A Broken Heartland

By Hugh Sidey/Washington

By the time the river reached them on July 13, Nick and Crystal Goedereis had removed everything possible -- livestock, heirlooms, even portable buildings -- from their 150-acre homestead along the rich banks of the Mississippi near Quincy, Illinois. But they still defiantly spent their last night in sleeping bags on the bare living room floor. "We didn't want to leave," says Crystal. "It was our home."

Repeatedly over the 160 years since Nick's family first tilled the land, the river had reached out to destroy the crops. But each time, the family had returned to replant and prosper. This was different. The river, recalls Crystal, "was like something possessed." For weeks now, the Mississippi has occupied their five-bedroom home, its undercurrents "shaking the house apart, ripping away the studs from the siding and Sheetrock," as Nick describes it. Unlike past flash floods, which were over in days, the waters may not recede for four months, and the family may not be able to replant their soybean crop for two years.

Throughout a heart-shape chunk that stretches 500 miles across and 600 miles long in ten Midwestern states, this deluge has recast the lives of the Goedereises as well as thousands of other families, perhaps forever.

For all the urban pretensions in bigger towns like St. Joseph and Des ! Moines, the region was geared to nature's rhythms, a verdant land of quilted green and slow streams with such names as Skunk and Nodaway. The Flood of '93 stole some of its innocence and its trust. The most frequently cataloged submersibles besides homes and acres of waving grain were bandstands and ball fields. "Summers are what we are all about," insists the Des Moines Register's Larry Fruhling. "This summer was wrecked." Worse, it may have planted fear in the hearts of thousands of the yeomen.

"Not many people are going to be willing to bet that this 500-year flood is not going to happen again in the next 499 years," says economist Neil Harl of Iowa State University. "There will be a drop in confidence, a rise in risk aversion."

Nobody has figures now, but it is expected that dozens of tiny towns will cease to exist. "Some people will absolutely leave -- the older people who lost everything are not going to go back," declares Roger Hannan, executive director of the Farm Resource Center, a mental-health outreach network, in Mound City, Illinois. "The prolonged nature of this flood is especially troublesome. We have little to refer to in the literature of disasters." But it is known that 60 years ago, after a summer of dust storms and drought, thousands of Midwesterners pulled up stakes and went west. This flood has been in some parts of Illinois since April. Whither today's refugees? Nobody is sure right now.

Experts expect there will be renewed efforts to control the rivers. Since they can't move downtown Davenport, Iowa, to higher ground, reason suggests a new system to replace inadequate local levees. There may also be a campaign to coordinate flood control in the upper Mississippi basin, which until now has been a hodgepodge of reservoirs, locks and levees. Central planning has produced a flood-control system on the lower Mississippi that has not failed since 1927, points out Michael Robinson of the Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. But the lower river has storage and pass-through basins equal in area to the state of Indiana, something never dreamed of up north.

"We didn't think this was possible," says naturalist John Madson of Godfrey, Illinois. "Levees turning to Jell-O, towns going down the tube. I'm sure we will be rethinking river containment. But it would take countless billions of dollars today. I doubt that is politically possible."

Even as the flood brings a resurgence of plant and wildlife, at least for now, it is likely to bring changes in city zoning for vulnerable areas, which will in turn alter urban growth patterns. Scientists note that the fields using new "no till" techniques, where last year's crop stubble is left intact, collected flood debris and took longer to dry out, delaying planting even more. Old-time deep tillage may become the fad once more.

Nick Goedereis just wants to be able to farm again, though it's unlikely he will soon replace his $500,000 showcase on the Mississippi, where he bred imported European hogs to produce the kind of leaner, lower-cholesterol pork prized by health-conscious Americans. For the time being, he, Crystal and their four young children have moved to a yardless, four-room, two-window apartment in town. They have no funds or flood insurance and depend on feed donations for their swine herd. "You have to force yourself to get up every morning and deal with something you don't want to deal with," says Crystal. Despite local press reports of federal emergency funds as high as $11,900 per family, their only check came to $390. "That wouldn't even get the utilities turned on," says Nick. By selling off his prized breeders at prices 80% below their value, he says, "I can afford a home, or I can afford to put myself back into business. The hogs will eventually put a house around us, while the house would never bring back the livestock."

The family's dreams may have been set back for a generation. "The kids know that someday they are going to return to a farm," says Crystal. "They just don't know it is not going to be this one."

With reporting by William McWhirter/Quincy