Spring Melt Brings a Flood of Memories
“Mom, me and Tony are going fishing at the Isaac Walton.”
The gasp from my mother Bea and the fact that she didn’t correct my grammar clearly indicated that I had said something akin to taking the Lord’s name in vain. I was just being straightforward about it. What could be wrong with going fishing with my 5th grade buddy Tony Lindholm during the 1965 flood?
The standard thing mothers do in a situation like that is to just say, “No, you’ll drown.” But she knew it would help if she had a stronger argument. After all, I was 10 and not a pushover.
Luckily for her, my oldest brother Bruce stepped into the room and said flatly, “Nah, you don’t want to fish now. Fishing’s no good during a flood. The high water and floating junk messes it up and the fish are spread thin.”
That was all it took. If anyone knew fishing, it was Bruce. So fishing was out. I’m sure Mom thanked him later. I’m not even sure why I told her we were going fishing. We’d already been down there numerous times without her knowledge. Maybe fishing was inherently dangerous.
This spring the cresting Mississippi River at Red Wing didn’t quite reach major flood stage so it wasn’t as devastating as it could have been. But it was high enough to cause problems for some businesses and public parks.
Any river flood these days brings back memories of the ‘65 flood. It seems like everyone has a story about that flood. It was so huge and unexpected, especially to an East End kid. I could observe the river flooding from many locations such as Colvill Park, the levee, and, of course, the Isaac Walton League.
I could also climb two bluffs to get a bird’s eye view. Viewing the flooding from the bluff tops wasn’t as dangerous as fishing during a flood but it still elicited the standard warnings from Mom. “You be careful and don’t get close to the edge!” This might have been the point in my life when I just quit telling her where I was going.
In 1965, we had the history-setting school closing on St. Patrick’s Day due to a foot or more of snow. I never did find out exactly how much Red Wing got, but it literally stopped everything. We Johnson boys did a lot of shoveling that day but made some money. It was a hoot not having school and jumping into deep drifts that cushioned your fall. Flooding was not on our radar.
But flooding soon became the center of attention because of a combination of things – saturated ground in the fall, significant winter snow, compounded by the March 17 storm, then lots of rain and rapid melting. As the river rose, so did the consternation of those directly affected by it.
My brother Bruce was a freshman commuting to UW-River Falls. The flood precluded any driving across the high bridge and back channel. So he and about five others rode a temporary ferry from under the high bridge to a spot on the other side of the back channel where they had parked a car to drive to school. This lasted for a couple weeks. He even got his picture in the Republican-Eagle boarding the ferry. The ferry was primarily used to transport employees of Red Wing businesses that lived in Wisconsin . The companies paid for the ferry so there was no charge to the passengers.
My brother Warren was seven that April when he and some friends rode their bikes across the high bridge and had a challenge contest to see who dared ride out the farthest in the water over the road to the Harbor Bar. One of the kids went right off the edge of the obscured road and plunged into the deep water, losing his bike and hitting rocks as he crashed. Mom found out about that one. Guilty by association. I was guilt-free since I wasn’t there. The bike was discovered after the river receded.
The summer of 1964 was when my wife Catherine’s father Jack was going to build a cabin on Friedrich Point near the head of Lake Pepin in Wacouta. But he was a candidate for district judge and had competition so needed to campaign that summer. That meant showing off the family at numerous county fairs, much to the chagrin of the Friedrich kids who would have rather been at the beach.
The cabin would be Jack’s opus, his one chance to use his engineering degree. He had intended to build it about four feet above the sand “to keep the snakes out.” Of course the cabin would have likely been washed away in the ’65 flood. So when he did build it that summer, the base was eight feet higher than the sand. The flood of ’69 reached the deck, requiring son Charlie to float under the cabin in the bottom of a canoe to retrieve logs stuck underneath. They can do a lot of damage in the current. The cabin still stands today.
As the water rose in the ’65 flood I monitored its progress up East 5th St. under the Highway 61 overpass, secretly hoping that it would climb high enough to run down 5th St. so Colvill School would have to close. But no such luck. It crested just under the overpass.