Flooding Memories
How a two-month exile "back east" helped me become a westerner
Last week, the Skagit River flooded. The flooding was not widespread, fortunately. I got a close look at the lower river just after it crested. A river’s power is impressive—and scary. It brought to mind a much more dangerous flood in US history to which I have a passing connection, so for this week’s issue of The Wild Card , I’m tugging on some memories about a critical moment in my life. Read on!
Going “Back East”
I spent two months the summer after I graduated from college in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It often felt like exile. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the feelings of dislocation were real, and in my mind, the time has taken on the role as a serious pivot in my life.
Sometime during winter of my senior year, a flyer appeared on the wall outside one of my history professor’s office announcing a two-month “history research training institute” in Pennsylvania, a partnership between a local university and heritage organization (if I recall correctly). I am not sure why the program caught my eye—resume-building, probably. I applied and was accepted.
When I was deciding whether to accept this opportunity, I was visiting what became the graduate school I attended. I remember asking the director of graduate studies during our meeting whether he thought it was worth my time to go east for the summer. His reply was something like: “Yes, go east, because then you’ll appreciate the West more.”
This proved to be the most prescient advice I ever received from him.
Uncomfortable in the East
I spent the first part of my time in Johnstown uncomfortable. Literally. The humidity of the East startled me. We also arrived in Johnstown after what must have been a record caterpillar spring; the sidewalks were covered in their fuzzy bodies, inescapable as we squished across them to reach buildings.
I was also uncomfortable figuratively. The towns and countryside were different in ways I did not know how to appreciate. Because of the grad school professor’s remark, though, I came to understand that I didn’t like Pennsylvania because it wasn’t the West. When you are a fresh college graduate, you feel some pull to define yourself, and as I was preparing to start a graduate program in western US history, my summer in Johnstown found me defining myself as a westerner.
Johnstown
Johnstown is famous as a disaster site. In 1889, a dam failed and water gushed downstream gathering energy until it slammed into Johnstown, killing more than 2,200 people and causing what is the equivalent today of more than half a billion dollars in property damage. Historical photos demonstrate the horrific damages. It was historic in many ways—the death, damage, and various legal legacies.
But our task that summer in Johnstown was not to study the flood but to survey the historical records about one of the city’s wards, Minersville, a small neighborhood at a bend in the Conemaugh River. We examined census records and mined local historical societies’ records.
The context for our work was the industrial plants and immigrants that worked in them, but the flood was inescapable. We visited the place upstream where the dam burst. We visited the Flood Museum. The town sat in a valley and I spent the summer feeling like it could fill up fast with uncontrollable water. It unsettled me.
The Flood’s Lessons, Past and Present
One of the writers I understood then as quintessentially western was Wallace Stegner. I had begun reading his novels and essays in college; in my first year in graduate school, I read his classic biography of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (a little on Powell in Taking Bearings here). On a few pages in that study, I discovered the Johnstown flood that I had so recently learned about firsthand.
Stegner wrote of that the flood’s lesson to contemporaries was that “all human action is related, and that whatever men do to control their environment must be multiple and reciprocal.” Controlling rivers meant dams. And dams could fail catastrophically. Because of the failure of the dam in Pennsylvania, many Americans looked more skeptically at dams.
But that was not the lesson Powell drew from the flood, according to Stegner: “The Johnstown flood, which had told many Americans that it was fatally dangerous to dam rivers, told Powell something quite different: that it was essential to know in advance all the conditions and specifications of the engineering job.” The flood taught Powell that long-range planning and thorough, accurate engineering were keys to it all.
I had not yet grabbed such a nuanced lesson. To me, the lesson—no doubt informed by that budding western, environmental identity I was nurturing—seemed to be that attempts to control nature caused as many problems as leaving it alone.
Post-Pennsylvania
After my first month in Pennsylvania, I changed my attitude and felt less uncomfortable there. I took advantage of its location and visited interesting places, including the area where Ed Abbey and Jimmy Stewart grew up, Punxsutawney Phil’s home, Amish country, and Washington, DC. When I drove west toward graduate school in August, we crossed the border from Missouri into Oklahoma, I knew I was back in the West. And I realized I was of the West. Still, whenever floods are in the news, I recall those months in Pennsylvania and appreciation deepens.
Closing Words
Old Writing
At various times in my historian’s career, I wrote about river development. My first scholarly journal article included sections on reclamation efforts on the Salt River in Arizona. My first co-written, and most-cited, essay focused on the Columbia River. More recently, I wrote a brief history of the Skagit River. I’m sure more river stories will be in my future.
New Writing
I have a new local farming story out you can find here. I also learned recently that a major digital history project I contributed to before leaving my university job is now available. You can get lost in the data about Idaho wilderness by clicking here. Finally, a new story about wildland firefighting is out today.
As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).
Special Offer
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Taking Bearings Next Week
Next week, I’m back to The Classroom. Because the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act is just around the corner, I’m thinking that will be the topic. Stay tuned!