Flood
For the third time in four years, the Mississippi River at St. Louis rose into the top ten highest ever flood levels. It settled at 42 feet on May 6, 2017. Ranked at number 6.
Prior to 2013, record flood levels were scattered over three centuries, the oldest (provisionally) dating back to 1785, one in the nineteenth century and the rest in the twentieth century with a gentle uptick in frequency towards the end. But three top ten records in four years? No precedent whatsoever.
So seeing high water in this area is becoming disturbingly frequent. In the past (1993 — still the record high, and 1995), the river at these levels engendered a lot of local excitement but that seems to have dissipated. I was surprised how few people came out to see the Mississippi River on Saturday, May 6, when I took these photographs. I came across a single other flood spotter; we joked about climate change and the blind idiocy that has taken the denialists. As if it is really a joking matter. Certainly not for the farmer whose fields and buildings lay behind this breached levee on Chouteau Island in Illinois.
The frequency of flooding seems certainly due to the larger and wetter storms we’ve been getting in this area over the past few years. It has to be more, though. In the past it took extensive and sustained rainfall and often snow melt north of us to build up the waters into a flood. These floods were slow to build and slow to decline. But now it seems that just a few days of very heavy rainfall is enough to push the big rivers up and up. Behaving as if they were much smaller streams. Part of it has to be the ever increasing constraints on the Mississippi. More and higher levees, less and less wetland and dedicated floodplain. The river is like a aging and constricting raised vein lying on the land; it takes less and less to fill it.
When I look out over these inundated lands, gazing with some wonder at roads and places I had walked just a few weeks or days before that now lay invisible beneath the water, I feel a visceral charge. Much as one does in a flood dream. A sense that very ground beneath you can be taken away.
This sense of a landscape changing around you without any regard for your assumptions of permanency is unsettling.
In contrast, on a sea shore the rise and ebb of a tide is understood to such an extent that a tide table book can tell exactly where the water will be at any particular time. Sitting on a beach watching the waves draw closer or move away is a fun thing to do. No sense of unease there.
But not here.
No, this is nature working without regard for any order. Altogether wilder.
It makes me feel small. Perhaps that’s a good thing. At least, in this case, I was only the observer. No lost home or property.
I drove home thankful that I could. And that I live on a hill away from any big river. Who knows when the next high water will strike? But I’m willing to bet that it will be sooner rather than later. The world is changing.
Text and photographs by Richard Keeling
