Showing No Mercy

By HUGH SIDEY ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI

This was to be the season of county fairs and riverfront festivals, all domed in clear blue and cotton cumulus, with the deep, black earth beneath yielding abundance. But for one more weekend in eight heartland states, the skies were angry and the water poured down on flooded river bottoms and supersaturated farmland.

"The outlook is bleak," said Bob Anderson, of the Army Corps of Engineers in sodden St. Louis, Missouri. "The weather patterns are merciless." Another record-shattering crest -- this one 48 ft., something not even imagined a week ago -- is gathering on the upper Mississippi River and rolling toward St. Louis. . The levees, including the massive 52-ft. floodwall that protects the heart of St. Louis, are seeping, having now been soaked by flood levels twice as long as they were in the epic flood of '73.

But river people by nature are gamblers. Hope never dies. Floyd ("Shorty") Hutson isn't budging, though God and the Mississippi have been hard at him. He was still behind his homemade 8-ft. levee surrounding his two-acre farmyard, near Niota, Illinois, water on all sides, rain falling.

With him were Kay, his wife of 49 years, two damp dogs, their phone and electricity, six farm buildings, their house, 21 pumps spurting river seepage back outside the levee, a dry basement, two tin skiffs for ferrying in food and water, and his considerable sense of humor and fortitude.

"I'm disgusted," said Hutson, "but I'm not discouraged. I'm not going anyplace. This is my home. My father lived here. You learn to contend with the river. But I never heard of a 500-year flood before."

Out of the family farm of 800 acres, 235 acres of soybeans, wheat and corn are underwater, crops ruined for this year. When the flood passes, he has to clean up sandbags, driftwood and barrels that floated down from other farms, then he has to worry whether the water level will drop enough by fall to dry out those submerged acres, or he will lose another year of cropping, more thousands of dollars.

Shorty has been lucky or shrewd or both -- so far. He has prayed a lot. But so did those who lived in the 42,000 homes isolated or damaged by water, producing an estimated 100,000 displaced people. Yet the strongest detectable sentiment among them is that most will return after the worst of what has been called "the biggest flood that white man has ever seen in America."

The Rev. Ronald Bottens, pastor of the Community Church in West Alton, Missouri, gathered some of his scattered flock on the heights above that submerged town for a Bible study a few nights ago. "Maybe three or four families I know won't return," he said. "But when the time comes, most will go back. It was amazing how upbeat they were, asking what they should do next." Before the flood crested the first time, Bottens preached to them about Noah and the failure of others to prepare for the biblical downpour. Bottens' congregation, living on the narrow triangle of land where the Missouri and Mississippi come together, had prepared for a 100-year flood. But God added four more feet of water. It's odd, or maybe not, that Bottens and these worshippers seem not only drawn closer together but also more devoted, strangely exhilarated by having been through the great test of nature. Bottens ! himself stood on the Missouri levee that finally yielded. He watched the huge fist of water push aside soil, sand and men. "It was a phenomenal demonstration of force," he said, more convinced than ever that he and his people are a part of God's grand plan.

But more typical was a numbness produced by the spectacle. Experience was no guide. Barber Bill Horman, mayor of Hardin, Illinois, watched the water creep toward his town and silently form a huge lake around him after an Illinois river levee ruptured. "I've never seen anything like it," he stammered.

Last week this flood on the Missouri and upper Mississippi basins moved beyond mere awe and tragedy to the realm of mysticism, to top almost every means of measure, verbal and mathematical. Words ran out for writers, who called the Mississippi "a filthy, fetid, raging beast" and the Missouri "a brawling" and "bank swallowing" monster. All of that was true. All of that was also inadequate.

Army engineers calculated that as much as 10 times normal rainfall was flung over eight states for the better part of two months, so far killing at least 40 people, immersing 13.5 million acres of land, bursting federal levees in 12 places and private levees in nearly 800 spots, and causing an estimated $10 billion in damage. And still the water clings to its conquered territory.

Rivulets glint out of fields of dying crops, yellow slashes on hillsides show where seepage is rotting corn and soybeans. Bogs once tiled and dried out by farmers are bogs again. The Department of Agriculture estimates that 8 million farm acres were never planted or are underwater, and 12 million more have stunted crops.

In some places, like Des Moines, Iowa, there has been respite enough to begin the cleanup. The city got back running water 12 days after its main filtration plant was inundated by the Raccoon River, a normally stodgy stream most people never heard of. But the cleanup of the stinking mud and goo with shovels and hoses was plainly not going to produce the heady bonding among neighbors that the sandbag brigades developed. When Des Moines officials appealed the first time to citizens to keep their water turned off so that pressure could build in the pipes, the effort failed. Too many cheaters. In St. Louis city employee Phil Lane cast a realistic eye on the future. "You have volunteers who come out now to sandbag, but I don't see that happening during cleanup," he said, weary after days of manning pumps.

Yet the deluge of '93 has produced the greatest network of aid for any flood in the history of the country, from both government and private groups. James Lee Witt, the new director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, showed up in Moline, Illinois, with crisp plans to coordinate federal help and search for more emergency money. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena roamed the riverbanks overseeing plans to get barges, trucks and rails moving as soon as possible. The Red Cross and Salvation Army rallied nearly 13,000 volunteers between them in 130 cities and towns. Back in Washington, congressional bickering stalled a vote on $3 billion in disaster aid, but a new vote was scheduled for this week.

Residents of Quincy, Massachusetts, sent a truckload of donations to its namesake city in Illinois. A St. Louis restaurant baked hundreds of extra muffins each night to send to St. Charles, Missouri. Anheuser-Busch began filling millions of cans with water instead of Bud. Rocker John Mellencamp is staging three benefits for flood victims, and Kenny Rogers is not far behind.

The flood analysis became a technical marvel, with scientists and engineers on the job studying videos of levee breaks and the spreading fingers of water. Beyond water and terror there was literature. The ghostly hand of Mark Twain came back to write many a news lead, though his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, tucked safely behind a new floodwall, saw tourism drop 80% below normal, since would-be visitors erroneously believed the haunts of Tom and Huck were awash. William Faulkner and William Percy, authors molded by the Mississippi, were pulled off dusty shelves to make sense of it all. Nature writer John Madson, who has studied the prairies and their rivers from the heights of his home in Godfrey, Illinois, looked out over six miles of water that had once been a corseted river. He swore he heard the Mississippi whisper, "Dam me and I'll damn you." Shelby Foote, who grew up and still lives on the lower Mississippi, declared, "I don't mean to be irreverent, but the Mississippi has a presence in life. When I think of it, I think about God Almighty himself."

The flood is a great communications drama as well, with whirling helicopters and minicams beaming this slow-motion catastrophe to the world. A drought is arid pictorially as well as naturally. Hurricanes and tornadoes are stealthy and swift. Only the aftermath waits for camera crews. This flood came slowly and predictably to a boil, a scheduled drama. It may be the most vividly recorded natural disaster of all time. At one Army engineers briefing, in St. Louis, it was announced with due solemnity along with new flood statistics that CNN's Larry King would that evening interview Lieut. General Arthur Williams, chief of engineers. The god of talk had taken notice. And if the rains keep coming as predicted and the levees soften even more, Larry King and the rest of the nation may witness a natural calamity that could transform the Midwest.

With reporting by Staci D. Kramer/St. Louis