All spring and into the summer of 1993, beyond the notice of the outside world, the heavens opened up above the central United States, a steady stream at first and then biblical torrents that drowned the soil and forced the Mississippi River to climb over its banks and to defy the will of man. This was not the flash flood of a single storm but the slow, steady rise of a makeshift sea that over the weeks and months would drape itself over entire towns, or threaten to, in nine Midwestern states.
By that June, the Father of Waters and its tributaries — the Missouri, the Minnesota, the Iowa, the Cedar, the Wisconsin and the rest — had all run out of room and were returning to where they had been before highways and subdivisions displaced them on the primordial plains that had once been theirs. They re-established residence and would linger for as many as 200 days. They drove uncountable numbers of townspeople from their homes and paid no heed to the sandbags that tried to coax the rivers back into the channels that humans had assigned them.
I was The New York Times’s Chicago bureau chief at the time, responsible for the 12 states of the Midwest, and was coming off a monthslong immersion in the life of a 10-year-old boy on Chicago’s South Side at the height of a different calamity — the 1990s crack cocaine epidemic. I was anticipating a quiet re-entry into my everyday world, when reports began to surface of river crests beyond anything ever recorded and futile attempts to prop up failing levees.
By the time the city of Des Moines was shut down after the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers overran their dikes, engulfing the municipal water treatment station, forcing highways and bridges to close, and leaving the city without running water even to put out fires, I was on a plane to Iowa.
From the window seat I could see the roof caps of houses poking up from the river water like buoys and rafts out to sea. I wrote on the back of a napkin that it looked as if someone had spilled gallons and gallons of coffee on a patchwork quilt that happened to be farms and towns. I would tuck that note into my bag to save for an overview that would end up, as it turned out, in that Sunday’s paper. For now, I had to get to Des Moines.
Covering disasters requires a certain kind of accelerated metabolism, a nimbleness and stamina you might not need until you are suddenly heading to the airport into the middle of an unfolding catastrophe. Your life is now suspended for the duration. Overnight, you have to get up to speed on the inner workings of a place you may never have been to, and on whatever field of expertise applies to the crisis at hand.
There were few cellphones back then, no GPS and no laptops as we currently know them, but, instead, for us, hulking processors with DOS screens and clunky paraphernalia, all told weighing in at close to 15 pounds, with no guarantee that whatever you wrote on them would get to the editors, given the temperamental nature of dial-up. Thus I arrived with pens, notebooks and instinct.
The year before, I had been dispatched to South Florida to cover Hurricane Andrew, at the time the most damaging hurricane in U.S. history. I drove through the barren no man’s land of denuded palm trees, abandoned highways and empty tollbooths, and saw, as never before, the power of nature. I walked up to one of the many shellshocked homeowners as he stood in front of what was left of his house, awaiting the arrival of an overworked claims adjuster. He was surrounded by the rubble of the hurricane — matted mounds of clothing, broken table legs and torn-up chairs on their sides, a refrigerator.
“How is it possible,” I asked the man, “that the wind could pick up your refrigerator and blow it all the way out to your front yard? It is unbelievable.”
He shook his head at the enormity of it all and corrected me. “That’s not my refrigerator.”
So I considered myself prepared for whatever the summer had in store. But the Great Midwest Flood was not merely a disaster. It was a siege that would become the worst flood in modern U.S. history. So many records broken, so many levees breached, so many residents evacuated, so many houses and farmers’ soybean fields ruined and sodden over the course of five months that the term “flood stage” lost all meaning, and I and the other Times correspondents scattered over the region were running out of synonyms for “flood” and “water.”
Then a news brief came over the wires about the unimaginable: The flood had washed away most of the cemetery in a tiny town in northwestern Missouri. Caskets were floating down the Missouri River or had come to rest along railroad tracks and in soybean fields. It seemed like a scene out of the Old Testament. By the time I arrived, townspeople let me know that reporters had come and gone and had already written about the caskets, which were by now attracting gawkers from other states.
That was not why I had flown all the way to Kansas City and then driven 45 miles to the town of Hardin, in rural Ray County. The story was not about caskets. The stories that touch the soul are those that reveal themselves on multiple frequencies and are never only about what they seem on the surface. The caskets might have gotten a reader’s attention, but it was the human response to the unthinkable that would hold it.
In that farm town of 598 people, the Ray County coroner, Dean Snow, was leading the recovery effort for a pre-Civil War cemetery where nearly everyone who had ever lived and died in Hardin had been buried. The townspeople who had lost everything to the flood were now worried sick over what had become of their loved ones. It was as if the people had “died all over again and the survivors must grieve anew,” I wrote.
Every day they gathered at the fairgrounds to scour the bulletin board where the names of the dead who had been recovered and identified were posted. It was a painful task, more akin to a plane crash than a flood, that required survivors to give volunteers any descriptions they could recall of their departed relatives, like the man who was wearing a Timex watch and had a slide rule in his shirt pocket, or another who had “a tattoo on his right arm that said ‘Irene.’”
One woman, distraught and near tears as she stood there, searched the list close because she had two husbands in the cemetery and was beside herself at the thought that the wrong one might have been carried off. “You don’t feel the same way about every husband,” she told me.
Later, because I was by myself and not with a gaggle, the coroner let me accompany him past the barricades to what was left of the cemetery. He waved along Ed Wolfe, a friend who was so heartsick over the stillborn son he had buried years before that he beseeched the coroner to let him come with us. The two of them walked the cemetery reminiscing about the people beneath the headstones as if they were at a reunion.
“That’s Della’s husband,” Wolfe said, pointing to the surviving headstone of a World War II veteran.
“Yeah, Bob’s dad,” Snow said, looking down. “He was working on his car, and it fell on him.”
Wolfe had been pacing the cemetery the whole time, in search of his father and stillborn son. Soon we got to the edge of the cliff that had been gouged by the river, and he sank when he saw that the earth had vanished where their caskets had once been.
“My baby and my dad are gone,” he said, his eyes red and watery. “We’ve been hoping for five weeks they were safe. The way things are broken up down there, I don’t know if they’ll ever be recovered.”
This was not the time for questions but for empathy. In the finished piece, I ended with: “He wiped his eyes and headed back to the road, walking over dead corn shucks and wheat stubble, to break the news to his wife.”
I wrote the story in longhand back at a hotel in Kansas City and called it into the dictation desk, which passed it on to the editors. We had no concept of email or high-speed Wi-Fi back then because they did not exist for the general public.
As I look back, I am in awe of what all of us did with seemingly so little compared to now. We could not Google the length of the Mississippi River. There was no internet on which to search an oblique scientific reference, just finger-crossed calls to researchers that you hoped you could get on the phone before deadline, and the rushed clippings faxed to the front desk of your hotel from the newspaper’s librarians in what we used to call the morgue.
In a pinch, after all the offices had closed, I phoned my civil engineer father, who, though he built bridges and not hydraulics, relished — in fact, had been waiting all my life for — the chance to talk theory and terminology, as it was going to be the closest glimmer he would ever get to seeing me as the engineer he had once wanted me to be.
The rivers did not fully recede until that October. The catastrophe had crept along unnoticed until it was beyond the dominion of man, and it only ended when the rivers said so. It was an early sign of the earthly trials to come in the current century — the sudden flooding in Nepal and Tibet from a collapsing glacier this summer, the record-setting heat and drought in Europe, extreme enough to expose a Nazi warship at the bottom of the Danube, and the wildfires in Canada that sent smoke a thousand miles from the original flames, all reflections of the unheeded forewarnings of history.
What people came to realize during the Great Flood was that a river is not what we can see on any given day. A river is wherever it has been and could return to again. Which is why, by the fourth month of the flood and after twice being submerged by the Mississippi, the village of Valmeyer, Ill., surrendered to the forces of nature. The people voted to move the town from the rich lowland that Swiss immigrants first settled during the previous century, to a bluff a mile and a half inland and 400 feet higher. The people of Valmeyer gave the river back to itself. They decided they couldn’t trust it anymore.
As for the mourners in Hardin, Mo., sadly most did not get their wish. While more than 600 caskets were recovered from what the Missouri River carried away, only 120 remains could be identified. So the town reburied most of them in a mass grave for the unknown. One hundred and forty-eight of the departed were never found and were effectively lost at sea for all time.
That summer’s anguish was recounted without the technology we now take for granted, which affirms, in case we ever doubted, that technology cannot speak for the human heart. We may be covering a region or a country or a beat. We may think we are writing about elections, hurricanes, famine, poverty. But what I think we are always actually writing about is the ancient story of humans battling, and somehow surviving, the odds against them, whether the foe is others of our own species, systems of our own making, injustice, greed, war, or, in this case, the power of nature itself.
Once the storms were over and the river had collected itself, traffic at last came back to life after months of impassibility. This allowed me to make a six-day journey down the Mississippi on barges and towboats and every possible conveyance. There I ran into an engineer from Washington, Mo., named Bill Scholl, on the deck of a gambling boat, the Alton Belle. Beyond the tree line, a gray silt veil still clung to collapsed houses and grain bins, to deserted farm towns and to cornfields laid to waste. The river was quiet and composed now, as if nothing at all had happened that summer. Scholl leaned on the railing as he fixed his gaze on the deceptively still waters before us. Then he turned to me. “The river always wins,” he said. “God always wins.”
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