High-water hell

IT was a different time and a different place, but Zora Neale Hurston touched on the present when she wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” about black life in South Florida, where even the miseries of the Great Depression were overwhelmed by the agonies unleashed by nature.

A hurricane had come, Hurston wrote in 1937, and the levees that contained the Everglades’ Lake Okeechobee couldn’t stand up to the storm. The “beast had left its bed.... He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the [cabins]; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors.” A 10-foot wall of water chased the near-dead across the lowlands, “rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses.... The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.”

Hurston might have been writing about real events. A 1928 hurricane forced Lake Okeechobee over its banks, killing more than 1,800 people, and she lived through a hurricane while visiting the Bahamas a year later. But untethered from reportage, the primal scene touches deep-seated fears that have made cataclysmic storms and floods recurring themes in the human story, such as ancient creation myths and Noah’s famous struggle in the Bible, movies such as”Key Largo,” Delta blues, George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” and Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel “The Makioka Sisters.”

Real floods, be they spawned by hurricanes or deluges, hold similar fascination. Popular historian David McCullough’s first book, “The Johnstown Flood,” which is still in print, was a surprise bestseller in 1968. And in 2000, Erik Larson hit international bestseller lists with “Isaac’s Storm,” about the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas, killing more than 8,000 people.

And the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina will soon be documented in at least one quick-turnaround book. New Orleans writer Douglas Brinkley is shooting for an early 2006 release of a book that will provide “analysis and narrative” of the disaster, according to Publishers Weekly.

In religion and myth, the flood usually symbolizes punishment from an angry God and the chance for renewal. In the blues, the flood is the uncontrollable force that kills and takes, leaving anguish when the waters recede. In movies and literature, it is a plot device to force characters to confront themselves and nature, and the catalyst for change -- if you survive.

“People are fascinated by and even long for destruction, in a way, because it seems like it’s going to clear away the dilemmas that they live with,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, who read 100 novels for the just-published “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel,” an extended meditation on writing and reading. “And then whatever the form of destruction that happens is so much more horrifying and worse than any dilemmas they were having before, they regret the idleness with which they conjured up or were fascinated by the destruction.”

The flood as a literary device is as persistent as nature itself, appearing in ancient texts and present-day works in progress. The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, considered to be among the world’s oldest literary works, contains the tale of a cleansing and transforming flood.

And contemporary writer Laila Lalami, whose collection of interrelated short stories, “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,” will be published next month, is in the midst of writing a novel in which she uses a flood as a catalyst to bring together diffident government officials, the poor and religious fundamentalists.

Lalami watched in discomfort as news accounts from the Gulf Coast seemed to imitate her art. She said she has written a chapter about a Casablanca slum devastated by a flood, after which residents receive empty promises from the government but concrete help from a right-wing Islamic group.

Lalami, a Moroccan native now living in Portland, Ore., used the chapter as part of a workshop at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in late August. “When I got back home ... and saw the pictures on the Internet and on TV, I was completely horrified. I saw all those poor people who couldn’t get away and were told to go to the convention center, only to be left to fend for themselves. I heard the promises that Bush and FEMA officials made while people were dying in wheelchairs.... The coincidence was quite disturbing.”

Lalami said she was caught between her own human responses and those of a writer, examining how the real disaster sharpened the focus on class and racial divides she is exploring in her novel -- and feeling guilty for thinking of her own work amid the suffering in the South. But she’ll keep the flood in her book, after rewriting it to better capture the immensity of what she has watched unfold on television.

“If anything, I feel I have understated the effect of the flood on the people, and the way in which the government responded,” Lalami said. “Reality turned out to be even more unbelievable than the fiction I wrote.”

Smiley, who has written about relationships among people and the land in “A Thousand Acres,” said she hasn’t used floods in her work and doubts she would because they represent the uncontrollable outside. A novel, she believes, should be contained by the world the writer creates.

“I think floods are naturally dramatic,” Smiley said. “But it comes, in some ways, from nowhere. It is generated outside of the action of the book, and it really can only reveal things that were hidden or were submerged, literally, in the plot of the book.”

Yet floods can also be seen as a betrayal by nature, in which a substance necessary for life suddenly threatens to kill. Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist specializing in reactions to trauma, suspects there’s an instinctive element at play.

“People say, ‘come hell or high water,’ so there’s something in our collective unconscious that equates high water with hell,” Butterworth said, adding that he has experienced that fear while scuba diving. “It’s scary to go down about 70 feet and look up and see water. The first time I did it, I started hyperventilating.”

A power beyond human reckoning

YET it is the arbitrary nature of floods, and their power, that gives them their drama.

In “Life on the Mississippi,” Mark Twain wrote about an 1882 flood that stretched the river 70 miles wide in the Delta. And in the spring of 1927, massive rains in the heart of the country flooded the Mississippi River at a scale that dwarfs the current scenes from New Orleans. John M. Barry’s 1997 “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America,” which has shot up Amazon’s bestseller lists in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, details how floodwaters covered 27,000 square miles and didn’t recede for two months. Black sharecroppers were forced at gunpoint to shore up levees, hundreds losing their lives when the berms washed away anyway.

The flood destroyed much of the Mississippi Valley’s sharecropper economy and helped propel the mass migration of Southern blacks to such northern cities as Chicago and Detroit -- similar to the smaller diaspora from the Gulf Coast now underway. The political fallout helped usher Huey Long into the Louisiana governor’s mansion and Herbert Hoover into the White House. And it infused the Delta blues, another form of storytelling, with a fresh round of miseries to sing about.

Musicologist David Evans counts more than two dozen blues songs that grew out of the tragedy, including “Broken Levee Blues” (1928) by Lonnie Johnson, who sang about being jailed for refusing to work on the levees, and Charles Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” which Bob Dylan revisited in “High Water (For Charlie Patton)” in 2001:

High water risin’, six inches ‘bove my head

Coffins droppin’ in the street

Like balloons made out of lead.

Rather than couching floods in terms of punishment and redemption, blues renditions see floods as just another deliverer of pain, said Evans, a University of Memphis professor whose essay on the 1927 flood and the blues will be included in the upcoming “Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From: Lyrics and History,” edited by Robert Springer.

“There were already so many religious songs about the biblical flood, and they tended to be revived when floods hit,” Evans said, adding that blues songs generally “are accounts of personal suffering or personal experience.”

But literature is where our stories get archived and our lessons preserved. Russell Dynes, cofounder of the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, believes the commonness of floods is what gives them a universal application.

Early civilizations arose on navigable rivers and other waterfronts, places that gave life but also took it away in unpredictable fashion. Most cultures have their own flood myths or creation myths that involve a great flood.

The theme is so pervasive that some scholars believe there might have been a cataclysmic event in early history that affected a wide range of cultures. Others believe that water and our relationship with it is a universal experience, open to flexible interpretation.

“It’s a familiar hazard around the world, and people can visualize it and its consequences much better than a hurricane or earthquakes or things like that,” Dynes said. “It does lend itself to, if you are looking for it, a creation myth more so than any other hazard. It creates a blank slate on which people can write. And they can be interpreted in a lot of ways -- as punishment in certain ways, and as a point of creation in others.”