Upon the First Terrace

I

 

Now, this is Tom Bridge: Most of the dust storms in southeastern Colorado blew in from the north. I was a boy—seven, eight, nine—in the early thirties, Dust Bowl days. For a long distance we could see them coming, the dusters. We looked north and there was a curtain of brown dust, sometimes black. The storm came on like a cliff. The sun shone right into the irregularities in that wall, and it was like looking into a canyon. There was a period of quiet: the air got still as the dust came on. It was hundreds of feet high. And then the high-velocity winds that were riding over the top of the storm roared in. It turned so dark I could hardly see the end of my arm. We watched from the house, and we felt the grit between our teeth, and pressure changes pulled dust into the house and into everything—linens, trunks, hatboxes. Lids weren’t any use, so my mother hung wet towels over the windows, and when we went out, she had us wrap wet cloths over our mouths and noses. The dust was silt—fine quartz sand pulled up off the alluvial fan east of the Rockies.

I am at the dinner table in the Bridges’ house, a solid, one-and-a-half-story, red-brick, red-tile-roofed place built in 1921 in Saffordville. Although it’s not a big home, even today it stands out in the county. For twenty-two years, Tom Bridge, tall and angular, has taught geology at Emporia State University, but he grew up on the Colorado grasslands at the foot of the Front Range.

After a duster, we’d go out and hunt arrowheads: the wind had carried off the lighter topsoil and the flint points lay shining on the hardpan. I had cigar boxes of them “dug up” by the wind. We lived near a leg of the Santa Fe Trail, where the ruts were compacted so hard that the wind would blow away the soil around them, and following a storm we’d find ruts raised like railroad tracks. We never had to open a gate after a duster: the fences would catch the tumbleweed and make a windbreak, and the drifts covered the barbed wire. We rode our horses right over the fences.

In 1966, he got lost and drove into Saffordville and asked the old banker’s son for directions to a piece of land Tom was considering buying. The son said he might sell him his house, and later he did, and all along Bridge knew that the house sat in the floodplain of the Cottonwood River. Anybody who grows up inhaling dry bits of the Rocky Mountains might do the same. He moved in with his wife, Syble, and their four children, and it’s quite possible that they will be the last citizens in Saffordville. From 1966 to 1973 they averaged a flood a year, but the water never got higher than the basement. Tom didn’t complain about the flooding but he did about Syble’s overstocking canned goods because they seemed a needless burden. In 1985 the river began to swell, and the Bridges began raising furniture, but they were soon out of bricks and concrete blocks, and they started setting cans of corn, tomato soup, and V-8 juice under the furniture legs. Of the three inhabited houses remaining in Saffordville, the Bridges’ is the farthest from the river but on the lowest ground, and it isn’t feasible to raise the brick house as their neighbors the Staedtlers did their big, two-story frame place. So, while the radio crackled out flood updates, the Bridges put down cans of chili, and pork and beans, their sole defense against the river and not much more effective than wet towels against dusters.

As goes the Cottonwood River, so goes Chase County: through the quarter-billion-year-old limestone hills, the typically slow waters have cut a sixty-mile dogleg trough, northeast, east. Before the recent building of several impoundments, all the storm runoff in the county, but for two small portions in the south, as well as much of the drainage of Marion County, rolled past Saffordville. While nearly every village in Chase sits in the valley of the Cottonwood or one of its tributaries, only Saffordville on the east, sooner or later, gets the runoff from seventeen hundred square miles, an immense drainage for such a small channel. Without the Cottonwood watershed there would never have been much settlement in Chase or agriculture other than upland grazing, and the railroad and highway 50 would not likely have passed this way, since transport crosses the hills through the gaps cut by the Cottonwood and South Fork. The valleys hold the towns and the cultivation, but only fourteen percent of the county is bottomland, and it is the rain that falls on the other eighty-six percent, the uplands, that creates floods. Like Kane, the ancient Hawaiian shark-god, the Cottonwood gives life and destruction with equal nonchalance.

 

Now the river is rising:

the uplands in saturation, they can no longer hold the rain, and they slough it down the slopes to the creeks, where a few days earlier quiet waters flowed blue-gray, the color of moonstone, but now they climb banks and rip off ledges with mad turnings of earthen roil, and where they join larger streams they meet walls of water and back up until the whole county, its veinings of waterways become a massive thrombus, starts to overflow, and the word goes out by radio, by neighbors in pickups: River’s on the rise! And all the time it’s raining, raining so long that the Emporia Gazette has time to print front-page jokes about it. If you’ve been saving for a rainy day, brother, this is it. Raining, and the Cottonwood, now thirty feet deep, tops out and starts across the bottoms and begins losing its hundred serpentines as it straightens itself to fit the more linear contours of the valley, and the word goes out, Take high ground! and people wonder, Am I high enough? and now only parallel lines of cottonwoods and sycamores and willows mark the usual river course, and a man stands on a bridge and remembers how last week his rowboat hardly moved in the slow river when he fished east of the old milldam, and now the silent river has voice, loud, and one fellow says to his son, It’s that sound I don’t like, and farmers start their combines and tractors (and one machine won’t fire up) and move them to higher ground: How high is high enough? and, Is there time to get the cattle out? and everywhere along the South Fork and the Cottonwood the usual argument: I’m not leaving. This is where I live. This is mine. And the old, benign river turns malevolent, and a farmer shouts at his wife, It’s sweeping us away! and she won’t listen because women here are always the last to leave, and out back the corn and milo are slipping under, green to brown, and she shouts, I’m going upstairs! and he shouts too, No you’re not! And she: It’s not taking my house while I stand up on the bluff, not this river! And he: It ain’t no river now! It’s a thing moving as if it knows what made this valley and knows its million-year right of tenancy, and it’s going to tear out the fences and flush the squatters and their privies away and scrub the valley of the septic intrusion and let them go down with their hogs and stories of Noah:

the river has risen.

 

This is Syble Bridge, small and trim. She says to me: The problem isn’t the water really: it’s the mud that stays behind. The water drains out but the mud settles. And Tom says, and he is thinking of Dust Bowl days too: We get that same layer, that same type of dust or mud precipitated out of water. I’m laughing and I say, all your life you keep getting soil in your house from one agency or another. You’re an earth scientist and earth keeps coming in to live with you. It must make you glad you’re not an entomologist. Or a mortician.

I ask, where did you see the water first, and she says: In ’85 I opened the basement door, and it was coming up the stairs at me. It was rising faster than we’d seen it do before. I’d already gotten my home-canned goods from down below, and then they went under up here: sweet pickles and dills. Afterward, we were afraid to eat them, but we ate the stuff in tin cans. Two dozen jars of pickles, still pretty and green, went to the dump along with some furniture and mattresses and rugs: three flatbed truckloads. You understand, in ’85 we never left the house. That’s the way it is for us here—our neighbors don’t leave either. We have one room upstairs, and Tom and I go up to it, but we come down in our rubber boots and sit in the water to eat at the table. The man who built this house, Bill ImMasche, the banker, did the same thing: went upstairs and waited it out. During a flood, Stanley North would come up to the back of the house in a rowboat to bring Bill his paper and mail and milk every day. In ’51 they took the screen off the upstairs window to pass things in. Before he pulled away, Stanley said, “You want this screen back on?” “No,” says Bill. “Leave it off. I’ll swat flies. It’ll give me something to do.” The floods never bothered him, but people say that his wife’s severe heart trouble came from worrying over this house flooding. He watched his pennies, but she shook him loose to build this place.

The Bridges have lived here twenty-two years, and I ask why they don’t at least build a levee around the house, a four-foot berm should do it, and Tom says, When we get time. I ask whether living here makes them watch the sky, and he says, We’ve had floods when we’ve had no rain on our place. We have to listen to the radio, go down to the bridge to check on the river, especially at night when we can’t see it coming over the fields.

Syble says, When the forecast is for flood, Tom starts moving vehicles to higher ground, and I mow the lawn so the grass clippings will wash away. If the forecast was for flooding tomorrow, I’d head right now for the canned goods, especially juice cans, the forty-six-ounce size. Two years ago it was ten inches in this room, but in ’si it was five feet, and that’s what damaged the house. When we bought it, we had to put everything inside back together. We decorated with the idea that things would probably get wet. Now Syble is setting the table to serve a roast and mashed potatoes and broccoli, and she says, In high water it gets quiet. About all we hear is the water slopping outside.

Tom: This house is a riverboat that won’t float. I’ll look out a window and see carp jumping on the lawn. Frogs in the basement. Cordwood floating off the porch.

And Syble: I looked out the window in ’85 and saw the workbench float out the garage. An eddy carried it away. It wasn’t a regular workbench: it was an old grand piano that had been gutted, but it had fancy carved legs. We kept tools and nails sitting on. We watched it float out, go past the house, moving right along. It stopped over east in Edith’s field, tools still on top of it.

Tom: I had three Honda motorcycles in the garage. They went beneath. There isn’t time to get everything, so we go for the books first, then things in the basement. I turn off the electricity if water’s coming upstairs. Syble got shocked the last time. You’ll feel the electric current in the water, a kind of vibrating: it can kill you. We take oil lamps to the second floor. The toilet stops working, the bathtub backs up with foul stuff. There’s no question a flood’s inconvenient.

Syble: You don’t live in a floodplain and get excited about water. Now, a tornado gets us excited. Tom calls us collectors who need a flood every so often to clear things out anyway. When the water drops, we get the brooms and hose and squirt it and keep the water riled up, make it take the mud back out. If you let the mud dry, it’s like concrete. We pump out the basement.

The Bridges have no flood insurance, and Tom tells me he sold their canoe, and Syble says, I wouldn’t want out in a flood in a canoe or anything else. They don’t have a CB to make up for losing the telephone when the buried lines short out. I ask Tom if he will see water in this house again, and he says, That’s a real possibility, but I don’t worry about it. Our lives aren’t threatened. Our possessions, yes.

The meal is over, and we are talking about geology, and someone has said that the Kansas pioneers’ great fear was drought. I say, since erosion is the primary geologic force in Kansas, isn’t it appropriate for a geologist to live amidst the cycle of flood, erosion, and deposition, and Tom says, Twenty-two years here now and I really understand sedimentary layering, what made these hills.

 

II

 

Edith McGregor lives across the road—that’s all it can be called now, although it once was Hunt Street—from the Bridges, and she also knows that sedimentary layering is the real enemy. Her home is a large, two-story frame house, immaculately white, the kind you find along old, tree-lined, front-porch streets in America, and she isn’t much slowed by her eighty-two years, she of the young hands. Her husband died a few years ago, yet she’s a jolly woman, a former schoolteacher as are all five people who live in Saffordville, and, like the others, she owns no boat and would have to be unconscious before she would take to the flood in anything other than the second floor of her house. She has a master’s degree in psychology. I am seated at her kitchen table in front of the window where, six months ago, she watched the tornado come down on Toledo, a mile north, and she says, I didn’t go to the basement. I wasn’t turning my back on that thing, and she sets down thick slices of her wheat bread and pushes the butter toward me; she has already explained how she gets fresh Chase County wheat from the small grain elevator by the Santa Fe tracks and how she grinds it to add to her store flour. It’s ten in the morning, and she’s wiping off a jar of home-canned pears.

Dean and I came here in 1947, and we saw floods about every year, but the water never got out of the yard until ’51. It came up early on Wednesday morning, and it rolled across those west bean fields like a wall, it seems. We didn’t have much time before it started up the porch steps and under the front door and then through the windows. They’re low like old windows are. This is the highest house here: built in 1913 for seven thousand dollars and paid for with one crop of alfalfa seed. My husband was head wire- chief in Emporia, in telegraph communications for the Santa Fe, and whenever it looked like high water, he’d take out for town so he wouldn’t get cut off. That Wednesday he got the horse to higher ground and went on to work. I was here with my daughter and son, both still in school. First we crated up the chickens and took them up to the sun porch on the second floor, and that was our mistake: it took too much time to run down three dozen fryers. We got the dining table up on boxes and the piano up on something—got it up a foot or so—we thought that was enough, and she smiles at her naiveté and says, They tell that the Indians believed a big flood would come every hundred years, but our people who build on high ground have their wells go dry in the summer: we located down in here to have water. My well’s been polluted by floods, but it’s never gone dry.

There’s a story of the woman who in the drought of 1929 prayed hard for rain, even asking that the river overflow and water their dying corn, and it began raining, and the Cottonwood rose and washed out their whole crop, and I ask, did you pray? and she says, I suppose we did. My son got scared when the water started rising in the house, but he got over it. The first floor is four feet above the yard: I measured the water in this kitchen, and it came to the top of the table, thirty-three inches. We took canned goods upstairs: I remember a lot of hominy and mackerel. Haven’t eaten hominy since.

Edith sets preserves and a glass of cold water on the table, and she says, When the river’s coming on, I always fill the bathtub so we can wash up and flush the toilet. Somebody will bring us drinking water. In ’51, a boat was at the house by noon to pick us up, but when the water’s six feet deep with a current like we get here, I don’t go outside. She says that as if speaking of spring showers. That boat wasn’t big enough. I can’t swim. Besides, I had no reason to get out. I like to stay and take care of things. I guess I’m an old river rat.

She slows as she recalls the details, and she says, We stayed and watched the river rise: the chicken coop washed away, and that was it for us raising chickens. The soybean crop went, but the wheat we’d already harvested. Then, the second day my son got restless, and he went up on the roof with the dog and his twenty-two and shot at trash floating by. An airplane flew over and saw him and passed word that the McGregors were signaling for help. I wasn’t scared, really wasn’t. My husband couldn’t get away from all the stopped trains in Emporia: every stranded passenger wanted to send a message. He didn’t come home until Monday. But every night he drove up to the south bluff to see if the oil lamp was burning in the window—that was our signal that we were all right. On Friday I started stirring the water with a broom so the mud would go out with it. I went round and round the rooms, and finally, when the water was out of the house, I went to the porch time and again and brought in buckets of water to throw on the floors. You don’t wait until you need a shovel. These pine floors held up, but all the veneer furniture and the doors and the piano just fell apart.

She’s watching to see whether I find all this eccentric, and she says, I walked out of the house Sunday, but my son put a bundle of clean clothes over his head and waded out Saturday evening—went to town for a good meal. When I came out, first thing I did was get a drink of cold water and a big slice of fruit pie someone brought—peach it was. Then strangers started coming out to stare and pick through our fields and houses. They carried off more than the river did. For the first time she shows irritation.

She says, I remember that before the water started rising, animals did strange things. Groundhogs, skunks, snakes all moving: they weren’t waiting for the water. A mother skunk got trapped in the barn with her two little ones, and my son lifted the babies up on a feed box, and then the mother climbed up but never raised her tail. She seemed to understand. A neighbor, the French war bride, stopped her pickup on the highway and opened the door to see if a big old hog was all right. He climbed up in the seat and sat down beside her, she said, “just like he knowed me.”

Now Edith is looking out the window where she could once count eight houses along Hunt Street. She says this seriously: If people don’t know any better than to live down here, they’ll have to suffer the consequences, but I never knew anyone to die in our floods.

 

III

 

In the early summer of 1951, Frances Staedtler’s husband’s parents jacked up their big house, added three feet to the foundation, and set the house back down on it. Six days later the Cottonwood was at the door, and then in the kitchen, the living room, and the family went upstairs. Frances spoke to me for a while about the floods, her story paralleling the others’, and, when she began talking about her mother-in-law taking the ironing board to the second floor in case she needed a raft, Frances had to stop, and she struggled to say, I’m afraid I can’t go on. It’s too much remembering how we all were in those days, when we were strong enough to fight it. We were together.

These people of Saffordville, the whole population, all five of them, as they talk their way back into the big floods, grow animated, and sorrows and smiles come and go so quickly about their faces that I almost don’t see them, and their eyes are widened and keen. They are not boastful, but they relish, not having beaten the river, but having held their own with it and not yielding to it other than by climbing a flight of stairs, and the whole time they realize the battle is a little foolish—just the way they want it. They recognize but do not say how the river whets a fine edge on their lives, and I never heard any of them speak love for the river, or hate. These are not people locked in the floodplain by poverty; they are held here by recollections of what the river has given them: hours of a family bound tightly like shocks of wheat, of moments when all their senses were almost one with the land, of times when they earned the right to be tenants on the first terrace of the Cottonwood River. One afternoon, Edith McGregor said to me: Not everybody gets the chance to live like this.