Flooding - Then and Now

There are many events in our memory that recede with time. Trying to bring back those memories is not always successful. Reading about the flooding along the Mighty Mississippi River this past week has brought back some of those memories for me.

In January 1937, there was a major flood in the Ohio River Valley, which has since been described as the deepest Ohio River flood on record. http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lmk/?n=flood_3

I was twenty-eight months old at the time, and my family lived in Mound City, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers came together. The estimated population in 2003 was 673. Here are old photos of that flood. These pictures show people trying to move about on boats. http://www.enquirer.com/flood_of_97/history4.html.

I was told that when Daddy came to take us out of the parsonage in a small row boat, Mother grabbed three things: her violin, a Monopoly game, and me. Her violin was precious because it was a rare instrument and Mother was an excellent violinist; the Monopoly game (new to that generation) was a borrowed item and she needed to return it at all costs; and I suppose she saved me because I was her child. We were taken to higher ground to wait until the waters subsided enough for us to return.

My father had gone to help out on the levees, and according to Mother, the only way she knew he was still alive was through occasional radio reports of a great rescue miracle performed by the town’s “young Methodist minister.” Her tales about the flood may have been histrionic, but I suspect they may have contained an element of truth.

I scanned this picture of my father from a fragment of an old photo that was made during his time of working on the levees.

I was in fourth or fifth grade when I read in our geography book about how the terrain of Southern Illinois had been drastically altered because of the 1937 flood. Years later, when my youth group from another church attended a function in that flooded out little church, the water line was still visible about twenty feet high on the still unpainted walls.

Almost up to the moment I left for college, women would come up to me and say, “I made little dresses for the Methodist preacher’s daughter and you must be her!”
http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/investigations/es1308/es1308page07.cfm

I pray for the many people who are trying to survive mentally and physically in the flooding today.