River Muse-ings
I just finished Paul Schneider’s Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. The parts I liked least: places where Schneider gives us more personal-essay than research-book (of course I have nothing against personal essays, but his particular execution didn’t excite me), and the chapter(s) devoted to Civil War battles and strategy (not my kind of history). The parts I loved most: where Schneider channels the kind of macro-view employed by one of my favorite authors, local geographer Richard Campanella––where elegant prose, nuanced explorations of cause-and-effect, and an expansive view of history, both human and natural, come together.
Here is an excerpt from the second-to-last chapter, where Schneider details the seemingly infinite examples of human attempts at controlling the Mississippi River and its tributaries: “Every one of the dams and levees has a story behind it: an astonishing engineering feat, an epic political battle, an abrogated Indian treaty, a dubious economic study, a broken back, a drowned coolie, a blown-up rig, a lost homestead, an irrigated field, a picnic by the reservoir, maybe some skinning-dipping. Some of the stories are very good, and some are sad. But none of the stories are much solace to a homeless shrimp or a hungry Cajun at the bottom of the river. Or a flooded city.…
So Louisiana continues to sink into the sea under the weight of its load of ice-age mud, while the only thing that can save it––the river of mud that made it in the first place––is shackled from top to bottom” (330).
If rivers are metaphors for Time-with-a-capital-T, then are our clumsy attempts at shackling them metaphors for our relationship to time? We need this ancient, massive, unpredictable, mountain-dismantling, course-shifting body of water, and yet we want it to never get too high, too low, or too shallow. It cannot change courses. It cannot touch our city, and yet our city is sinking for lack of its touch….
