Personal Impressions of the Photographer: Here’s How I See It

By Eldon Linschoten

Manager, Church Photography Department

On the fifth of June, 80 billion gallons of water poured through a gap in the Teton Dam—in twelve minutes. Farmers and townspeople in Wilford, Sugar City, and Rexburg rushed from their homes to high ground. They turned and watched as a wall of water swept away their homes, their farms, the food supply, their barns, their livestock, their shops, their cars—and left behind mud, sand, animal carcasses, and a grim future.

But when trees get pruned, they don’t wither up and die. These people had deep roots in Idaho, with plenty of strength to grow again. I talked to a sixty-year-old woman up to her knees in mud where her house had been. “Is this bad enough?” I asked her. She turned and answered, “Oh, it’s terrible. But we’re a tough people. We’re gonna rebuild the town. Rebuild it with buildings, sure, but we’re gonna rebuild it with new people, too.” She didn’t mean outsiders. “I mean us. With new spirit, and new love, and new strength.” I asked her what she was searching for in the mud. She was raking and raking—to find her genealogy papers.

When I went to Idaho four days after the flood, it looked hopeless. We were driven in on back-country vehicles from Idaho Fish and Game. The stench was horrible. There wasn’t a house that wasn’t saturated with water, filled with mud—that is, if it wasn’t torn from the foundation and deposited a mile away. I said to myself, “It’ll take these people 2 1/2 years. If they’re lucky.”

I went back five weeks later. I was amazed. They were already showing great signs of cleaning up. The day I came up there were 500 people each from two stakes. They had paid for the bus they were riding in. They had brought their own food and water. And they had brought food enough to feed the families they would help that day. Where else do you find people like that?

And they found a lot of them. A thousand a day for weeks on end, coming from stakes in northern Utah, western Wyoming, Montana, other parts of Idaho. By the end of August, almost a million man-hours had been donated. With that much work you could build a pyramid or two!

On my July visit there were bulldozers leveling buildings too damaged to repair. The dead animals were gone, and the stink was fading. But to me it still looked like a year’s worth of work ahead.

Then I went back ten weeks after the flood. I couldn’t believe it. If a stranger walked in and I told him that ten weeks ago a ten-foot wall of water had smashed into Rexburg, he’d call me crazy. It doesn’t look like there was a disaster in Rexburg, not any more. Now it looks like a boom town—foundations and footings already poured for new buildings, new signs on the stores, freshly planted grass in the yards, and people cheerful—except that they’re all working fit to bust! What I thought would take years had been done in weeks.

The reason is that the people had grit enough to look at two feet of sand covering their farm and think of it as nothing more than something to clear off before they plowed to plant winter wheat. They had determination enough to look at the ruins of the home they had spent all their lives working for and think only of what the new home was going to look like. They were too busy making the future to worry about what they had lost in the past.

There was help from outside, of course. Besides the volunteers, the Church and the government had come in to help. The Ricks College cafeteria served 30,000 meals a day. Caravans of trucks were loaded up in Salt Lake City with blankets, toothpaste, disposable diapers, flashlight batteries—everything the people might need—and they opened a store in the flood zone. Anybody, Mormon or nonmember, who needed anything could walk in and ask for it and walk out knowing that people had missed a couple of meals once a month to give them the help they needed.

But if the people of eastern Idaho hadn’t had the nerve to stay and build on the ruins of their homes and farms, no amount of outside aid would have helped.

There’s a trailer park in Sugar City where a pasture used to be. The people there mean to stay, even though their fine brick homes are somewhere downstream. They’ve strapped down their trailers so the eastern Idaho wind doesn’t knock them down. They’ve got gas and water piped in. Some of them have even planted flowers. They aren’t going anywhere. Sugar City is home.

I came up to a man and woman—they must have been near seventy. They were picking through the wreckage of their house when the couple suddenly remembered that today was their golden wedding anniversary. Fifty years together. So the woman picked some hollyhocks and made a bouquet of sorts, and the man leaned down and kissed her. They took a break from their work for a minute or two, got some old chairs from the ruins, and sat down. I got a picture, but the picture can’t tell you what I felt when he said, “We’re going to start all over. Brand new.” Like newlyweds, in a way, building from the ground up. But with fifty years of love behind them. They could lose everything they owned and still have everything that mattered to them.

Or the farm family that used to have a little rodeo ground. A nice house, a barn, a good farm that produced well—and the rodeo, complete with floodlights, bleachers, a place to train young would-be rodeo stars. Well, of course, the flood took all that. Not a trace of the bleachers left, the barn gone, only the house left standing, and entirely gutted at that.

So they got together and had a family council. Did they decide to move? No, of course not; Idaho was home. So now we’ve got the eight-year-old, the thirteen-year-old, the sixteen-year-old outside building a beautiful ranch fence around the property. The father has the whole farm cleared of silt now, and he’s planting it soon with winter wheat. The house is cleaned up, but the biggest miracle of all is in the barn. It looked solid enough to withstand a small tornado. “Your cows are going to like this,” I said. But he answered, “Oh, it’s not just for the cows.”

It was for their food storage, too. They’re planning to store enough in that barn that if the need ever came, they could feed themselves—and others. They had found out in the Teton Dam flood that when you all share the same disaster, those who have something share it with anyone who needs it. “The water was no deeper on my farm than it was on others,” he said. “And when everybody’s lost almost everything, those who are lucky enough to have something left just don’t feel right about keeping it to themselves.”

I guess one thing that impressed me most was their sense of priority. Rexburg wasn’t a big city before, and their entertainment facilities were limited. One of the best places in town for people to go was the park. Well, the flood took care of that. Mud, trees toppled, it looked hopeless. One thing I was sure of, that first day: they’d have to bulldoze that flat and plant the park all over.

But they had different ideas. They pulled the trees upright and held them there with guy wires. They built new park benches. They cleared off the dead cows and cleared the grass. It looks like the perfect little central park from everybody’s dream of small-town living. And they did it first, so that the kids would have someplace to go on the Fourth of July while the grown-ups worked.

It could happen anywhere, you know. It does all the time. And disasters demand courage from you. I’m real proud of the way our people handled it. It made me kind of wonder if I’d be up to it myself. I think maybe I would. It’s in the heritage. Brigham Young put his walking stick down in the desert and said, “We’ll build here.” Just the same way I saw a man with his farm buried in sand, wondering how he could farm on what looked like a beach. But he stopped wondering pretty soon. He just dug.

Now he has a little garden cleared, and he’s planted vegetables mostly, a few flowers. He may not even get a crop before the frost. Why did he do it?

“The prophet said to have a garden,” he told me. “I plan to do what the prophet said.”

Edwin O. and Elda Hamilton Smith of Sugar City take a break from heavy-duty clean-up to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary with a hug and a spray of hollyhocks.

Behind the Sugar City sign is the new town—all mobile homes.

Downtown Rexburg looks trim and tidy only weeks after the devastating flood.

Four Griffeths team up to build miles of fence: Melainie (left), Greg, a cousin, Julie Ann, and Rama Jean with the pole. Nord Hill is at the head post.