(five feet high and rising)

I think I've been semi-consciously avoiding reading anything about how high the water is in Illinois right now -- my folks don't live on a creek that feeds into a river that feeds into the Mississippi anymore, so high water is no longer our direct problem. Dad said they're calling it a 500-year flood in Iowa, and worse than 1993, but still...Iowa is not where we're from.

But then I saw an article on the TV on the subway (they do news snippets here) about the levee being breached in Gulfport, Illinois. And then the Times article I read last night was all about the bridge at Quincy, and how Clarksville, Missouri is losing ground and going under water inch by inch. These places I know, though Quincy is on a bluff, as Kolz made sure to find out.

In 1993, even we had a few sandbags for our basement, and our house was on a hill. Granted, with water all around when the creek came up -- which it did, a lot, usually once every two years -- taking a boat to get to the barn was kind of cool, and seeing it up over fence posts in the spots that always flooded was not shocking. For us, the sandbags weren't a make-or-break thing, quite, though I remember my dad talking with the Army Corps of Engineers about them letting water out of the lake that fed our creek, I think. There were certainly backroad short-cuts you couldn't take because the water was over the road. But if this really is worse than what we saw when I was in high school, I might make myself not follow the news. People do know more now than in 1993, someone was quoted as saying, but you just hope it holds.

I'm on notice, now, and it makes me nervous. I know the river comes up all the time, and people are used to flooding -- as if the houses on stilts and massive levees that you pass by, driving through towns along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers aren't convincing enough. And when I go home next, there will be flood damage lines on the houses, towns that are different. I just get freaked out thinking about the people down there waiting to see how high it'll get, and what they will lose.