Bottomland
Many years ago, my cousin bought a piece of bottomland along the Embarras river in southern Illinois.
It was abandoned at the time, he bought it on a tax sale, and got it for a song. He went in, sank a shallow well point with a sledgehammer and a ladder, and dug a septic and seepage bed. He borrowed a bulldozer and carved out a flat spot on a bluff overlooking the river, and dragged in an old mobile home.
I think the total cost was around $6000.00, not including his labor, for the whole shooting match, fourteen acres of arable land and about six wooded acres. The gravel for the driveway cost almost a thousand of that 6k.
I loved to visit my cousin, he was living my dream life. We’d sit on his front porch (actually several old skids nailed to tree stumps cut level with his trailer floor) and cast our lines directly into the river, catch fish, eat them for dinner. At night we’d shoot coyotes sniffing around his henhouse.
He never touched the farm, he had a neighbor who plowed, planted, harvested, and he got 1/3 of the crop, and never had to lift a finger. It was a good deal, he always had fresh sweet corn and a very small garden out behind the trailer provided as much fresh produce as he could eat. He had two big freezers which he filled with food he either caught, shot, or grew, and at any moment he could probably live for a year and never lift a finger.
The farm was beautiful. See, bottomland tends to be very fertile, southern illinois growing seasons long, and it was a rare summer he wasn’t able to get two full crops off the land. He was living pretty high on the hog, by my standards.
One spring I saw news footage of people being rescued by DNR boats off the embarras, and to my surprise, I saw as uniformed DNR officials and cops in an Evinrude tri-hull rescue my cousin off the roof of his almost submerged trailer.
Horrified, I packed up my old Chrysler, loaded it with blankets and food, and drove down to see how cousin was making out. I arrived at my uncles house, where he had been taken, to find him in a surprisingly good mood.
I was baffled for a while, and asked why he wasn’t more upset.
“Bottomland floods, that’s all there is to it” said Ben. “The reason bottomland is so fertile is that it floods every so often. I knew that when I bought it, I knew someday I was going to get flooded”
His resignation baffled me for a while, then he said “Look, I know it looks like I lost everything, but I still have the property, and I may even still have one decent planting this year. The trailer will be messed up, but it’s just an excuse for me to get a new furnace, and some other new appliances. ”
IN ten days the place was on high ground again, the trailer damp and nasty, his clothes filthy and a mess. I helped him clean up for several days, and when I returned almost a week later, he was almost back to normal again.
He was right, he ended up re-siding, re-insulating, and re-paneling the trailer, at a cost of around $900, even put in a nice new picture window, and bought his mom’s old freezer, stove, and refrigerator. It didn’t take long for the land to dry sufficiently to be planted, and that summer, the corn grew so high and so fast that I could stand between rows and not see the sky. All that fish crap and fertile river bottom soil had coated and refertilized his little farm, and the sale of the harvest that year outweighed his costs of repairing everything but the driveway, which was muddy for a while until he could afford more gravel.
He worked that summer and saved enough scratch to get a decent used truck and a jon boat with an outboard motor. I don’t think they ever found his car. He was back to normal the next year, and when the next major flood came, seven years later, he parked his truck on the main road and used the jon boat to putt-putt back and forth to the trailer until the waters receded.
I know that it is impossible to predict a Tsunami, or hurricane, or flood, with any level of accuracy, nor be completely prepared for the trouble those things will cause, but if you live on the ocean, if you live on a piece of bottomland, if you live in tornado alley, you have to expect that someday the all-powerful forces of nature are gonna come along and make an effort to wipe you out. You can be aware of this and have my cousin’s attitude, or you can wail and cry, but it doesn’t change anything. No, I don’t think that the people who died “deserved” to die in indonesia, nor can I say anything but good about the Americans who are rushing to aid those people, but I have to say this: Everywhere you live, there are certain risks. If you live in a place where there is a risk of a large natural disaster, don’t be taken by surprise when it happens. And frankly, don’t expect to be bailed out. As Sam Kinison once said, speaking to starving ethiopians, “You live in a FUCKING DESERT! see this stuff? it’s SAND! You know what it’s gonna be in 200 years? SAND! MOVE to where the FOOD IS!
Move to where the goddamned ocean won’t come and wash your corrugated tin shack out to sea, folks.
Great post! I agree. I grew up on the Gulf Coast and we expected hurricanes every now and then – it was part of living near the ocean. Now I live in the Texas hill country where the rivers flood every once in a while. We deal with it. If we couldn’t, we’d move.
Oh, yeah. It always pisses me off to see some report of hillside houses washing away in mudslides and the owners wailing about it. You built a house on a HILLSIDE that WASHES AWAY every few years. What’s wrong with you?
Build in a place like that, either have the right attitude when it goes away, or shut up about it.
And you know what happens to a lot of bottomland? It gets washed downriver to the Gulk of Mexico — thank-you-very-much to the Army Corps of Engineers with its chimerical “flood control” projects.
Your brother has the right idea, God bless ‘im.
M
It sounds like your cousin did not go crying to the Small Business Administraiton for flood relief. If so, my hat is off to him.
Don’t know about the Army Corps of Engineers, but I have had it with people who put houses on rivers (or in hurricane country, etc.) and expect everyone else to pay for it when they run out of luck.
Indeed, Daniel: My cousin did not expect a dollar’s worth of relief, didn’t ask for it, didn’t get it. he rebuilt his life out of pocket.
What he DIDN’T do was build a $40,000 home on his property, because he knew it would eventually be damaged.
Daniel,
Its good that he didn’t go to the SBA, but he should have gone to the Army Corps of Engineers. After spending 6 years litigating with them over the conditions of the Upper Mississippi and the Illinois Rivers my only lasting impression is that institutionally they are the single most sleaziest and dishonest Agency of the federal government. The individual employees are fine, but the agency is crap.
Yes its true that bottom lands flood. But when you average a 500 year flood less than every 10 years over the last 50 years something else must be up. What is it? Simple. The Army Corp has done zip to maintain the river systems under their control (over the last 30 years dredging has been reduced over 50%) allowing both the floor of the river as well as mean river levels to rise while increasing the velocity of the river channel and eroding levees and flooding out bottom land due to seepage.
The federal government has fucked the farmers and it is an absolute crying shame.