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Kevin Duchschere: Life on the lakebed

A certainty of growing up in Fargo: The water will rise, and if nature doesn't relent, only human hands can stop it.

By KEVIN DUCHSCHERE

Last update: April 3, 2009 - 2:40 AM

The far north side of Fargo seemed like uncharted wilderness in the spring of 1960, and my parents its pioneers. My father, convinced he could build a better house than the ones he and my mother considered buying, constructed a small green rambler on a curving new street optimistically given the name Forest Avenue.

Around us was nothing but coal-black acreage awaiting more homes, and across the street a broad alfalfa field. The vacant lots were dotted with prairie roses, and among the alfalfa I would find meadowlark nests, sometimes containing speckled white eggs that Mom told me not to disturb.

And always, there was the river.

It was not far across the fields from us, invisible but for the green sheath of elms and oaks lining its banks. Looking like spoiled chocolate with its churning clay, twisting back upon itself so many times you couldn't tell if it was coming or going: That's the Red River, Dad would say as we drove across the bridge. It flows north, to another country.

And this was the Red River Valley. Except that it wasn't really a valley.

It was a remarkably fertile stretch of prairie, flat as a gridiron and true as a carpenter's level, that marked where the forests of Minnesota left off and the high plains of Dakota began.

Why no forests, no hills where we lived? Because this was the bottom of a dried-up old lake. Oh. Oh.

The river had carved little more than its own narrow and tremulous channel; it just took up residence when the lake drained. And the valley was a natural bathtub, 40 to 50 miles wide, that fills with water when the river's spigot opens wide.

We had five floods in Fargo while I was growing up, an average of about one every four years or so. Most of those were easily repulsed; one occurred in summer, but the most memorable was in April 1969 when the Red rose to 37.3 feet.

It was the biggest Fargo flood in the 20th century until the showstopper of 1997, so big that my parents saved the newspapers. Looking at them now, the headlines could have been ripped from today's stories.

"High Water Will Continue To Test F-M Flood Defense," reads one, and then there's this: "Seepage, Sandbags -- Tears, Triumph."

Fargo Forum columnist Wayne Lubenow dubbed Fargo-Moorhead's youth the heroes of the '69 flood, writing that homeowners seemed "not one bit concerned with the length of the hair of the kid hauling the sandbags."

I went home a couple weeks back to check on my mother, just as the Red was beginning to rise. When the familiar call went out for volunteers, I pulled on Dad's old Air Guard jacket and went down to a city depot to move sandbags coming off an octopus bagger. Most of the workers were high school and college kids showing the same energy and spirit that Lubenow had lauded. Only this time with shorter hair.

Dad is gone now, as are the meadowlarks. Mom lives in the last house he built, on the north end of Elm Street across from a riverside park. He chose the site after studying the elevation maps and determining it was outside the flood plain despite its proximity to the river.

He was right in 1997. But this time, it seems, all of Fargo has been a flood plain.

My mother packed a bag and moved into the parish rectory last week. The dike the Army Corps built along her house, the first we've ever seen there, held firm.

Now there's talk of a second crest. My mother is going home anyway. Always, there is the river.

Kevin Duchschere is a reporter for the Star Tribune. He is at kduchschere@startribune.com.

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