, the Mississippi will do exactly what it wants to do. There have been efforts by the Corps of Engineers to channel the River. Fuhgeddaboud it. In the eternal battle between human ingenuity and the Mississippi River, the River wins. Every. Single. Time.

Down south they've been a little smarter about this. The system of spillways is a concession to physics and fluid flow being what they are, and at New Orleans the River's channel is cut so wide and deep that our biggest floods don't have much impact down there. (A Category 3 hurricane, however. . .)

A building I walk by used to be a hot dog shack. It's been closed for years. On a corner of the building there are markers, showing what the high-water marks were for some of the great historic floods. A good two feet above any of the other markers, and fully three inches above my head there's a marker that just says "65". The shack is probably 50-75 feet from the shore, and there's a slope going down to the shore. So, 50 feet from shore the water was over six feet deep.

I remember the '65 flood. We'd moved from Davenport to East Moline a little over a year earlier. Our family drove over to see what we could see. What we saw - lots and lots of water.

The Mississippi wins. Every time.

'93 was pretty impressive, too, but the Mississippi River flood that's referred to as The Great Flood was the flood of 1927. It affected the lower Mississippi more than the upper Mississippi. There were torrential rains for much of the winter of '26-'27, and the flood reached a level of force such that levees all down the River were breaking. (The Mississippi wins - but you knew that.) The floods peaked in April, '27, and two months passed before it had subsided. At one point, 36 of Arkansas' 75 counties were flooded, some to a depth of 30 feet. 6600 square miles - underwater. It spawned cultural changes. It was the setting for Faulkner's Old Man (Old Man was a nickname for the Mississippi.) You should read it, assuming that it wasn't ruined for you in the class in which you had to read it.

Back to The River tomorrow. Meantime, thanks for hanging out.