We tamed the Mississippi. Should we?
Welcome to the first Friday conversation about living the dilemma. I explore my relationship with the other. This is a conversation with you, my reader. Talk back.
This is the first of several Seeker posts about the South. A road trip down the Mississippi a year ago still festers in my mind. I have not been able to digest the many-layered
experience. Perhaps picking apart themes that keep forcing themselves into my consciousness will help. Perhaps readers will engage in this conversation about the South and I will find the balance I am seeking.
First the River itself.
From the age of ten, I lived in northeastern Oklahoma near the Arkansas River and several of its tributaries. My father read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to me and my two younger brothers. We made a pack to build a raft someday and float downriver to New Orleans. The dream stuck in my mind and spurred me to respond to my sister-in-law’s suggestion that we drive the Great River Road. She and I had married the Bell brothers in 1957 (me) and 1963 (Joan). We were both East Coast girls, with East Coast college degrees. As married couples, we each had lived in Kansas (me) and Oklahoma (Joan).
Widowed now, and living far from the South, we wanted to experience the Mississippi River and the towns along its shores. Maybe we would understand the South better and our younger lives lived in quasi-southern places if we drove the back roads (no interstates), slept in fishing cabins, ate with the locals, stopped at all points of interest, and paid attention with open minds.
Our road trip began in St. Louis at the Hyatt Regency at the base of the Gateway Arch. Human engineering awed. The movie about constructing the Arch is high drama. Nothing like it had been tried before. It was not a sure thing that the monument would stand when they dropped the centerpiece in place. Riding to the top in the tiny tram, I marveled at the structure from the inside.
Flowing through St. Louis, the Mississippi is a Water Way, straight banks and full of commerce. Cargill’s grain elevators dominate to eastern shore. Mark Twain remarked on the straightening of the river in his memoir Life on the Mississippi published in 1883. Gazing at the river, I could see that he would not recognize it and that today’s pilots do not need to “read” the river the way he did in his youth. His detailed description of learning to navigate the river fascinated me. The pages read like a lesson in mindfulness. How rare is it to have such an intimate relationship with a natural thing? My guide running the Colorado through the Grand Canyon needed that skilled observation for the thirteen-day trip. Twain piloted two thousand miles traveling day and night with few mechanical devices to assist him. Not so the modern pilot.
The Corps of Engineers
In the 1970s, I read Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works. January 1, 1971 by Arthur E. Morgan. A Quaker and proponent of small towns to build community and cooperation, Morgan was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the great flood control project begun as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Morgan became disenchanted with the Corps as the agency played "deus ex machina" interfering with the natural flow of rivers beyond helpful projects. His book made me a critic of the Corps. I volunteered as a citizen activist in a two-year study for the City of Seattle’s Electric utility to investigate whether conservation—building codes—could reduce the increasing electricity demand and avoid the building of another hydroelectric dam. Seattle did not build another dam in the seventies because of the study’s conclusions: conservation can reduce demand.
It was never my intention to wonder about the Corps of Engineers during our road trip, but when we stayed in an air-conditioned cabin at Ken Lake State Park not far from Paducah, home of the quilt museum, I realized we traveled in part of the Tennessee Valley Authority. At breakfast in the park’s lodge, we chatted with an elderly couple enjoying their grits and sausage. The wife gazed out at the lake with a wistful look. “That there’s where my people lived before the dam. We had no choice. Move or get flooded out. They gave my folks money to buy a new place. I was five. Even then it didn’t seem fair.”
We don’t trust the government. A topic for this seeker’s exploration of the South in a future post.
In Vicksburg amidst the monuments to the deadly battle and Union Army siege in 1863, is a modern museum of the Corps of Engineer’s efforts to control the Mississippi’s frequent floods. Pride in human conquest over nature exuded from every chart and poster.
I cheered for the River at an Old River Control Structure, a floodgate system in a branch of the Mississippi River in central Louisiana. It regulates the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River, thereby preventing the Mississippi River from changing course.
If I remember correctly, in the aftermath of Katrina’s winds and ocean surge destruction of the protective levies around New Orleans, a few thoughtful people suggested we have over-engineered the River. One levy created a deep-water channel for cruise ships to reach New Orleans. Smacks of a twisted, money-centered value driving the engineers with little regard for the low-income Parishes in the path of any potential breech. There is a plan to let the River meander more along its course, sending flood water overload into Arkansas.
We have our own Water Way here in Seattle where our only river, once home to teaming runs of salmon and indigenous Duwamish people, is now a super-fund site. Warnings on the banks read “eating more than three fish a month from these water can be hazardous to your health.”
What is our right relationship to the rivers that provide both commercial transportation and home to people and other creatures? Can we have both? Is there a third way by which humans recognize we are Second Tier beings according to Robin Kimmerer, ecologist and Potawatomi citizen? We must learn from our elders, the grasses, through careful observation and an attitude of humility.
The Mississippi River could be a partner, not an adversary as we seek to balance nature and commerce, flood-protected housing and water that could distribute nutrients to farmland instead of rushing to fill the Gulf of Mexico
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