Our home was built probably 80 to 90 years ago on the top of a small sand hill that rises perhaps 5 to 10 feet above the surrounding fields, woods, and farms of Mason County, Illinois. The original owners undoubtedly picked this high-ground location for their farmstead to avoid flooding. Yet in most normal years, one would hardly ever think of flood waters; the nearest stream, the Illinois River, is about four miles away, and even its highest floods would never be able to reach the height of the river valley’s bluff tops and then spread over the uplands. No, the floods they were concerned with came not from the river, but from the seemingly dry ground below.
When I first moved to Mason County in 1991, I could not help but notice that the land’s outstanding characteristic was its dryness. Its natural areas reminded me of a desert-like landscape with prickly pear cactus common in sand prairies dominated by bunch grasses such as sand love grass and little bluestem; in savannas and woodlands, blackjack oak, a gnarly tree species that seems the quintessential dryland species every bit as much as mesquite in an Arizona canyonland, is common. On a hot summer day on the prairies, there is not a drop of water to be found, and survival for plants and animals must be a greater struggle than usual.
Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, Mason Co.
But in 1993 my perspective on the sand areas of Mason County was turned upside down. For it was the year of the great flood on the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries. Though many blamed human modifications of the river and its watershed for the flood, an idea deserving of some serious investigations, the fact is that it rained a lot over the Midwest in 1993. It rained so much that the land was saturated with water; aquifers rose in consequence, and even some lands far above the river’s highest possible flood level saw flooding; certain lands could hold no more water. Western Mason County was one of those areas. While the sand hills remained dry, in some cases surrounding lower lying areas turned into shallow lakes and marshes; the water to fill these depressions came from either more precipitation or from a rising aquifer surfacing from water pressures beneath. Eventually the wetlands grew characteristic vegetation such as cattails, rushes, arrowhead, and smartweed, among other species; and their fishless waters, not being fed by any inlet streams, were havens for a variety of frogs and toads that appeared in astronomical numbers seemingly from nowhere. Many varieties of wetland birds were also attracted to these sandy-bottomed aquatic habitats.
County Road 1500N, south of Havana, Il, 1993
Sand, though, holds water very poorly. And after precipitation returned to normal and the aquifer lowered, the sand marshes soon disappeared. By the late 1990s, corn, soybeans, or winter wheat were once again being harvested from the dry, flat, low-lying grounds that I knew would one day again become marshes and open water.
When it was time to purchase my first home in 1999, I remembered which areas had flooded from the rising aquifer six years earlier. And so I knew the old farmhouse on the sand hill was safe. And I remembered how the surrounding lands were covered in water in 1993 and county roads that were closed from water that had nowhere to go. So in the early spring of 2011, I am able to sit high and dry, even though the last two or three years have seen exceptional precipitation, and the aquifer has been full to overflowing for over a year; the farm fields to the north and south of my home have been wet or under permanent water for about as long. Amphibian choruses are loud and nearly constant; there must be many thousands of frogs and toads in just the flooded acreage north of my home. I have even heard the rare Illinois chorus frog. Wood duck pairs fly here and there looking for appropriate nest trees.
This is all good, but the water also means loss of planting opportunities for affected farmers. And although many flood-damaged homes were removed after 1993, some folks stayed, possibly looking upon 1993 as an anomaly. I know of at least one very unfortunate family about an eight of a mile down the road who are now in a desperate, daily battle against the aquifer’s high waters to save their home. And I am sure that they look upon the wetlands to the north and south of our sand hill very differently than I do.
County Road 1500N, south of Havana, Il, Jan. 2010.
But the spring of 2011 has only just begun. With the usual spring rains yet to come, it would seem to be a given that Mason County’s sand marshes and small lakes may be a regular feature on the landscape for some time to come; that is, until the inevitable dry periods return, and the cycle begins anew.