It has been an unusually wet spring, and the creeks and rivers of Perry County have spilled their banks more than once, but we haven’t seen anything like the record-breaking juggernaut of the mighty Mississippi. The recent flooding in the Mid-West has been largely contained by the system of levees and floodways created in the aftermath of the great Flood of 1927, which killed hundreds and left devastation in its wake, but at the beginning of this month, with floodwaters lapping the top of a two-mile levee at Birds Point, Missouri, Major General Michael Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers was faced with a Solomonic decision: breach the levee, and flood roughly 130,000 acres of rich farmland; or leave the levee intact, and risk inundating the city of Cairo, Illinois.
On May 2nd, with the river at 61 feet in Cairo, and with the pressure on the levee great enough to create a geyser, General Walsh ordered the detonation. Almost instantly, 500,000 cubic feet of water per second was flowing through the breach. The Missouri farmland in the floodway was inundated, along with 90 homes.
No one envied General Walsh this decision, least of all the politicians in the region, who kept uncharacteristically quiet through most of the deliberations. Some aspects of it seemed straightforward: Cairo is home to about 3,000 souls; whereas the floodway was home to about 200. The levee was breached once before, in 1937, so there was a precedent. Most importantly, Cairo is a culturally significant city with a long history; whereas the farms in the floodway were more recent, and built with the knowledge that they were vulnerable. Insurance companies refused to underwrite the houses there. Seventy-five years is a long span between breaches, but given the latent threat of the Mississippi River, the farmers, one could argue, were living on borrowed time.
But aside from population numbers and federal floodways, there were other subtleties at work in the General’s decision, which pitted Illinois against Missouri; farmer against city-dweller, and, at a certain level, white versus black.
It’s true that Cairo is a city, but a puny one, and much faded since its heyday. It was founded in 1837 as an outpost of the Cairo City & Canal Company, and incorporated in 1858, two years after the completion of the Illinois Central Railroad, which linked Cairo, at the very southern tip of the state, to Chicago. The linkage of the railroad to the Mississippi River gave Cairo strategic importance in the Civil War. General Grant and Admiral Foote both had headquarters there.
Cairo has a literary significance, too. The city is an important symbol in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Huck floats down the Mississippi with Jim, the runaway slave, Cairo is a hot topic of conversation. Cairo is where the Ohio River runs into the Mississippi; Jim’s plan is to follow the Ohio north to freedom.
As Huck and Jim approach Cairo in the dead of night, Huck experiences a crisis of conscience: he’s committing a crime by helping a runaway slave! And as Jim daydreams out loud about his plan to buy back first his wife, and then his two children, who have been sold away to different masters, Huck finds himself in the grip of two opposing forces: revulsion at his role in “stealing” a slave and aiding his escape; and an equal revulsion at the institution of slavery, as embodied by his friend Jim.
When push comes to shove, Huck protects Jim rather than give him over to slave-hunters, but by then, it’s too late. The raft has drifted past Cairo in the night, and run deep into slave country. Still, Cairo has served its purpose to the story by standing as the beacon of freedom.
These days, it’s hard to tell what Cairo is a beacon of, exactly, except perhaps the decline of the American city. As the nation’s transportation system shifted away from river traffic, Cairo’s economic engine sputtered and died, and it has never really recovered. These days, the city suffers, on a tiny scale, the problems of much larger urban areas: a third of the population lives below the poverty line; the school system is packed with disadvantaged kids; the tax base has all but vanished; and crime is the main growth industry.
Did I mention that the city is about 60% black?
Surely there were farmers who felt that flooding Cairo, a doomed city anyway, was infinitely preferable to ruining more than 100,000 acres of productive farmland, just as there was a sense in some circles, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that nature had finally answered the intractable problem of New Orleans’ endemic poverty.
But a flood is a natural disaster, not a means of social policy. General Walsh made the right decision in saving Cairo. The law was on his side, even if public opinion wasn’t.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 19 May 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
