Recent flooding brings back not-so-fond memories of childhood home in East St. Louis
We didn’t say it out loud.
But we thought to ourselves, “Here we go again.”
It would rain hard. Pounding rain. Sheets of rain. Rain all day and night. We were stuck indoors. Even a kid like me wondered about the rising water in the canal just beyond our backyard.
Rain continued the next day. Mom would start taking things off the floor and putting them onto the kitchen table, on chairs, in the attic.
About a dozen times during my early childhood, flood waters overtook our Terrace Drive neighborhood in East St. Louis. Water reached our home’s front porch steps a few times. Water crept inside our home but never touched our furniture or caused permanent damage. We dried out and cleaned up. Moved on.
Until the next big rain.
The Terrace Drive neighborhood is located just east of Interstate 255, off 68th and State Street in East St. Louis, behind the Clyde C. Jordan Senior Citizens Center that was a Kinney Shoe Store. The Harding Ditch was just beyond our backyards. We called it “the canal.”
Interstate 255 was not built yet. It was a fun, middle-class neighborhood. A mix of brick homes and vinyl-sided homes. Two bedrooms, one bath. Yards big enough to mow for an hour every weekend. A large sandlot in the middle of the neighborhood with a real backstop. Clothes lines in every backyard.
Unfortunately, what made our neighborhood unique was the canal and it overflowed when it rained heavily for a few days.
That was the 1960s. That same East St. Louis neighborhood was severely flooded last month. The Harding Ditch, or canal, overflowed again. What the old neighborhood has experienced this summer is far, far worse and devastating than any flood we had 50 years ago.
But I remember the canal never flooded just a little bit.
Water was everywhere, or it was nowhere.
Mom and Dad would have moved to another neighborhood, far from the canal and out of the flood-prone neighborhood. But that was easier said than done. They could not afford it, at that stage of their lives. It was our home, our neighborhood. The canal was part of the package. Unfortunately, so were floods and fear of them.
When it rained heavy, Dad told a story of a family car being ruined by a flood. That was before I was born. He always worried about his car when it rained. Who wouldn’t?
We always rebounded from the floods. In a few days, we played ball on the soggy sandlot while the grownups were left with the cleanup, fear and frustration. We never had floods so bad that debris had to be hauled away. Or that residents needed to be evacuated.
I looked for flood photos but couldn’t find them. Somewhere in a box or scrapbook, there are old photos of water above the tires of Mom and Dad’s car. Water on the steps of the front porch. Neighbors standing in flood water past their knees.
We lived in that Terrace Drive house until I was in fifth grade. We sold the house to realtors and moved a few miles away to the Loisel Hills area of East St. Louis where we didn’t worry about the rising canal or floods.
How can this still be happening?
The recent news coverage made me feel great empathy for the residents.
Their belongings ruined.
Their lives soaked.
Some evacuated.
It made me wonder how flooding in the same neighborhood, from the same ditch, can still be happening, 50-plus years later.
It made me hope it never rains so hard again in my old neighborhood.
