LETTERS FROM HOME: WATCHING THE RIVER FLOW AND THE SAND SHIFT

May 25, 1995

Dear Patty,

After moving back to Missouri, DC and I bought an ancient unpainted pickup truck. It lacked a few things -- a front bumper, brakes, a functional alternator, a gas pedal -- but got us through the winter once those minor details were rearranged.

Some people proclaimed this the ugliest truck they'd ever seen. They exaggerate. It is the ugliest vehicle I personally have owned. It easily beats out the 1959 Renault Dauphine with the vise-grip door handle and the U-Push starter. It also surpasses the yellow Dodge hippie van with the orange carpet and the girlfriend-made curtains and the Vesuvian radiator.

The pickup, a testament to the adage that rust never sleeps, is much more of an eyesore. It is an extravagant eyesore, a piece de resistance.

The French have a term for women who are beautiful in their ugliness. I'm sure it's sexist, but I know what they mean.

As summer approaches, though, we knew the old gray pickup has to be put out to pasture. Primarily because we can't figure out how to turn off the heater.

So we got another truck that's not quite as old. It came with paint and an air conditioner. The gray one will be sold if we can find someone who appreciates ugliness.

The river crested at 15 feet above flood stage yesterday. People, especially the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, are dumbfounded that this has happened again two years after the 500-year flood of 1993.

People who have been flushed from their homes once again have lost their tenuous sense of security. And the engineers have lost the confident mien that led them to try to control something as unpredictable and undefeatable as a river.

Now, like the rest of us, they say, "I don't know."

Out West you try to control the rivers by reducing the flow, which allows silt to build up and destroys the salmon runs and the balance developed over the eons. The old-timers up in Garberville told us stories about how the Eel River used to run, big and green and treacherous. Once in awhile it would flood and wipe out some houses. They'd love to see a flood now.

Here, we've channeled the water that runs in the smaller rivers and streams -- the St. Francois, the Whitewater, the Castor, Crooked Creek and Hubble Creek -- into man-made ditches that carry it to the Mississippi.

It was a Herculean engineering feat that turned millions of acres of swampland into fertile farmland. During prolonged periods of rain, the drainage project also contributes to the Mississippi floods.

Now we're at the hold-your-breath stage. If the rains back off, the river will begin dropping and the levees and sandbaggers can rest. The longer the river stays up, the greater the risk of a levee break.

Usually a break isn't life-threatening. Usually people already have been evacuated.

But many of our neighbors are homeless for the second time in two years. Homelessness is homelessness, no matter what the cause.

We've only been in our new house three months and we're safe on a hill behind a floodwall. But after Oklahoma City and the newest flood, you have to wonder whether our sense of security is built on shifting sand. I'm sure the French have a term for it.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.