IT IS POSSIBLE FOR GOOD TO COME FROM FLOODING?

Something seems amiss when I find myself carrying buckets of water to my tomato plants and pumpkin vines when less than three miles away and all up and down the Mississippi and across the middle of Missouri folks are hurting so terribly from too much water.

It is the lay of the land and the edifices erected to try to tame the river and the astonishing amount of rain in one geographical area that is the cause of this incongruity. But, somehow, I feel guilty, or rather guilty mixed with lucky and sorrow and compassion. I wonder what the word would be for this mixture of emotions.

As I traipse out the hot sidewalk with my two gallon bucket of cool, clear, clean water slo~shing over, I try to occupy my mind with old pieces of literature about water and floods. Is there anything good in the written word to remember about floods?

Well, of course, there was the Great Flood that came when mankind, all but Noah and family, got so abominable ~God~ couldn't stand them any longer and started over again with a small nucleus, giving us a second chance.

There was the Red Sea that stopped then started again with all the backed up water to save the nation of Israel.

More than one journalist has recently recalled Mark Twain's remarks about the Mississippi and T.S. Eliot's description of the "~sullen~, untamed and intractable" waters. And there is the Ancient Mariner telling about "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink."

Probably the simplest of all the comments about rain that comes to mind is Robert Louis Stevenson's, "The rain is raining all around. It falls on field and trees. It rains on the umbrellas here and on the ships at sea."

Looking at my drying plants, I want to re-write that quatrain to say, "The rain is raining all around except on my pumpkin patch. If it rains only up north and north, I fear no little punks will hatch."

Even that facetiousness makes me feel guilty when corn fields and bean fields by the thousands have been ruined by too much water.

Probably all have little family stories about being in a flood. I have. Mama, Dad and I were trying to cross the flooding St. Francis River. The buggy began to turn sideways and float downstream. The horse swam. Dad ordered Mama and me to step out on the upstream side of the buggy step so as to balance the weight. We made it,~~~~ dripping and triumphant but chagrined because we had misjudged a river we thought we knew so well.

~As I watered the pumpkin and tomato plants, I kept trying to think about another flood I had read about sometime in the distant past that had left a warm spot in my heart.

What convolutions the mind goes through to finally arrive at some long ago, almost forgotten piece of literature! Motherhood was the first little impression that came to mind. It was something about motherhood. And pigs? Yes, there were pigs in the story. Wild pigs. And it was down south. On the Suwanee~~~~~~ River? It must have been Stephen Foster than. But somehow Suwanee didn't seem right. Savannah? Well, it started with an "S" anyway. Who were the southern writers a long time ago? Stephen Foster? Joel Chandler Harris? Archibald Rutledge? There! That was it. I went to my Rutledge books and took out "Peace in the Heart." Scanning the contents I saw the chapter entitled "High Water." Yes, this was it.

I wasn't far into re-reading the chapter until I saw the river was the Santee. I was right about the "S" anyway.

What Rutledge had witnessed from a canoe during a flooding of the Santee was a very ugly, wild sow with nine little piglets stranded on a tremulous islet of sedge and sodden log that had caught precariously on a tree top limb. The old, wild razorback "grunted" her brood into a watchful huddle and plunged into the water, swam a short distance and then returned to her trembling brood~. Rutledge describes it as, "she was instructing her babies as to how the thing was to be done; and she was showing them how easy it was."

Then Rutledge saw the sow plunge into the water again and nudge her babies, one by one, into the water where they would be on the lee side of her great flanks, thus protected by the swift current as they swam across. They all made it to higher ground one half mile away.

This led Rutledge to conclude that perhaps no living thing is doomed as long as it has a mother. But it is another point I want to make.

How can I bring this rambling piece around to make any sense or connection with our disastrous Mississippi-Missouri floods? Perhaps by saying if an old, wild razorback with nine babies can beat it, surely the pragmatic, tough-minded people of the Midwest can do it too. The physical lowlands and valleys between the mountain ranges are still our homelands, homelands that sometimes have tantrums, but each one we survive leaves us on higher mental ground.

REJOICE!