He bailed out her basement and her living room and her front yard, just as he did Monday. His mother, Pat Fowler, has lived on Riverview Road for about three years. The view of the Rock River has gotten much clearer since Sunday. What was once a bucolic riverfront 150 feet away was 30 feet away Wednesday — and that was after the river level had gone down a foot.

Like many who live along the Rock River where it meanders from Watertown to Jefferson along Highway 26, Fox is preparing for more rain and a higher river at his mother's home about five miles south of Watertown.

"It started Monday, we were about knee deep in water out here. The freezer was floating around in the basement," said Fox as he stood outside. Other homes along Riverview Road were in similar condition: surrounded by sandbags. A rental truck was being filled with furniture at one.

Ducks and ducklings had ample paddling room. Fox had hooked up a large construction company pump — 6,000 gallons an hour — that was spitting river water from the home's basement onto the driveway, more aptly described as a spillway.

The prospects are dire if more rain arrives. Monday, neighbors, relatives and friends banded together to have 28 yards of crushed rock hauled in by a landscaping company. They formed temporary dikes along the road and filled thousands of sandbags.

Fox suspects the river has moved the house's foundation, but there was no panic in his voice as he explained the sandbagging process, the expectations for the rest of the week. There was only an uneasy, wary calm with which tired flood victims await the inevitable: The damage is already done, everyone is safe, the first of the floodwaters had receded, more damage is expected.

Just a few miles north, in Watertown, the only indication of an impending disaster was the turbulence in the Rock River, a waterway with a long history of settling, then unsettling, activity.

Fishing in Jefferson

Southward in Jefferson, behind the Rock Bottom Bar that bellies up to the Rock River, three teenagers sat fishing Wednesday afternoon. It was the first day of summer vacation for Tina Czappa, Kassy Long and Tim Sincere, ages 14, 13 and 16.

The very notion that a fish in the swollen river would have any spare energy to nip at the stinkbait on the teenagers' lines seemed folly, but the friends insisted they were getting bites.

Usually, the catch would be bottom-feeders, catfish, sheephead and carp, said Sincere, but the river was hosting refugees from other tributaries now, and a rainbow trout was pulled from the brown water Tuesday.

"The dam isn't holding anything back now," said Sincere, pointing to a ridge of brown suds that only local memory would recognize as a dam across the Rock. If a dam was there, it was holding its breath.