Photos around Cape Archives

December 31, 2015March 20, 2021

Dutchtown: Flood of 1993

Some of you have been wondering where I’ve been. I was busy in Cape getting a boat ready to pull down to Florida for Kid Adam, then it was a long slog south because of weather. When you’ve been gone from home for months, there are a number of things you have to catch up on. If you don’t accept all those excuses, I’ll have to fall back on “the dog ate my homework” and hope you don’t know that I don’t own a dog. (I’m owned by a cat, but they rarely eat homework.)

OK, to bring us back to the headline, I was in Chicago for phone switch training when the Flood of 1993 was going on. I told the boss that I’d pay any difference in ticket price to do a stopover in Missouri for a couple of days, so I could see the high water.

Dad’s construction company owned a piece of ground at the southeast corner of Highways 25 and 74 in Dutchtown. It had gone under in 1973, and was revisited by water backing up from the Mississippi River in 1993. Brother Mark and I rented a canoe to explore the property at the height of the flood. The building we’re headed toward was what we called the mechanics shed.

Big enough to hold heavy equipment

The building had a super-thick slab strong enough to hold bulldozers and draglines when they needed repair and maintenance. Half of it was set aside for mechanical and welding work, and the other side had storage cabinets and a carpentry setup.

The first challenge was how to open the door. The Master lock was located just beyond where you could reach it comfortably without tipping the canoe over. My key ring, 22 years later, is still bent from trying to twist the lock open.

Not a pretty sight

Mark’s first peek showed stuff bobbing around all over the place. We lost some good table and band saws because we never thought the water would come up so high and so fast.

How do we get through the door?

The next challenge was how to get a wide canoe through a narrow door. It was part of family lore that Dad once built a boat in a basement on Themis street, then figured out it was too big to get out. I never knew for sure if that was true, and he’s not around to either confirm or deny the story.

I REALLY didn’t want to go swimming, and I REALLY, REALLY didn’t want to spill all my camera gear in the drink, but how can you pass up an opportunity like this?

I went first

I managed get the bow of the canoe far enough into the building to rig a 2×8 or 2×10 board between the top of a cabinet and some shelving, and clambered out. Mark handed up everything that was in the boat and followed my lead.

Once the boat was empty, he was able to twist it enough to get it through the door.

Mark doesn’t look comfortable

He’s giving me the look that says, “I bet you’ve rigged that board to dump me. I can’t figure out HOW you did it, but I’m pretty sure something nasty is going to happen.”

Snakes?

He looked even more uncomfortable when I started sharing snake stories from other floods and hurricanes I had covered. “Don’t forget,” I warned him, “snakes are looking for high ground, and they might mistake you for high ground.”

Compressor was flood casualty

There was a huge, industrial-size air compressor on the mechanic side of the shed that wasn’t bolted to the floor. When the water came up, the air tank on the bottom started to float, but the heavy motor and compressor on the top caused the unit to flip over. Had it been bolted down, the water wouldn’t have gotten up high enough to do any damage. Mark’s using the big ceiling hoist to get it out of the water.

We asked someone if they thought the compressor was salvageable, but we were told that the motor was probably shot. We gave it no thought for about ten years until Brother-in-Law John came down to help us with something. He said he’d take the thing off our hands.

Sure enough, when I went over to his shop a couple of weeks ago, the compressor was puttering away as good as new. I’m glad it found a good home.

On the same side as the compressor was our ski boat, The Mary Lou, floating, still attached to its trailer. (You’ll hear more about The Mary Lou later.)

Water marks

When I got back to Cape several months later, the armpit-high water marks on the buildings were still evident. Mark may be my “little brother,” but he’s not that little.

I saw drone aerial photos of the property shot a couple of days ago. The water is already into the buildings, and I suspect that Mark and I could take a canoe through the big shed pretty much the same at 1993 if the water crests as high as predicted.

December 16, 2015

MV Donna Griffin

Road Warriorette Shari came down from St. Louis the other week with a list of places she wanted to go: Old Appleton (where we saw the old Silver Dollar Tavern just hours before it was torn down), the Mississippi Mud Tavern for Liver and Onions Night, the Lutheran Heritage Center’s Christmas tree exhibit, and Trail of Tears State Park.

From the Mississippi River overlook, we were lucky enough to catch the MV Donna Griffin coming upstream. We could hear her talking to another boat to arrange a passing, but I think it was well north of us, so we didn’t get to see that. We could hear a train whistle in the distance, but it must have been on the Illinois side, so we missed seeing two major transportation systems at the same time.

Rigging amazes me

It always amazes me how the pilots and captains can maneuver long strings of barges around sharp bends and between bridge piers. I know those straps have to be bigger than they look in this photo, but still, I can’t imagine how much strain is placed on them when the captain needs to move something that’s a thousand-plus feet in front of him.

Here’s a website with some interesting factoids. It says that a standard barge is 195 feet long and 35 feet wide, although some of the newer ones are 290 by 50 feet.

Let’s assume that the ones in the photo are standard length. The string appears to be two wide and six long. That would mean that you have to figure out where to make your turn from nearly 1,200 feet back. Think about THAT the next time you complain about a parallel parking space being a little tight.

You can click on the photo to make it larger, but I didn’t spot anyone on deck checking us out.

Bald Knob Cross

That little white dot on the top of the hill in the distance is the Bald Knob Cross.

Has had three names

The Donna Griffin was built by Nashville Bridge Shipbuilding in 1965. A website, reports that she was named the Julia Woods until May 2006, when she became the Michelle O’Neil. In May 2009, she was renamed the Donna Griffin. I didn’t find anything that explained who the boat was named for nor the significance of changing the names in May.

A shipbuilding site said Nashville Bridge Company was originally a bridge builder, founded in the 1890s. It was converted to shipbuilding in 1915 and, by the 1960s, it was said to be the world’s largest builder of inland barges. George Steinbrenner bought it in 1969 and added a second yard in Ashland City in 1977; he sold the company to Trinity Marine Group in 1995. Trinity closed the Nashville yard in 1996, when the City of Nashville decided that the downtown shipyard property would be more valuable to the community as a stadium.

She is 180.1 feet long, 50.5 feet wide, and the hull depth is 11.5 feet.

The towboat is owned by Ingram Barge of Nashville, the largest carrier on the inland waterway system.

December 9, 2015

Sunsets and Geotags

I was racing the dark Monday to shoot the remains of the Silver Dollar Tavern on Apple Creek when I popped over a hill on Highway 61 south of Old Appleton and saw this farm in the sunset. I did one of my patented U-turns to capture the golden glow. That’s the reason photographers call the hour after sunrise and before sunset the Golden Hours.

I had some tighter shots, and I debated cropping up from the bottom, but I like the way the manmade yellow highway divider lines echo the color of the backlit grasses.

Keeping track of where I am

One of the challenges in shooting lot of pictures is that you sometimes forget where you were or there aren’t clearly identifiable clues to help you orient yourself.

You can buy GPS attachments to plug into your camera, but they are bulky and expensive. Kid Matt came up with a cheaper solution. Since I already have an Android phone on my belt all the time and an iPad in the car, he suggested I get a program called Geotag Photos Pro that would capture the GPS track of where I’ve been. Matching up the track time with the filestamp time associated with a photo, can tell you where it was taken.

It sounds complicated, but I was happy to find out that it is harder to explain than to use. The map above shows where the photos were taken. The yellow marker that has the 16 means that 16 frames were exposed near there. The orange 4 represents four frames taken with a second camera body. They were both taken from the same location, but the camera times were off by a few seconds, which caused them to appear to have been taken at different locations. I’ll synchronize the devices better before I do this again.

It’s going to help out a lot now that I’m spending a lot of time roaming around in rural areas I’m not really familiar with.

December 7, 2015

Roundabout To Eat Buildings

When I drove past this building one day, it said Southeast Missourian. A few days later, the sign was gone and the Jackson bureau office was closed for good. When I competed with Missourian reporter Bob Todd in my old Jackson Pioneer days, and filled in for him when I started working for the Cape paper, the office was in a tiny building where the Cape County Archive Center is today.

We filed our stories on a 110-baud Teletype that looked like this. Everything you typed showed up on a companion machine in the Cape newsroom. It printed in all caps, there was no backspace, and you had to type in a slow rhythm to keep from going faster than the machine could handle.

One of my jobs at The Pioneer, a paper with more characters than character, was to plagiarize Bob Todd’s county commission meeting reports. I still think my rewrites were better than his originals, even if I didn’t copy his signature transition phrase, “In other business….”

How to outfox the competition

I could have sworn I had told this story before, but I couldn’t find it in the archives. Anyway, it might explain why I was able to make the transition from the newsroom to telecommunications late in my career.

On Election Day 1964, Jackson Pioneer Publisher John Hoffman told me I had better be wearing running shoes because “Bob Todd keeps the only pay phone nailed up, and you’ll be running back and forth from the courthouse with election returns all night.”

I gave that some thought, and toward the end of the business day, I went to that pay phone, took the receiver off the hook, and put a sign on it that read, “Phone Out of Order. Has Been Reported to Phone Company.” My theory was that since it was late in the day, nobody would bother to call Ma Bell, particularly since someone else had already done it.

When the returns started trickling in, Bob sauntered up to the phone with a bunch of results in his hand, glad to see it unoccupied, then his shoulders slumped when he read the sign. I let him contemplate it for a minute, then I stepped up, hit the phone’s hookswitch, dropped a dime and called The Pioneer. When I hung up, I told him what I had done, and we agreed to share the phone for the rest of the night.

Victim of the roundabout

A sign on the door read, “Due to MoDot needs to demolish this building for the planned roundabout, the Southeast Missourian’s Jackson office will be closing September 30, 2015. It has been our pleasure to serve you at this location for the past 22 years. After September 30, please continue to call the Southeast Missourian at 573-243-6635 of 573-335-5611 for assistance, or visit our office at 301 Broadway in Cape.”

A Missourian story (not written by Bob Todd) reported that the DOT has acquired the right-of-way from all but one property owner. This is a different location than the roundabout that would have wiped out Jackson’s Hanging Tree and a good part of the courthouse lawn.