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Nebraska City, Neb. —
Like the federal flood levee that finally gave way to the Missouri River near Hamburg, Iowa, this summer, Clayton Lang's life is fractured.
It's a perilous time to plant a crop, he said, when wind can whip up enough dirt to bury an emerging seedling or drive enough sand to shred plants the moment they appear on the barren, brown landscape.
“It looks like a desert out there,” Lang said. “I don't see how some of the bottom ground will ever be farmed again. It's just open and barren. There's no color to it,” he said.
His ground escaped the deep sand deposits that stretch out beyond the levee breach, so he expects most of his 1,000 acres to spring back to life.
He sees weeds casting a green hue of photosynthesis across the eerily empty landscape to signal that farming practices can resume, but Lang's life has changed.
Sometime at the turn of the 20th Century, Lang's father bought some land in Nebraska, in the vicinity of where the Nishnabotna River reaches the Missouri River basin.
It's located in what they call the Nebraska teardrop, because of its shape starting as a pinpoint on the state border that widens and circles as it dips inland, keeping both Iowa and Missouri at bay.
The great flood of 1952, when the level of the Missouri River set records that lasted nearly 60 years, wiped out a crop, but Lang's family was able to replant that very year.
There were floods in 1993 and '98, and the Nishna Botna, it seems to Lang, threatened to pour over its banks all too often.
In time, however, the Langs returned to their home and way of life.
In some eyes, the timeline for the flood of 2011 might have started on May 23 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that record rainfall in Montana and the Dakotas was making flooding unavoidable.
For others it started May 31, when Fremont County officials warned residents of Hamburg that water at the town's firehouse could be eight feet deep.
For Lang the order to evacuate meant 70,000 bushels of corn had to be trucked out first.
The timeline was ticking for his livelihood and each extra day he rejoiced at hearing the troubled levee was still holding.
Early on, water burst from beneath the levee, but it collapsed on itself and resealed.
A second partial breach was reported June 5 and the river bullied its way through on June 13, leaving men and machines to scramble.
Lang's treasure of corn had been saved and the arrival of what Lang called a “great multitude” of family and friends meant they could begin moving out their household possessions from his mother's house and from his house that sat nearby.
Lang lived under the shadow of the giant structure of dirt and sand known as the Nishna Botna levee. It would now serve as a dam for the water spreading across farmground upstream.
The torrent would stop beyond Lang's fence row, pool and start to back up toward Hamburg and the truck stop at Percival.
Ten hours had passed since the levee broke when Lang pulled the final, heaping trailer from his farm.
The water had already flowed five miles inland, spreading at least five miles wide. Turning the corner from his property, Lang's truck hit a stretch of hidden roadway where the water was already two feet deep. His wife discouraged him from stopping to take a photograph.
He had never seen anything like it and would never see his mom’s home standing again.
His neighbor, Glen Stenzel, shares Lang's optimism about the land's ability to rebound and grow a crop.
The flood swept away grain bins, shook sheds apart, buckled buildings and left scars on the land, but Stenzel said its lasting tragedy will be how it forced the residents to leave for good.
When the flood had pooled about 20 feet deep over Lang's property, he launched a small boat on the bottoms.
He lived on the “teardrop” all of his life, so he had little trouble navigating by a line of telephone poles that poked from the water's surface or a lone tree that had not yet leaned over.
He came across an assembly of lumber that wind or current had deposited downstream from Hamburg's west ditch levee.
As he investigated, he realized it was all that remained from the top of his mother's roof.
The rest of the place was never found, unless by a piece here or there, scattered across 10,000 acres.
Lang lived in the original family home. It had been improved and expanded on over the years, but now it had been inundated for most of June through September. It has not been bulldozed into a pile yet this spring, because Lang and his tractor had been hired on all winter to help rebuild the flood levees.
“You just don't have enough time to get everything done,” he said.
Lang's land is covered with a fine silt.
“Maybe,” he said, “It will be better than before. I don't think there's anything in there that will keep a crop from growing.”
Now Lang lives in town, just across from the library. He says he enjoys the hard-surfaced roads.
“It was a lot different when I was kid, I'd bet there were 20 families on just that land where the sand is so deep now, but only a few remained. I think you reach a certain age and it's hard to up and go when the water rises and move back in again. I guess I'm at that age now,” he said.
“Until we can get some vegetation on the land, something growing in fence rows or some grass established, there's nothing out there,” he said.
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