How might this river be encompassed, memorized, and understood? Stand on the bank of the Mississippi River, anywhere is fine, and view it as the remaining sum of everything it once was. With its headwaters in the north woods of Minnesota, from a small lake within red and white pine forests sustained by fire; then further south through a wide floodplain between high bluffs, some with hill prairies, a dry, fire-prone community; then tortuously meandering through the deep south; its complex discharge of water, products of erosion, debris, and various lifeforms—from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies—finally flows through a land of southern swamps with buttressed bald cypress and coastal marshes, before dissipating into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Mississippi River as it flows out of nearby Lake Itasca, Minnesota (2005).
The Mississippi River in the Driftless Area at Guttenberg, Iowa, above Lock and Dam #10 (1989).
The Mississippi River as it flows through northwestern Illinois' Driftless Area (2003).
Travel the river, but view in frustration only up to the next bend. So create a panorama of still shots along the way, two dimensions from a dynamic three, flattened and stretched, only a semblance of reality. And what of the scenes between images? Memorize the rest and rely upon the unreliability of recollection. Or measure and record with a scientific method, converting its shifting complexity into static tables of numbers and graphs generated from computer-assisted multivariate statistical analyses. Synthesize, synthesize, synthesize. What are the resulting images? More numbers and graphs. Where does this leave understanding? And what about between sampling points?
The Mississippi River at Davenport, Iowa, and Lock and Dam #15 (2024).
A side channel of the Mississippi River called Andalusia Slough,
about 10 miles downriver from the Quad Cities. Andalusia Island
is on the right (2022).
One must not overlook the time factor. For the Mississippi is always changing. A yearly spring flood is an expected event, sometimes profoundly altering the river’s course. Within its substrate and biota, subtle links exist that point to earlier versions of today’s river, some going back millions of years. Other clues are more recent and obvious, such as abandoned channels and oxbow lakes, showing where the river had once flowed.
A narrow channel entirely within the Mississippi River's Long Island, just upriver
from Quincy, Illinois (2003).
Still more recent, insignificant on a geologic time scale, is the river’s human history. A travel route—since the last glaciers retreated northward—in canoes, flatboats, wood- and coal-fired steamboats, diesel-powered towboats pushing lashed-together barges, and trains rolling along tracks following along the river banks. Because we are less inclined to grant the river its wild demands, it has been civilized with levees, wing dams, riprap, retaining walls, articulated concrete mat banks, and a system of locks and dams. The Mississippi is a regulated river: for commerce, resources, flood control until it's uncontrolled, and to carry away what our modern society would rather not think about.
The Mississippi River at Quincy, Illinois, with a towboat pushing barges,
a train crossing on a river bridge, and vehicles crossing the river on US Highway 24 (2020).
Mark Twain's childhood hometown along the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri (2022).
A recently burned hill prairie with a pre-historic Indian mound at McAdams Peak, Pere
Marquette State Park, Illinois, near the confluence of the Illinois and
Mississippi rivers (2023).
A levee break that occurred during the Great Flood of 1993.
Photograph near St. Louis, Missouri, from an airliner window as
the plane banked, October 1993.
At the river town of Grafton, Illinois, about 15 miles north of St. Louis,
Missouri, at the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers a few
years after the Great Flood of 1993. The 1993 high water mark is noted
on the building.
View of the American Bottoms from the Illinois bluffs. St. Louis,
Missouri is in the distance (far left center) (1990).
The Middle Mississippi River (between St. Louis, Missouri, and
Cairo, Illinois) at Trail of Tears State Park, Missouri, showing wing dams
and a towboat pushing barges. Southern Illinois' Shawnee Hills
are visible in the distance.
Bald cypress at an oxbow lake in southern Illinois at the northern-most
portion of the Mississippi Embayment.
The meandering lower Mississippi River (downriver from Cairo, Illinois)
at the border between Arkansas and Mississippi (yellow line). Photograph
by staff at the International Space Station on 2 April 2020 (nasa.gov).
It would be the rare bottomland forests, prairies, and wetlands that appear not much altered from before the dams where links remain to form a rough starting point to imagine what the past may have been like; burial and effigy mounds from pre-historic cultures fill in more of the blanks; and updated maps over the years present in abstract the changing watershed and provide the context. So much alluvium to be sifted through and interpreted.
Wetland within Turkey Island on the Mississippi River near Lock
and Dam #9 and New Boston, Illinois (1995).