"We can't do nothing about what Mother Nature kicks at us,"

The Mississippi spared Kentucky and northwest Tennessee any catastrophic flooding and no deaths have been reported there, but some low-lying towns and farmland along the banks of the big river have been inundated with water. And there's tension farther south in the Mississippi Delta and Louisiana, with the river's crest continuing a lazy pace, leaving behind what could be a slow-developing disaster."We can't do nothing about what Mother Nature kicks at us," Allen said. "This is history making right here.""It's probably the biggest tourist attraction in Memphis," Umstead said.`'I hope I've got it worked out," said Allen, who was getting ready to pack his red Ford F-150 pickup truck with TVs, microwaves and clothes and head for an aunt's house Saturday. "What we leave behind, I don't care about it. I hope it don't get so bad that we have to cry about anything.""If it was my house, I would be devastated," said Kim Mueller, whose home was spared last year during the Nashville floods, which inundated parts of downtown and many low-lying neighborhoods.She thought the wide river looked peaceful. "It's just awesome," she said

"I just want a new life and relocation," Blue said as a garbage can floated in the high water near his house and a yellow "No Outlet" street sign was nearly covered. "I would like the elected officials to come down here to see this with their own eyes and see what we're going through."Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the Morganza spillway could be opened as soon as Thursday, but a decision has not been made. If it is opened, it could stay open for weeks."There's no big trucks coming in and out of here," Roddy said from an empty restaurant in De Valls Bluff on Friday. "We don't have one customer.""It's bad for business when the roads are closed," said Roddy, 57, who is staying with a cousin on higher ground. "It's going to be nasty," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California-Berkeley who investigated levee failures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. How bad it gets depends on how well the flood-protection systems have been built and maintained, he said.

 "It's just like if you took out every bridge going over the Mississippi, what that would mean to railroad and vehicle traffic?" Muench said. "You're shutting down a major thoroughfare." She added: "The last thing we want is a levee to go, but we also want to keep moving.""This does not mean that water is at your doorstep," Nations said of the door-to-door effort. "This means you are in a high-impact area." "The standards we use to build these things are on the horribly low side if you judge them by world criteria and conditions," he said. "The breaches, as we learned in New Orleans, are the killers." "The whole summer will have to be watched," said J. David Rogers, a civil engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.