"How high's the water, Mama?"

In 1974, Johnny Cash sang the song, "Five Feet High and Rising" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91OIaPRrDts) about flooding on the family farm.

"How high's the water, Mama?" he belted out. "Two feet high and risin," was the reply, going on up the tape until it got to five feet.

And that's kind of the case out around the Wolf Lake Community thses days, where current and former residents have been advised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Wolf is rising at a rate of a foot-and-a-half a day. If it stays at two-feet and doesn't get any higher, a lot of folks will breathe easier ... but five feet? That's gonna be too deep.

The irony of everything is that some folks were loaded their belongings in trailers while others on the next place down the road were putting seed in the ground. I guess they were doing that "in case" the flood doesn't come although friend Harold Horton wonders if "they're watching the news on TV?"

Last Saturday (May 7), we got a shot of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad depot in Vicksburg, which sits outside the protection of the now-closed flood wall, and is in the process of being rennovated. As I took the picture, you could see water bubbled under a large, sqaure utility cover of some sort in the drive. On Sunday, a photo was posted on a railfan website I visit and the water was lapping at the steps of the depot.

As we drove into Vicksburg on U.S. Highway 61, we laughed about having seen this rather youngish looking ninny on WAPT-TV out of Jackson, who actually asked a park ranger at the National Military Park about the danger of the graves nearest the highway being flooded ... but we wondered about the truck after truck after truck of dirt heading north that we passed.

As it turns out, there were boils showing up along the levees in the Eagle Lake area and the dirt was being rushed out there to help secure the area. The Corps, you see, will cover the boils -- places where water seeps under the levee and starts to break through on the inside of the levee -- with the dirt, then allow water to cover the area in an effort to stop it by pressure.

Oh, back to the flooded graves question ... if that happens, nobody's going to be around to ask about the water's depth!