Old Man River has his way ~ April 26, 2001

David Heiller

Cindy and I stood on the observation platform of Lock and Dam Number 10 last Wednesday, April 18.

Locks and dams on the upper Mississippi.

The Mississippi River was high. It was almost flowing over the top of the lock. A lock is like a long cement chute with a gate on either end. The locks are used to move boats past the dams. In normal weather they tower over the boats, except for towboats. But the river had swallowed up the locks.

We talked about the houses we had just seen upstream in Guttenburg, Iowa. Dozens of them were flooded. The road ran between them had been replaced by the main channel of the river. It was a strange sight.

I struck up a conversation with another guy on the platform. “Did you see those houses under water up there?” I asked.

“Yeah, we live in one of them,” he answered. He and his family had one of the few houses that wasn’t yet flooded on the island. He had come to town in a boat, going very slowly and carefully. You would not want a floating tree to catch you in that water. I thought it was kind of funny that after he came to town, he went to the dam to look at the river. Didn’t he see enough of it from his kitchen window? But the river in flood holds that kind of fascination for some people. I include myself in that category, although I like to think that I would not live on a low-lying island along the Mississippi.

The man’s wife said it was the third time since 1993 that their neighborhood had been flooded. The only other time before that was in 1965. That tells me that we must be doing something to help Old Man River with his spring tantrums.

Look at Brownsville, my wife, Cindy, said. In 1965, the water came up and over the banks of the river. It spread over many acres of bottoms and beach, all the way to the railroad tracks. They called it a 100-year-flood. Yeah, right.

But now there is a housing development at that spot, as well as huge sand dunes left by water Army Corps of Engineers dredging. The water can’t rest in Brownsville anymore, so it hustles downstream and finds another spot to flood, like Guttenburg.

I don’t have much sympathy for people that build in flood-prone areas. But then again, they aren’t looking for sympathy. The people that live there take floods in stride.

With David.

Cindy and I spent four days last week along the Mississippi. It was a vacation for us, although it sure wasn’t for the people who live there. We didn’t time the trip to coincide with the second worst flood ever. That was a grim and awesome bonus. The grim part was obvious. The fascination came with the magnitude of the flood.

On Friday evening my mom and I walked down to the first spillway of the Reno Bottoms, seven miles south of Brownsville. Normally there is no water over the spillway. It runs through a big culvert. But we watched as four feet of water rushed over it. One spot where many people fish was eight feet under.

“Think of the treasures that will wash up back there,” I told Mom. I could see the tip of a canoe protruding from a tangle of water and wood. Suffice it to say that Mom did not share my enthusiasm.

I told her I would be back in a couple weeks to find that canoe, and maybe some more goodies. It will take more than a couple weeks for the river to return to normal, she replied. She’s probably right. Then we can wait for the next 100-year flood, which will probably happen sooner than that.