When the news switched to coverage of the flood, he put his mug of tea down mid sip. He placed his elbows on his knees and leaned forward on his couch.

“Record rainfall to the northwest and melting from the Rockies have combined to cause flooding all along the Missouri River this week. Multiple towns in Buchanan County have been ordered to evacuate as the water levels keep rising. Residents downriver are told to be ready for continued flooding coming their way. The national guard has been mobilized and sandbagging efforts have already begun in Howard, Cooper, Boone, Cole, Calloway, Osage, Warren, Franklin, Howe, and Duden counties. Residents near the river have been advised to temporarily evacuate, as waters are expected to keep rising as much as a few inches to a few feet,” said the man on television. “Now, protests have continued in—”

The Gas Station Attendant knew his history. He knew how often this river flooded. He had grown up as much in it as on it. Even the first accounts of the river, even in pioneer days, painted it as a temperamental little bitch. It cuts corners, runs around at night, fills itself with snags and traveling sandbars, lunches on levees, and swallows islands and small villages for dessert. That’s what George Fitch said about it a hundred and twenty years ago. The constant dredging and manicuring of the Missouri River nowadays was a hint to its traveling past. The river used to just decide a new course every year. It was less of a river in the classic sense as a loose collection of rain and meltwater coalescing every spring and summer and deciding in unison that the river should take a new channel this year, often running through towns, houses, farmlands. Hundreds of years ago, every year, the government would try to persuade the Missouri River to stick to a single course, a single riverbed, and nearly always it was in vain. Simply put, as it was, the Missouri River was useless to all manner of business, agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing. If the river couldn’t be predicted, how could it be effectively monetized?

The Gas Station Attendant didn’t know which river he preferred. Nowadays, of course, civilization won. The river was dredged and channeled and kept its same course from source to mouth. The Gas Station attendant thought that there was something romantic about this muddy, shitty, mostly useless river being a bucking bronco of sorts, fighting against anyone that tried to claim it. On the other hand, that bucking bronco was now going to flood and fuck up his house. Because it never quite really got tamed.