Tyler J. Kelley - Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on Americas Waterways

Poignant and powerful[A] passionate, provocative debut. Los Angeles Review of Books

The Struggle Against Nature on Americas Waterways

Pen America Literary Award Longlist

Holding Back the River

Tyler J. Kelley

A VID R EADER P RESS

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Copyright 2021 by Tyler J. Kelley

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First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition April 2021

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by Christopher Lin

Jacket photograph by David Freese, 2018

Author photograph Araby Kelley

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-8704-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-8705-6 (ebook)

For Marla J. Kinney

D avid Lueth was riding his lawnmower when the sheriff arrived. The yard he was mowing encircled a white farmhouse where his wifes family had lived for four generations. The green line of the levee was visible just a few fields away. It was the spring of 2011 and the worst flood in history was coming down the Missouri River. In this part of southwest Iowa, all the land between the bluff and the river was under mandatory evacuation, including Lueths farm. Lueth had moved his crops to safety but was ignoring the evacuation order. After a few obstinate remarks to the sheriff, he agreed to leave.

An unprecedented amount of snow and rain had fallen over the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Each of the six massive reservoirs that hold back the Missouri had filled in succession, leaving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with no choice but to release the surge of water into the undammed lower river. Up and down the valley, levees blew out or were overtopped. Homes, businesses, and whole towns were inundated. The rushing river rose around Lueths house and swept into the first floor. The nearby levee was reduced to nubs of earth.

After the water went down, Lueth bought a trailer to live in while he tore out mildewed walls and replaced waterlogged floors. He ordered new farm equipment. He bulldozed the six-foot sand drifts the river had left behind. Rebuilding cost his life savings$100,000. He had flood and crop insurance, but he couldnt collect until he and other flood victims appealed directly to their senators and the secretary of agriculture.

Lueth has a wide nose and bright eyes quick to smile and quick to cry. He favors round glasses, bucket hats, sandals, and the occasional tie-dye. His shaggy hair has gone gray. Though Lueth, a Christian and an avid bow hunter, is a registered Democrat, he shares a distrust of Big Government with his Republican neighbors. After the flood of 2011, he and his neighbors felt betrayed. The government had promised to protect them from the river, but it hadnt.

Yet by July of 2018, Lueth had canceled his flood insurance. While the Missouri River had been high for several years in a row, he believed that the events of 2011 were an anomaly. Since then, the locals and the Corps had spent a lot of money and time repairing and strengthening the levees. Im going to be dead before it all happens again, said Lueth, then sixty-one years old.

Eight months later, it did happen again. Early one Friday morning in March of 2019, the Missouri breached a levee near Bartlett, Iowa, ten miles north of Lueths house. The water was coming his way, across the Percival Bottoms, a wide plain below the bluffs that enclose the river for almost its entire length. Traffic on Interstate 29, at the base of the Iowa bluff, continued to flow, but the sheriff ordered everyone between the highway and the river to evacuate. Again, Lueth disregarded the order. He had soybeans worth $10,000 stored in a bin beside his house. If the beans got wet, they would swell and rot. He had to move them to high ground.

The floods cause was obvious enough to Lueth. It had been a cold winter and five days earlier a foot of snow lay on the ground. Then a bomb cyclonea sudden drop in barometric pressuremoved over the Midwest and temperatures rose into the fifties. As all the snow melted, more than two inches of rain fell across several states. The frozen ground could not absorb the water, which ran off into rivers and streams. The Little Sioux, a tributary of the Missouri, rose fourteen feet in twenty-four hours.

Lueth scrambled to buy new flood insurance, but the policy had a thirty-day waiting period. He was too late.

After trucking his soybeans to a nearby grain elevator, Lueth lingered in the house that he had already gutted once. He had recently brought his daughter into his farming business, based in the house he knew he had to leave. The sky was blue and snow geese flew overheadit was a beautiful day, but Lueth could barely keep from crying. The prospect of abandoning his home and farm made him physically sick. He had thrown up twice that morning. Sandbagging the levee by hand, as he and others had in 2011groaning and sweating to add a few extra inches of protectionwas pointless. The river was rising too fast. The levee, built in the 1940s and rebuilt after 2011, just wasnt high enough. There was nothing Lueth could do.

He left.

The following Monday morning, another levee breached to the south. Parked on an overpass of the now-flooded interstate, he could see his house. It stood on a patch of dry land, but the water was rising. It had inundated a swath three miles widefrom river to bluffand at least twenty-five miles long. The town of Bartlett was inundated; Hamburg, McPaul, Glenwood, Pacific Junction, Percivalall swamped. Some locals were already saying the damage was too much, that they wouldnt rebuild. In darker moments, Lueth too thought, Screw it, Im done.

Over the weekend, his sadness had given way to anger. He was certain the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that manages the Missouri River, could have done more. Why should he and his neighbors be the ones flooded? The massive dams upstream were supposed to control flooding. Why were they dumping water on him? Why werent people upstream suffering like this? Were rich South Dakotans, with their summer homes on the lakes, being spared at his expense? Or was it the ice fishermen? Hed heard that the Corps had to release water from the nearest dam or risk bursting it. If the dam wasnt helping, Lueth thought, let it collapse. It couldnt be any worse. Confused, unsure about tomorrow, he prayed and prayed.

Cut off from his own property, Lueth helped his friends and neighbors. While moving farm equipment to higher ground, he saw hundreds of deer running across a flooded field, flushed from the woods by high water. Watching the terrified animals fleeing, as he and his friend also hustled to move, Lueth felt even more depressed. It seemed obvious to him that the river had changed, while the levees and dams built to manage it had not.