The western writers of the America Annual Conference were in Bismarck, S.D., this past June. I was hoping to sneak off and fish for some walleye, but that never happened. Days before I left, I was on the phone talking about road conditions with a nice lady in Missouri’s road department. “You better take I-35 E to Des Moines,” she warned. “The rest of the country is flooded.”
I hoped I didn’t have to go that far east, but things were looking tougher as the I-29 corridor was coming under increasing flood threats. The Missouri River was charging down flush with rain and snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains. An incredible snow fall in the upper mountains was still over 20 feet deep and this flooding was not going away. I watched the water rise every day on T.V. over sandbag dikes and felt sorry for the folks whose homes floated away and acres of farmland flooded.
Back in the 70s when our kids were little, we went to Minnesota in a camper to the Black Hills. A big adventure as we took Highway 71 up there. This isn’t interstate but it’s a good road. So we made that our route. North of Kansas City and St. Joe, Mo., we forked off onto 71 and set the compass on north. That put us in Spencer, Iowa the first night.
They were having a tractor show there – 380 old tractors being shown off in a huge festival. Motel rooms were few and far between and prices were high. We got a room, ate supper and went to bed. I told my wife, Pat, that Iowa farmers could grow more corn than maybe any others. We went through acres and acres of beautiful corn. The price paid for corn at the elevator sign I saw was $6.90 a bushel.
If you could make 200 bushels per acre that was $1,400. Some will make more bushels than that. Corn is not planted in rows, it is drilled like wheat almost.
Bismarck is on a hill or the Missouri River would have swallowed it up as well. While we were there, Minot, 70 miles north, was flooded by a Canadian River that eventually ran back into Canada. It rained about every day and cancelled some of the trips planned for the members.
The devastation of the flooding is terrific. You can see the tops of barns and houses in miles of flooded land. You can only wonder what they saved. One man I met in the hotel parking garage teased me about my Southern accent when I greeted him. In early June they’d gotten out of their house down on the river, that had been 3 weeks before and it would be September before they could go back. I didn’t learn where they resided but after that long under water, what could they go back to?
The last night we were there they had severe winds and more rain over the region. Seventy miles an hour winds to be exact. And driving home, we found the beautiful corn in eastern North Dakota, Minnesota and halfway down western Iowa blown completely flat on the ground. That made me sick. A sad affair, its part of farming, but it is never easy.
God bless and see you down the road.
Western novelist Dusty Richards and his wife Pat live on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. For more information about his books you can email Dusty by visiting ozarksfn.com and clicking on ‘Contact Us’ or call 1-866-532-1960.
