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Red barns in Missouri’s rural Ozarks | |
I didn’t care about the Midwest Flood of 1993. I already knew about floods. Six months earlier “the perfect storm” inundated my Connecticut home for three days with five icy feet of the salty Long Island Sound. I was used to late summer hurricanes and winter coastal storms raging through our region. Having seen enough of the relentless force of water, I went to Missouri in the steamy heat of July 1993 to photograph iconic Midwest scenes for New York photo stock agencies.
As I set my itinerary, I ignored a friend’s prophecy that I would “follow the flood and the media.” Carrying cameras, tripod, lenses, filters, and film, I went to the “Show Me State” to photograph blue skies, red barns, white picket fences, and clean pigs at 4-H fairs. I would document the people along the Mississippi River and its tributaries: farmers baling hay, couples canoeing on clear streams, friends chatting on the porch of the general store, bluegrass musicians tuning dulcimers, and craftsmen designing Windsor chairs and heirloom quilts.
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| Canoeing on Missouri’s Current River |
I read David McCulloch’s biography of Harry Truman, so I could bring his plainspoken values into my camera’s depth of field. In those pre-Internet days I skimmed encyclopedia entries on Missouri’s mythical heroes – Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, Daniel Boone, Laura Ingalls Wilder, George Washington Carver. I studied George Caleb Bingham’s epic paintings documenting Missouri’s frontier era.
I would loop south through the Ozarks and Branson, up to Kansas City, and back east to St. Louis along the Missouri River. I arrived on July 4th for celebrations in historic Saint Charles. The next day I turned up at a 400-acre, century-old B&B farm in the Ozarks. I photographed father and son feeding cattle from a 1950s pick-up truck; a goose and goat playing in the children’s sandbox; and cows posing with very intent five- and seven-year-old fishermen. This was a travel photographer’s delight.
But plans are meant to be broken. After waiting out torrential thunderstorms for two days at a dairy farm, I realized that the new-mown hay being swept off low-lying fields along the Meramec River meant there was an incredible story on the Mississippi River. My friend was right – I couldn’t ignore the flood.
Headlines were happening all around me. My adrenaline rose with the rivers, and I couldn’t resist photographing a front-page national news story. Following the clear run-off of the Courtois and Hussah Creeks, I drove east to the muddy Mississippi.
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| Flooded corn field outside Ste. Genevieve |
The rains and floods that summer are still described in Biblical terms. On the first day of my new self-assignment, I photographed a restaurant sign that humorously claimed, “Noah would have eaten here!” While empathetic toward river-dwellers’ lost homes and crops, I was rushing to catch the story with “punchy photographs.” I didn’t realize that the flood could last over a month. I was used to coastal five-hour hurricanes and three-day Connecticut “nor’easters.”
My revised destination became Ste. Genevieve, a picturesque Missouri river town south of St. Louis founded in the 1730’s by French farmers. This town of 4,400 people would be small enough for me to cover it in depth, and its Creole architecture and upcoming Bastille Day celebrations would be good stock images.
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Historic Ste. Genevieve being flooded | |
En route I picked up USA Today and local newspapers to see veteran newswire photographers’ images of raging muddy rivers. I thought of T. S. Eliot, who grew up in St. Louis, referring to the Mississippi as “a strong brown God.” National weather forecasters and local homeowners were asking whether this flood might prove that the river’s power had remained irrefutable despite man’s flood control infrastructure. The awe that was flooding the media and random conversations on the street slowly began to wash over me.
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| Pumping seepage back over the levee, Ste. Genevieve |
As I arrived in Ste Genevieve, the radio dee-jay was playing the1970s hit “American Pie”, so I decided to heed its lyrics. “I drove my Chevy to the levee,” but the levee across Main Street wasn’t dry. It was three feet high and one sandbag wide at the top. Already “sand boils” were leaking out underneath it onto the street. Brown waters were curling merely inches from the top. How to transfer that danger onto my film’s emulsion? The fearsome seepage on the street merely would appear as an innocent puddle. Eliot’s “strong brown god” would be rendered ineffectual by the two-dimensionality of paper. Could a photograph carry with it the river’s sweep of timelessness?
That first evening in “the oldest town west of the Mississippi,” I walked past clusters of sandbaggers working by moonlight. I looked again at the saturated levee. A proposed $100 million levee could have saved this town, but financing hadn’t been obtained from Congress. Now it was too late. How could a few midnight sandbaggers stop “The Father of the Waters”?
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Sand bags in north end of Ste. Genevieve | |
As I put a flash on my camera, I wondered why the residents didn’t realize this flood was different. The many levees constructed since 1973’s flood upset all previous methods of predicting flood levels, and their restraint only further intensified the river’s fury. Weather predictions called for a week more of devastating thunderstorms. The previous week’s accumulations were not even accounted for in hydrologists’ calculations. My mood of creative elation had certainly disappeared.
The next morning, in the days before cell phones, I used a coffee-shop pay phone next to a noisy jukebox to call my NYC stock agency editor. Explaining where I was and why, I asked what kind of flood images the agency wanted. His reply: “We don’t do news stories. You’re there for red, white and blue, apple pie Midwest images, remember?” As I slid onto a red plastic banquette and gazed out the steamy bay window, a waitress gave me weak coffee and the news. Bastille Day festivities were canceled; a “boil water” order and 9 p.m. curfew was in effect; and the elementary school had become the National Guardsmen’s dormitory. A siege mentality developed. Twelve-hour shifts were assigned. Instead of guns, shovels were carried to the front. Munitions of bags, sand, and screened lime were rumbling into town past my coffee shop.
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| Ste. Genevieve calling Pres. Clinton! |
I thanked the waitress, saying I’d be back for more coffee and more conversation. I followed a cracked sidewalk past sunflowers falling over picket fences. At the railroad tracks sweaty backs strained to stack piles of heavy-as-cement lime screening from a nearby quarry. Clever signs appealing to Bill Clinton for immediate help hung on porches of evacuated homes. A four-year-old cooling off in the swollen river scooped debris out of the polluted water with a butterfly net.
Just as slowly and surely as the river was rising, my sense of futility gave way to amazement. Residents and uniformed troops worked together to stay ahead of the rising water, block-by-block and literally inch-by-inch. “We feel like we cain’t even sit down to eat lunch or it’ll git ’head of us,” said one National Guardsman. His partner, in awe of the local volunteers’ round-the-clock efforts, shook his head. “Being on narcotics patrol on the Mexican border and fighting San Diego mudslides doesn’t compare to the intensity and exhaustion of this experience. Well, I’m paid for this – but these folks aren’t.”
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National Guard and locals work together, Ste. Genevieve | |
The sandbaggers were older men suffering from kidney stones, state champion football teams and young children. Strangers sweated alongside teams of life-long neighbors. In four long days the Main Street levee grew to ten feet high and ten feet wide, massive enough to hold bulldozers. A sandbagger reminded a New York reporter that while this was the worst flood in 100 years, it was also the greatest volunteer effort of the century.
Putting my cameras down, I joined in. “I can’t be here and not sandbag,” I wrote in my journal. There were intricacies to bagging. It took three people: one to shovel, one to hold the bag open and one to tie the bag. The white bags were best. The strings on the brown bags cut your fingers and the green bags didn’t stay tied.
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| Sandbags protecting Main St., Ste. Genevieve |
“Bag holders” and “bag stringers” quickly figured out that it was easiest to work while sitting on an already-filled bag. The “shovellers” were told to dismiss the American creed of “more is better.” A full sandbag is too round, allowing water seepage in the levee. A half-full bag (only 3 shovelfuls) is easier to stack, weighing a mere 40 instead of 80 pounds.
Residents with evacuation orders needed help moving their belongings upstairs. Residents on higher ground invited their neighbors and volunteers in for dinner, coffee, late-night glasses of sweet Missouri wine and home-baked cookies. I shared their shock when they found the body of “Old Mike,” an octogenarian recluse. In curious Mark Twain fashion, he had died in a long-ago abandoned garage which flood victims were now using for dry storage.
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The Ozark’s Alley Springs, Eminence MO | |
Charmed by the trellises and wrap-around porches of the historic Green Tree Inn, I photographed it and worried about its fate. Built in 1789, and still in 1993 a popular watering hole, the Inn was being shuttered and abandoned by the National Guard who deemed it too weak to sustain sandbag protection. Five out-of-state visitors wrote a poem of hope, put it in a bottle, and tossed it over the levee. One month later, my friends from The Main Street Inn wrote, “Let’s get together when all of this is over. We may never laugh about it, but we can probably smile.”
With difficulty I left Ste. Genevieve, experiencing the photojournalist’s dilemma of determining when to leave a story. There was no justification for staying unless a levee broke. I didn’t want that to happen. Yet if it did, I didn’t want to desert my new friends, but also I didn’t want to see it. Thus torn, I left to photograph scenes in other parts of the state that were on my original checklist. I set up my tripod to photograph deep blue springs. I found farmers selling cantaloupes and watermelons in front of old gristmills. But I never found the New York City stock photo agent’s request for a clean pig – they were all dirty.
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| Farewell from the front yard boat in Commerce MO |
I realized I needed to return to Ste Genevieve. I cared about the people I’d met and wanted to help. Unfortunately, a car accident stopped me from going back. I rescued my exposed film from a smoking rental car; and a friend flew out from NYC to take me back to Connecticut for months of therapy. I wouldn’t return to Ste. Genevieve until one year later.
My final view that summer of our country’s new inland sea was from my TWA seat en route home. This aerial sweep widened my perspective: there were many other communities also fighting Ste. Genevieve’s battle. I stared out my window, thinking of my daughter’s favorite author, Bryce Courtenay who wrote of “the power of one, one idea, one heart, one mind, one plan, one determination.” Whether levees survived or not, that defined the Midwest Spirit of 1993.
Back to Connecticut I unpacked hundreds of chromes of levees, my Levi’s, and some of that Midwestern grit. I had witnessed community values and moral commitment characteristic of Missouri’s favorite son Harry Truman. I left my search for stock images for photojournalism. If travel photography is “visual anthropology,” then photojournalism records and pays tribute to cultures coping with crisis. Midwesterners certainly cope well. I won’t start chasing headlines; but I will be more likely to recognize opportunities to document the human spirit.
Alison, a photographer from Mountainville NJ with a studio in New York City, works with nature conservancies and non-profits supporting rural third-world development. Her images of landscapes, cultures, and wildlife appear in magazines, books and electronic media, and are featured in her photo essays, slide shows, workshops, and fine-arts exhibits. For more information, visit alisonjonesphoto.com.
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