Mr. Caldwell shook his head. “Shoring up’s not going to work,” he said. “There’s nothing we can put up that will keep the water from breaking out if the spillway gives. But there may be another way, if we can do it in time. Scotty and I were just talking.”

He knelt down in the mud and drew a rough picture of the reservoir and the area around it. “Our immediate problem is reducing the pressure against the spillway.”

He scratched in a long line, from above the higher end of the reservoir banks all the way around the one on the far left side. “Here’s that channel where we had the creek diverted through before. We can open it up again and stop the creek from adding to the reservoir.”

Then he marked a spot on one side of the reservoir, down toward the lower end of the bank we’d built up to give some height to the land’s natural basin. “And if we dig through the bank here, that will let a lot of water out.”

I looked from his drawing to the Lundgren fields. “What’s going to happen out there?” I asked. “Will the channel and creek bed be able to catch all the water and keep it contained?”

“No,” Mr. Caldwell said. “It’s going to come out in a rush way too fast.”

“We brought sandbags,” I said. “Can we do something with those?”

It was Scotty who suggested using them to build a long, low wall between the reservoir and the Lundgren place.

Mr. Caldwell nodded. “The sandbags won’t stop the water, but they may slow it way down.”

A sudden sweep of rain washed away his drawing. “It’s going to be in a race, though. Somebody better holler Go!”

Half the guys piled back into the stake trucks and went with Scotty to the river, to fill sandbags and ferry them back.

Mr. Caldwell and I split the other guys into two crews. The smaller group opened up the diversion channel at the top end and used the first of the sandbags to block the creek from feeding the reservoir.

The bigger group laid into the bank with picks and shovels where Mr. Caldwell said to, digging an eight-foot-wide gap. I worked with them, and it was mean, dangerous, sloppy work, what with the rain and mud sloshing every which way.

Mr. Caldwell shuttled between us and the spillway. Every time he came back, he looked more worried.

Finally, when we’d dug the gap almost down to water level, he said, “All right. That’s as far as you can take it until we get the sandbag crew up here.”