"The Lord must have heard us," one of those citizens told me, for in 1993 began a spate of precipitation unlike anything the living had witnessed. What seemed to be the new normal was that it would snow all winter, and just as that began to melt it would begin raining all spring. In the worst years, falls were wet, too. Creeks and rivers flooded. Wetlands swelled. And the lake rose. It came up five and a half feet that first year, and another four the next.

The problem is that it has not stopped. Unlike with a river flood, this water does not naturally recede after a week or a month. It has nowhere to go: The lakebed is the result of a glacier that melted roughly 10,000 years ago, and its only natural outlet is at 1,458 feet above sea level. Since August 1992, the lake has risen more than 29 feet. That would be a remarkable increase in nearly any body of water, but in the context of North Dakota's famously flat topography it is extraordinary; here, the rising lake spreads across the land like water spilled on a table. At the lake's current size, a one-foot rise consumes more than 15,000 acres of surrounding land. In 19 years it has grown from roughly 69 square miles to 285, an area about the size of Fort Worth, Texas.

In recent years the lake has become so massive that it has begun a sort of self-perpetuation through its influence on the local weather. The body of water adds so much moisture to the lower atmosphere that it may well be increasing the amount of precipitation the area receives. And on summer nights in Minnewaukan you hardly need the A/C anymore. Nice for sleeping, perhaps, but the cooler air means less evaporation, more standing lake.

Researchers believe similar situations have happened in the past. The lake has reached its 1,458-foot natural outlet at least twice in the past four millennia, most recently about 2,000 ago, and it is now only seven feet from that mark. But our recorded history since European settlement has been a quiet time in terms of hydrologic activity, explains Gregg Wiche, director of the U.S. Geological Survey's North Dakota Water Science Center.

"Our understanding of that place has been that there weren't a lot of big floods," he explained. "So then during the last twenty years, this very wet period comes along. Researchers say, 'Jeez, this happened before,' but in our short experience here it hadn't. You asked me what the untold story here is. Well, the untold story is how variable and surprising nature can be. And now we're left to deal with this."

By "this" Wiche means the drowned football field, the disappearing roads, and building after building taken by the waters—the pieces that together comprise the world built up across this landscape over the past 125 years. With little way of knowing how vulnerable it could make them, settlers and their progeny assumed that the lake would more or less stay put—that a permanent society could safely be established on the land around it. Roads were laid and towns founded. Fields were cultivated, and acreage was bought, sold and passed down through generations. Lives were rooted in the dry land.