flood

 The destruction of the old world, said the preachers after the New World was discovered, was accomplished and marked by the Flood – the universal flood. Jonathan Edwards even hazarded the interpretation that man, before the flood, subsisted only on herbs of the field. Only after the flood did God allow a further ferocity:

“For we have no account of anything else that should be the occasion of man’s slaying beasts, except to offer them in sacrifice, till after the flood. Men were not wont to eat the flesh of beasts as their common food till after the flood. The first food of man before the fall, was the fruit of the trees of paradise; and after the fall, his food was the produce of the field: Gen. iii. 18. “And thou shalt eat the herb of the field.” The first grant that he had to eat flesh, as his common food, was after the flood: Gen. ix. 3. “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

Edwards world was one in which the great woods, and their inhabitants, was not so far away, and was as unexplored as, well, a flood.

Wilderness and flood, these are the signs and portents in the New World, or at least for the creoles inhabiting that Atlantic Oceanward huddle of real estate, the thirteen colonies.

Forests burn. Rivers flood. Against these sempiternal truths of natural history the United States, that knitting together of real estate deals, has always pitted itself. Pitting, fighting, constructing, damming, roadraging, planting – every moving thing that liveth and that was in our path had to get out of the way.

In one of those great early essays, Holy Water, Joan Didion wrote: “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is.”

Didion later revisits and downbeats the American triumphalism of her essays about California in Where I was from. This account includes experiences in Sacramento, a town that was often flooded when Didion was a kid.

This is from the infinitely wiser book, Where I was from:

By 1979 , when the State of California published

William L . Kahrl's The California Water Atlas, there were 980 miles

of levee, 438 miles of canal . There were fifty miles of collecting

canals and seepage ditches. There were three drainage pumping

plants, five low-water check dams, thirty-one bridges , ninetyone

gauging stations, and eight automatic shortwave water-stage

transmitters. There were seven weirs opening onto seven bypasses

covering 101,000 acres. There were not only the big headwater

dams, Shasta on the Sacramento and Folsom on the American

and Oroville on the Feather, but all their predecessors and collateral

dams, their afterbays and fore bays and diversions: Thermalito

and Lake Almanor and Frenchman Lake and Little Grass Valley

on the Feather, New Bullard 's Bar and Engle bright and Jackson

Meadows and Lake Spaulding on the Yuba, Camp Far West and

Rollins and Lower Bear on the Bear, Nimbus and Slab Creek

and L. L. Anderson on the American , Box Canyon and Keswick

on the Sacramento. The cost of controlling or rearranging the

Sacramento, which is to say the "reclamation" of the Sacramento

Valley, was largely borne, like the cost of controlling or rearranging many other inconvenient features of California life, by the federal government."

I never had that opportunity, or terror, of facing a flood. The town I lived in, Clarkston, within the Atlanta metro area, was subject to downpour and thunderstorm, and excitingly enough, sometimes the storm gutter running along our southern boundary line would fill up with churning water, which it would take into the mouth of a great corrugated metal pipe, but that is as far as flooding went.

That was one image of flooding, liliputian flooding. But if I find the image of the flood peculiarly terrifying, I owe this terror of my childhood to a book I read about the Johnstown flood when I was eleven. The description of the sudden destruction of that town, the awful mauling of the casualties of the flood, the way people noticed a rise in the water in the street and thought nothing of it, and the way it was presaging the wall of water to come all fed my nightmares for months. In terms of book-caused terrors, it was right up there with Hersey’s Hiroshima.

I have shed that childhood panic, but I am still vastly interested in water, and too much water. There are two books on water in America that, in my opinion, are indispensable – that is, if you don’t know them, your American history knowledge is deficient. One is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, which is directly in line with Didion’s Holy Water, although giving the Devil’s version – Ambrose Bierce’s devil, the truthteller. The other is John Barry’s Rising Tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

Usually a subtitle like that is so much guff. It is pretty easy to find midrange events in the newspapers of the past and show how they changed, in some little way, America. But Barry traces the flood, state power, and race in this book about one of the largest American disasters so that by the end you see why the Republican party lost its hold on Northern black voters, how that party, under its conservative wing represented by Herbert Hoover, became and remained a real federalist force about infrastructure (there’s some justice in naming that huge dam the Hoover Dam), and how the great black migration to the North went the opposite way of the Mississippi flood after 1927.

Barry’s book is, among other things, a corrective to the measures which, in apartheid and even post apartheid America, are used to measure loss. Officially, the 1927 flood took 1,000 lives. This is because black lives were, of course, undercounted. Not counted at all in many cases.

In 1927, the crucial moment in the great flood of the Delta was the collapse of the levee at Mounds Landing. Here’s Barry:

“The crevasse was immense. Giant billows rose to the tops of tall trees, crushing them, while the force of the current gouged out the earth. Quickly the crevasse widened, until a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high—later its depth was estimated at as much as 130 feet—raged onto the Delta. (Weeks later, engineer Frank Hall sounded the still-open break: “We had a lead line one hundred feet long, and we could find no bottom.”) The water’s force gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

It was an immense amount of water. The crevasse at Mounds Landing poured out 468,000 second-feet onto the Delta, triple the volume of a flooding Colorado, more than double a flooding Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper Mississippi ever carried, including in 1993. The crevasse was pouring out such volume that in 10 days it could cover nearly 1 million acres with water 10 feet deep. And the river would be pumping water through the crevasse for months.”

Looking at the pictures and videos of the floods that followed and succeeded Hurricane Helene, thinking of people I know in Atlanta and Western North Carolina, I am in shock. Shock here in Paris. I am reminded of these flood scenes, the iconography both biblical and geopolitical. I’m reminded that we all think too little of water. We live in a very populated, very administered, very constructed world - and that world is uniquely vulnerable to the leak under the levee, the storm that hits land 300 miles South of us, events high in the stratosphere that only the satelittes and angels spy on.

Forests burn, rivers flood.