Why Stay in Flood Area? Reasons Are Heartfelt : Midwest: The emotional bond farmers have for their land is as strong as the one townspeople feel for their communities.

Main Street still disappears into a murky brown soup, and most of this Mississippi River town’s homes and businesses are still under water 10 days after the crest of the Great Flood of 1993 passed by.

Once the waters recede, most of the buildings here are expected to be deemed structurally unsound, so residents are trying to decide how to rebuild their homes and lives.

The most popular solution is to move Grafton uphill, out of harm’s way. One thing is clear: No one wants this flood to spell the breakup of this close-knit community of 1,000 people.

“I think they’re all going to move back. It’s a very family-oriented community, and they’ve all lived in this small town their whole lives. . . . If you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know your town is your security,” said town secretary Sandy Rowlings.

Up and down the river, people who were driven out as the Mississippi reclaimed its flood plain are eager to explain to themselves--and to anyone else who will listen--why they are compelled to return to their homes and risk being ejected when the waters rise again.

These reasons are as varied as their lives. But as these Midwesterners recover, it is clear that they are rebuilding more than homes and businesses. They are salvaging a way of life so dear to them that they cannot let go, no matter how preposterous that may seem to outsiders.

For some, the beauty of the river and its lush banks is like a siren’s call.

Betty Lewis had to take a 40-minute ride on a military ferry to get to her home in the Missouri town of Portage Des Sioux, which was submerged when both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers expanded to include it and more than 40% of St. Charles County in their confluence.

A thick slime of mud, sewage and dead fish covers every inch of Lewis’ home--furniture, paintings and all. Although much of the town is dry now, a stench of decayed crops and rotting waste pervades everything.

“It’s just about the nastiest thing in the world,” said Lewis, who is raising her dead daughter’s two children.

Taking the last ferry out of town on a recent evening, Lewis felt moved to defend her decision to reclaim her home.

“You cannot imagine how beautiful it is in autumn,” she said, gesturing past the mud-caked town to the Illinois side of the river. “The bluff just explodes with color. I never want to miss that sight. We have eagles that fly over the town in winter. And deer wander into our back yard. It’s a nice place to raise kids.”

The emotional bond farmers feel for their land is as strong as the one townspeople feel for their communities.

A couple hundred miles upriver from Grafton, six Illinois family farmers have staked out their livelihoods in the fertile Mississippi River bottom land behind the Henderson County levee. Their lives have assumed a rhythmic cycle that is controlled--and at times interrupted--by the unpredictability of nature. This summer that rhythm was irreparably disturbed when the levee broke and their fields were covered with 10 feet of gravy-colored river water.

“The hardest thing will be when harvest time comes and we have nothing to harvest,” said Rosalea Pruett, who has farmed about 600 acres with her husband, Howard, for the last 44 years. “My favorite sound in the world is the sound of a combine running. It’s like reaping a year’s work when you hear it.”

Howard Pruett and his neighbor, John Robb, took a flat bottom boat across the Pruett’s sunken fields to survey the broken levee. At its peak, the river was flowing about four feet above the levee, and now that the water has receded, the levee is covered with debris and corncobs, the sole remnants of the Pruetts’--or perhaps some other farmer’s--1993 crop.

The farmers have received letters from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contending that the Corps is not responsible for repairs to the levee because local people failed to maintain it.

“It will cost more to fix that levee than our land is worth,” said Robb, the head of the local levee district and the vice president of the Upper Mississippi River Flood Control Assn., a group of all levee and drainage districts on the Upper Mississippi.

Robb contends that the Corps shirked its responsibility by failing to do the major repairs the levee needed, despite repeated requests. He says local people did their part by mowing the levee and alerting the Corps to serious problems.

He went to Washington to plead his case before the two senators and several representatives from Illinois. The levee, he said, is a part of the Mississippi’s navigation system--not just a dirt wall protecting six farmers’ crops--and thus is a federal responsibility.

But the Corps has made no move even to estimate the damage and “we’re getting plenty nervous,” Robb said. If the levee is not repaired by October, there is little chance the fields will dry in time for planting next spring. “It’s hard enough without a payday this year. We’ve got to make a crop next year or it will really kill us,” he said.

Rosalea Pruett says she worries that the levee will not be fixed and that the rhythm of life that has sustained her for more than four decades is gone forever.

Like Robb and the Pruetts, many flood victims worry that their lives may be drastically changed by another force greater than themselves: the government.

In Davenport, Iowa, the city’s gracious riverside park and its most famous waterfront restaurant, the Dock, were flooded. Now the management of the restaurant is nervous about city officials’ proposals to build a wall to keep future floods out.

“The flood wall would do us absolutely no good because they are thinking of putting it up on . . . the wrong side,” said Joe Leddy, the manager of the Dock. “If that happened, any flood would put us under 10 feet of water and the restaurant would be destroyed.”

For weeks now, two dozen workers have been shoveling the muck out of the restaurant and tearing out demolished furniture, carpeting, paneling and everything else touched by the floods.

Why rebuild in the face of such risk?

“There’s no more romantic place to be,” Leddy said, gesturing toward the river. “I’ve seen a dozen of couples get engaged in this restaurant, and countless people celebrate their anniversaries. It’s been here since the 1930s. That’s why it’s such a special place. It’s history for a lot of people.”

The atmosphere could not be replicated behind a flood wall--nor could his job satisfaction, he said.

In Grafton, as well as in other towns along the river, people whose houses were flooded are balking at local ordinances, passed under federal pressure, that forbid them from rebuilding if their houses are 50% damaged, unless they elevate the houses above flood stage.

Richard Mosby, the town’s zoning commissioner, broke that bad news to Wayne Williams, 64, a retired custodian whose modest wood home was almost submerged at the peak of the flood and where water still stands half way up the front door.

“You can’t elevate that,” Williams said in disbelief.

He said he has no flood insurance and was planning to put the house back into shape himself: “Put a little paint on that and you’ll never know it.”

“I’ve got to get back in,” he added. “I have no place else to live.”

Most of the people in town are likely to face the decision to elevate their homes and businesses or abandon them, like Mosby himself. At the flood’s crest, the entire first story of the zoning commissioner’s yellow, two-story house on Main Street was full of water.

The cost of elevating a house, about $10,000, would be prohibitive for most of the town’s residents, Mosby said. That is one reason people are talking about moving the whole town to higher ground.

But for most people, moving away from Grafton is not an option.

“That’s the thing about living on the river,” Mosby said. “It just gets in your blood--it gets to you.”