How would God respond to making a mistake? Would planets collide or mountains slide into the sea? Or would the ledger of all life simply remain out kilter until a series of small events forced that ledger back into balance again? It's probably the l...
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August 2, 9:17AM
Milepost 111, Interstate 70-E
Central Missouri
It's Day 2 of my trip and I'm already not sure if it's worth it. The weather yesterday wasn't too bad, but this morning there's been one thunderstorm after another. The rains started in this area a month ago and so much has fallen that the ground is now spongy. Even when it's not raining, you can hear squishing sounds beneath your feet and the highway just hisses like snakes.
All over the Midwest, the rivers are rising. They're calling this the flood of the century. Obviously, no one can really remember anything from that long ago but maybe this time they're right. It seems that everything everywhere is covered with mud or water. Even the farms are gone. By August, redwing blackbirds should be making slow S-turns above these fields. An occasional dog's tail should poke above the tops of the corn stalks. But the last corn tassels in this part of Missouri slipped from view a few days ago. All you see now is water. Brown (brown) water.
The radio just reported that the levees broke near Alton, Illinois this morning. My grandfather lived in Alton when he was young. Just for a year but long enough to meet Robert Pershing Wadlow, the tallest man in history. Wadlow died just short of his twenty-second birthday and the town paid to erect a statue of him in the cemetery. It's a life-size 8 feet 11 inches. Wadlow's buried a few feet away in a piano crate.
If the radio report was right, the brown water will soon be churning around Wadlow's feet. In a few minutes, it will cover his knees and the cane he used for walking. Over the next few hours, it will reach his chest, his chin, and his glasses. (He looked so studious in his glasses. Or that's what my grandfather said.)
Just before the big war, Wadlow's family paraded him from one small town to the next. Local boys paid for the chance to grab a silver dollar from the top of his head. It wasn't that much of a leap, but the excitement of the moment made most of them jump wildly – their hands closing too soon, their fingers bumping the side of Wadlow's head. Every so often, you'd hear the plinking and clattering of the silver dollar as it hit the ground, but no one ever held on. Or that's what my grandfather said. He also said that he tried the jump himself, but only once because 5 cents was much too much to waste in those days.
Now, the radio people are talking about the graveyard in Matson. The levees above that town broke yesterday. Since the graveyard was just beyond the levee, it caught the full force of the water. After 24 hours of swirling waters, the town is now inundated with well-dressed bodies unearthed by the flood. Century old men in their Sunday best. Women in their wedding clothes. Children in nightgowns. Tree branches tangled with the bodies and the expressions of the dead.
I can't bear to think of what will happen when the waters finally recede. No one will ever know which body goes with which marker. Some of them will be right, but it will be almost impossible to get all the bodies in all the right places. Math class never covered problems like this.
