One Man Is an Island: His Home Stands Against Flood : Mississippi: As the river attacked, a stalwart Illinois farmer circled the sandbags. Finally, the water retreated.

Floyd Hutson is not a man cut out for American folklore. At 71, he is a florid, slow-moving gentleman whose self-effacing demeanor would never qualify him to join such legendary Mississippi River heroes and backwoods boasters as Mike Fink, Ralph Stackpole and Billy Earthquake.

But Shorty Hutson, alone among his neighbors, took on the Mississippi and won.

As big levees around him collapsed and the land on all four sides of his Western Illinois farm liquefied into an oil-slicked sea, Shorty Hutson kept his homestead dry.

For more than a month, the Hutson family farmhouse stood on a tiny 2 1/2-acre island in the Mississippi, protected from the flood by a ragged crew of stalwarts--Shorty and his wife, a trio of sons and a few relatives and friends who rowed in to buttress his clay levee with a circular wall of sandbags.

The elderly farmer threw himself into the battle as if he were trying to turn back the tide. But Shorty, heaving sandbags like a sinewy teen-ager, checking on leaks at all hours of the night, tinkering with an orchestra of droning pumps long past the point of exhaustion, actually did it.

His quixotic joust with the river was the ultimate lost cause, a struggle every veteran sandbagger and engineer knew was beyond their control. But as the rains ceased this week and the Mississippi grew tame, Shorty Hutson strolled out around his island--now a peninsula--and savored his victory.

“We just started out to save my home,” Hutson said. “I never expected it to get to this magnitude. If you had told me 40 days ago that my house would still be here, high and dry, well . . . .”

There were plenty who had told him otherwise; even a few relatives took him aside and whispered doubts. Plan your escape route, they advised. Get your family and your prized possessions out to safety. Why stay?

To Shorty and his loyal kin, there was no choice. The white clapboard house had been in the Hutson family for more than a century. It was where Hutson--who won his nickname because he stood 5 feet, 8 inches on a basketball team of 6-footers--grew up. It was where Shorty and his wife, Katy, raised three boys and two girls.

“I was born here,” said Shorty, a portly figure in pressed farm denims. “I’ve lived here all my life. You just don’t walk away from a place like this.”

The river had always been part of his life too--a nourisher of crops, a source of beauty, a place to fish, and a potential enemy.

“That river has many moods,” Hutson said. “Sometimes, she’s so gorgeous. And when she’s angry, you’d better hold onto everything you’ve got.”

The Hutson house has been protected by a clay flood wall since the early 1970s, when the Niota levee district allowed Shorty to take several tons of clay from its own levee construction project to defend his homestead.

“We were nearly flooded out in ’65 and then again in ‘73,” he recalled. “I thought something big would come someday. I had no idea it would be this big.”

But it was. The river swelled like a supernova in early summer, rising as fast as two feet in a day. Beyond the house, Shorty’s 180 acres of corn and soybean fields turned into marshlands of seep water.

The sleepy homestead took on the air of a military outpost. The Hutson boys--Jim, Bill and Stan--shouldered most of the work. They ordered Shorty to lay off sandbagging--they feared that he risked a heart attack. But Shorty joined them on the line anyway, keeping mum even as his back and thick forearms ached.

“You can’t just stand there and do nothing when your sons are working like dogs,” he said.

As long as the farm’s gravel access road was open, Stan Hutson, 35, drove the family grain truck out each day to nearby Ft. Madison, Iowa, to pick up a 10-ton load of sand. When the river swallowed the road, the Hutsons kept the truck on the land side. There, the sons and neighbors bagged the sand, then loaded the bags into flatboats and ferried them across to the isolated farmhouse.

At night, when they quit, exhausted, only Larry Hutson, Shorty’s long-haired 20-year-old grandson, patrolled until sunrise. He minded the farm’s 15 water pumps, which removed rain and river seepage. Their eerie groans and burps became so familiar that Shorty found himself waking at night, startled, whenever one suddenly shut off.

Katy Hutson became the communications link to the outside world. She kept in touch with her husband by CB radio. A police scanner crackled on and off in the kitchen. Tables were heaped high with sandwiches and pies ferried in by neighbors.

Life inside the house was no refuge. Look through any window and you could see water. “It was like we were in prison,” Katy Hutson said. “You always knew it was out there. And it kept getting higher.”

The worst night was July 10. Working 18-hour days, Shorty and his boys had topped the clay levee with a foot of sandbags. But on the 10th, the river was cresting inches from the levee top. A quarter-mile away, river wash was already lapping over a dip in the Niota levee. Angry clouds blew in from the west, gashing the black horizon with lightning strikes.

“It felt like the Old Boy upstairs was trying to drown us,” Hutson said.

About 8 p.m., the Niota levee broke, flooding 90 homes to the south and forcing 160 residents to flee. Water gushed in over the cornfields and covered a railroad spur to the east.

“We felt so helpless,” Shorty said. “All we could do is continue what we were doing. It made us work twice as hard.”

Close to midnight, their sandbags ran out. The nearest sand pits were closed and it was too risky to ferry more in under the lightning. Dejected, the boys headed home and Shorty settled in for a night of fitful sleep.

“That’s when I did my praying,” he said.

The bags held. The pumps groaned on. At dawn, the island was still dry.

As it turned out, the Niota break and a breach before dawn at the Green Bay levee, across the river in Iowa, saved Shorty Hutson’s homestead by taking the pressure off his flood wall.

But he was not out of danger yet. The water pressure against his levee was still almost unbearable. Phone service failed twice. And for one crucial hour, the house’s electricity died, knocking out several electric pumps.

Shorty’s neighbors helped out with radios and ready-made sandbags. The Niota levee commission allowed him to take sandbags off their breached levee and use them on his barrier. They were wet and heavy, but they saved Shorty and his crew precious time.

“It was a community effort,” said Lester Eaves, a volunteer who handles communications for Niota. “Everybody helps everybody. That’s what keeps a man like Shorty going.”

Not until early last week was Shorty Hutson convinced that the worst was over. The access road to his house reappeared. Shorty had time again to wander out in his sandbagged yard and gaze over his sunken fields. Muddy wading boots dried on stakes out by the front door. There was no need for rain gear now.

He tucked his hands into his red suspenders and tramped through high grass that had gone unmowed for 40 days and 40 nights. He could laugh while his young grandsons scrambled into the drainage ditches, grabbing for the frogs and earthworms that had taken shelter there from the river.

And quietly, in a voice hushed so that the river would not hear him, Shorty Hutson allowed himself the boast of an old river man.

“The best feeling is that the old Miss didn’t whip us,” he said atop the levee. “You son of a gun, we outlasted you.”