The Great Flood of 2017
They’ll be talking about this deluge for years as it goes from history to saga, and enters legend—the way the Great Flood of 1927 has. This one will deserve the attention not only of historians and statisticians but songwriters and memoirists as it segues from history into folklore. (“Tell us again, grandpa, about the flood of ‘17.”)
This flood’s Johnny Cash, he of “Five Feet High and Rising,” has yet to emerge, but one can hope. The story of Denny Riney alone is worth telling and retelling as the Black River left the house where he’d lived for almost four decades a mud house. “It’s devastating,” he commented, looking at the mud-encrusted remains of his house after the flood waters had reached about a foot up its sodden walls. “I want to move, but I’ve got this home paid for.”
This isn’t the first time he and his neighbors have been flooded out. Back in 2011, the levee around their houses broke in three places. This time, it shattered in nine. But it left him with one indestructible asset: himself. He managed to survive before and, no matter where he floats to this time, something tells us he’ll recover—as all too many Arkansans didn’t have a chance to as they were swept away by the storms. The swirling maelstrom had claimed nine lives at last report, knocked out power to more than 80,000 houses and buckled roads. Worse may be on the way as the overflowing Black River flows into the White, endangering still more people and their residences.
The deputy treasurer of close-by Prairie County, Brittney Kocourek, said she watched the river rise and rise and rise everyday from her courthouse window. “It’s 20 steps from the courthouse today,” she said Monday. “The streets by the river are covered up. People are boating in and tying their boats to road signs.” And she’s stayed busy replying to far-off relatives who want to know how people are faring. “Each day,” she says, “I use gauges to see how high the water has gotten. Every time I look at that gauge, the next day it’s under water.” Don’t you know she’ll have some stories to tell her grandchildren. If not about the flood, then about the drought sure to follow when the waters finally recede and leave all of us in Arkansas high and dry once again.
Let’s just say the weather in Arkansas is, uh, interesting. Which is why it’s no great challenge to make this state’s history fascinating. To quote Barbara Tuchman’s two-word guide to writing history: Tell stories. Another historian with a fascinating touch is David McCullough, maybe because he knows a good story when he hears one—or tells one. He wrote his first book on the Johnstown Flood, which went to press way back in 1968 and remains a model of how to restore the art of the narrative in American history. It was Daniel Boorstin, the longtime Librarian of Congress, who said trying to talk about the American future without knowing its past was “like trying to plant cut flowers.” And it’s David McCullough who now warns: “We’re raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them.” It won’t work if we expect future generations to remember what past ones have gone through.
What a portrait gallery of both heroes and villains Mr. McCullough has assembled to make his histories irresistible reading. He seems to understand that it’s not history that makes men—and women—but those men and women who make history. Just as those
Arkansans who are doing what they can to stem the flood of ‘17 are making it now. And just as his historical favorites in the American story made it in the past, among them the Adamses, Charles Sumner, Theodore
Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
His summation of Harry Truman of the Show Me state is typical of Mr. McCullough’s clear-eyed assessments of American types.
He notes that Mr. Truman was “neither brilliant nor eloquent,” but, far more important, he was “courageous and principled.” That is, the man had
what is so often lacking in this age of the shoddy: Character, there’s no substitute for it.
Mr. McCullough doesn’t paper over American faults even as he praises American virtues. While he recognizes the presence of those virtues in the mixed annals of the Congress of the United States, he also knows that “some of the worst
of human motivations have been plainly on display” in Congress, along with a surfeit of “self-serving blather.” One need only glance at the headlines in today’s paper to be aware of it.
David McCullough laments those dryas-dust textbooks of American history that are “dreary, done by committee, [and] often hilariously politically
correct.”
They’ve lost the thread of the American story But there’s hope for us all as long as Americans are taking control of their destinies despite disasters natural and man-made. Which is what the people of Arkansas are doing this week.