The first flood I remember was in 1912. A farm wagon with a red calf in the back pulled us through a flooded section of road.

My brother, Don, was just a year old and I was going on 4. My father had bought his first car, a Ford touring car which was also known then as a "Tin Lizzy". We lived in southern Wisconsin, but most of my mother's family lived in the northern part of the state, Rozellville, Stratford, Marshfield, and Wausau. So as soon as we got the car, my father had to try it out on a trip north. The roads then were all gravel, and one had to find ones way by looking at road signs which directed one to the next town. The trip up north was uneventful, at least so far as I can remember, but coming home after heavy rains for a few days, the Wisconsin River overflowed its banks near Stevens Point. The flooded road didn't seem too deep so my father plowed in. But the car stalled. In those days cars had to be started with a crank at the front of the car. My father took off his shoes and stockings, and rolled up his pants and went out to crank up the car. It started, but when he tried to move ahead, the car stalled again.

While trying to decide what to do next, a farmer with a heavy wagon, pulled by two sturdy horses, came by. He had a chain and was able to tie our car to the wagon, and he pulled us through the high water. In the back was a red calf, and this is one of my very first memories.

Another experience I've had with floods came many years later. While we lived in Memphis, we owned a cotton farm in Mississippi for a while. Every weekend during the growing season, we made the 125 mile trip to check up on the farming operations. We had been talked into buying a good supply of special fertilizers which cost us several hundred dollars for the cotton and soybeans we were growing. One Saturday we had gone to supervise the distribution of the fertilizer. The next Saturday when we arrived, our whole farm was under water, and we figured all our expensive fertilizers were going to be washed down into the Mississippi River. What a depressing sight. I don't remember if we had planted the cotton and soybeans, or if we had to replant, and I have no recollection of whether we had a good crop that year. But that experience and problems with help, told us we'd better get out of the cotton farming business, and we sold the farm soon after that.

This tale is about flooding in Missouri, but not a personal experience. In 1947, as soon after the war as we could, we got a new car, and since my husband had a month's vacation, we planned a long trip "Out West". We lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the time, and to make for a longer vacation, the children and I left Charlottesville several weeks early, stopping to visit friends and relatives along the way. Burt flew to join us in Kansas City.

One of the stops was in Hermann, Missouri, where my sister-in-law, Louise, was spending the summer with her mother while her husband, a geology teacher at the University of Missouri taught a summer class in Wyoming. The home in Hermann was high on a bluff above the Missouri River, and a bridge across the river was just below the house.

The children wanted to walk across the bridge, and in the morning, we made it. It was a scary trip walking across because we had Mike three and a half, and George, 2, and my Ricky almost five with us and walking across the bridge without sidewalk or mesh railings was precarious.

Louise, who had grown up in Hermann, told us about flooding at this point on the north side of the Missouri River. Bluffs border the south side of the river and that doesn't flood although a creek in town does get some back water. A shoe factory in Hermann near a low spot in the bluffs along the river has a flood wall 6-8 feet high all the way around.

Farmers living in the flood lands must be prepared to move out every few years, and sometimes every year.

When they move out, they put their chickens and pigs in the upper part of the barn, drive out their cattle, put all their furniture in the upstairs rooms, put fences around their wood piles so they won't float away, and then get out themselves. While the flood lasts, they come back every day by boat to feed and take care of their stock.

When the flood finally passes, and they can return, they need to have typhoid shots, boil all their drinking water for months, scrub their houses and literally haul out loads of sediment which was left behind, repaint their furniture and woodwork, and repaper their walls. If there's only one flood in five years, they may be tired of the wall paper, but if there's a flood every year, it's very annoying.

The flood lands are very fertile, but when the flood covers the fields, everything is killed. First because when plants which naturally grow on top of the land, are covered with water, their roots can't breathe and they die. Secondly, often the flood leaves a heavy layer, sometimes 10 to 12 inches, of silt, and the plants can't grow through so deep a layer of soil. But because the flood lands have deep layers of top soil, washed away from other places, the soil is very fertile. When there isn't a flood, the crops are the best in the world. Some of the flood lands have as much as 20 feet of top soil.

A few days later, we drove to Columbia, and could see the remnants of the flood which had covered this area shortly before. Sometimes trees still stood in ponds, and other places farmers were putting in a late crop on land just recently drained of the flood. We could see the muddy streaks on houses and barns which showed how high the water had come, and by the grass and debris left on the fences and trees. It had been one of those years.