WITNESS: Humor, the strongest levee in the Midwest?

Nick Carey is a Chicago correspondent for Reuters who spent last week traveling up and down a 300-mile (480-km) stretch of mid-Mississippi River flood plain as the giant stream overflowed its banks and levees and swallowed up small towns and thousands of acres of some of the richest farmland in America. In the following story he writes of his impressions of people he met as they fortified levees, organized flood responses, and coped with the disaster.

By Nick Carey

PALMYRA, Missouri (Reuters) - I knew for a fact that Brent Hoerr was exhausted.

Half an hour earlier in the kitchen of his farmhouse, as we drained bottles of ice water in the heat of the day, his wife Charlotte told me Brent had barely slept for a week.

As a local Drainage District official -- a job rotated among Brent and his neighbors -- he had battled to shore up his levee against the rising waters of the Mississippi.

The couple, like thousands of other residents the past week along several hundred miles of one of the world's major rivers, had made virtue of necessity by rallying together to do the best they could amid the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years.

Charlotte had just returned from delivering sandwiches and drinks to volunteers up and down the sand-and-earth levee.

Bulldozing, sandbagging and fortifying the barrier had gone on round-the-clock for days.

As a reporter born and raised in Britain, I had heard that the people of the Midwest -- the farming heartland of the United States, the world's biggest grain and food exporter -- were hard-working, stoic, pillars of "family values".

But a week of watching them fight the floods made me think that perhaps their greatest bulwark against the tide of disaster was an inclination to laugh in the face of adversity.

Down at a pumping station in a blazing sun -- the metal railings were too hot to touch -- things looked grim. Brent Hoerr's one remaining diesel-powered pump sounded like it was hours, maybe minutes from expiring.

If it did, flood water would seep in from the river and likely undermine his levee, spelling disaster for the 4,000 acres of just-planted crop land it protected.

"Don't sound too good, does it?" Hoerr said, nodding at the wheezing machine and lost in despair for maybe a second.

"You do know how to swim, don't you?" he added, his eyes twinkling as he broke into a belly laugh.

SWEAT AND HUMOR

Nearby, Jeffrey Conte of engineering firm Klingner & Associates was urgently trying to help Hoerr find a way to keep pumping water, sorting through options while the sweat trickled down his forehead.