Hunched by age but ginger on his cane, Mr. Simpson, 94, bought the land some 40 years ago, thinking he would retire here from his lifelong home across the river in Cairo, Ill., the collapsed city that now sits threatened by the overfed Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
“I’m still thinking about it,” said Mr. Simpson, who with his wife, Anna, 92, heeded a mandatory evacuation order and is now staying with their daughter and her family at the farm. “Right now, we’re just sponging off them.”
Leaving Cairo might seem like an easy choice to some. Mr. Simpson has witnessed his town, once home to more than 15,000, go from “the hustlin’-est, bustlin’-est town you’d ever seen” to its current state — with less than 3,000 residents, one physician, no dentist and a surfeit of torched and abandoned buildings. Homeless dogs roam the streets, sinkholes yawn from the asphalt and the river remains dangerously high.
Mr. Simpson even concedes that he and his wife, who has long wanted to leave, would like to be closer to their daughter here, who could more easily drive them to medical appointments and handle household chores.
Still, he cannot commit to leaving — at least not yet.
The couple remains independent. Mr. Simpson continues to serve as the chief of Cairo’s auxiliary fire department, a position he has held for the past 54 years. He was known to occasionally ride trucks to fire scenes until injuring his back in a fall last year. He is the town’s institutional memory, and over the decades he has consulted with mayors on everything from flood prevention and economic development to city schools and civil defense.
“If it was left up to me, I’d have still been there,” Mr. Simpson said while tucking into a lunch of ham and pineapple rings at a local diner. “They said at our age, they would feel better if they knew we were out of Cairo.”
Perhaps most important, Mr. Simpson — like his hometown — has so far withstood the worst the river has had to offer. He did not decamp when, at 10, he saw a paddleboat pushing its way up a flooded road during the Great Flood of 1927. When the waters rose again 10 years later, Mr. Simpson avoided an evacuation order by ingratiating himself to the town’s mayor, walking the levees and fetching lunch for local officials.
“I figured: ‘I’m a pretty good swimmer. I’ll find a high spot somewhere,’?” Mr. Simpson said. “Leaving Cairo didn’t even enter my mind.”
But where these earlier disasters failed, the Great Flood of 2011 has succeeded, and the Simpsons, now sipping coffee in the safety of the diner, fled with nothing more than a few days’ clothes.
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