THE RIVER

Tales of Southern Discontinuity, part I, the final chapter

The first river I encountered was the Missouri river. Perhaps it is this river more than the Mississippi that divides the West and the East. More like west of the Mizzou is really the West, east of the Big Muddy is really the East, in-between no one knows. You can say whatever you like, can even say a void, a void with Des Moines as its capital. Des Moines ain't that happening. But you can trade bananas for cigarettes there.

Awakened from the dark afternoon hotel room heat from the wet rain pounding the storm is in already here. The wind rushes it heals the world stops outside its like a shower you don't have to think if you think too much or maybe you think if you never think other times. It freezes you in time with its warm wetness. All of this will end up in clouds or a river or tears or all the above.

I'm driving in the rain the drizzle the trucks ahead of me in the two lane road the hills up and down the pavement wet. I'm east toward the Mississippi the farmlands get richer I'm nearing Illinois and as I near it, it begins to smell like it used to it begins to feel like the cars I used to drive the 54 Chevy Bel Air (stick) the 72 Bonneville the 63 Chevy Malibu (before they were cool) the 73 Mercury Comet with no brakes the 78 Chevy Suburban (RIP Toledo 1988) the 77 Ford LTD rusted through (RIP Iowa 1991), my family goes through run-down used automobiles like other families take out the trash. Clinton has a nice bridge and brick buildings and screams of the midwest I cross the Mississippi which is never so much a river as a long, long flooded parking lot it seems, does it even move? It must. Entering Illinois it all comes back. The signs, the cars, the shape of the land this is home even if I didn't think it was. The radio fades into familiarity. I am back East.

Downtown Chicago is a place where two rivers meet, and shortly but briefly coexist before they empty into Lake Michigan. (Che-ca-gau is American Indian for "Field of stinky onions") No other reason to found a city based on a field of stinky onions than two rivers meeting. Cept now the only reason there's a city there at all is that it was there before, most cities really. They don't need rivers or bays or anything anymore really. All they need is to be pretty (Los Angeles) or fun (Las Vegas) and maybe that says something about people too.

The river was the reason, then the lifelink, then the sewer, now just a legacy. The river carried everything into the lake into the ocean into the clouds into the mountains. Everything. The river wasn't a piece of nature; it was infrastructure. The sides of downtown weren't lined with river parks; they were lined with docks and effluent tubes carrying waste. All this went into the lake and it all came back out of the tap and the diseases and the fevers got worse. So they turned the river backwards. It flows backwards now, always looking like it doesn't know where to go. "Don't you know nobody parts two rivers met?" It ends up in New Orleans now, where before it ended up going over Niagara. Don't ask me which is better. But I'm heading to New Orleans just like this dirty river.

Cairo is a town surrounded by levees and poverty and rusting bridges and lots of them. It's the southernmost part of Illinois and it's more south than Richmond Virgina (which they love to point out, cause else they point out that their bridge needs a new coat of paint). Cairo (pronounced CAY-ROW, Americans can't pronounce anything like it should) sits there at the Mississippi and the Ohio and you have Kentucky and Missouri right there and Indiana and Tennessee not much more than a riverboat ride. It must be awfully nervous in a downpour with two muthers of a River bearing down on this nothing town, it's lucky it has that Kentucky Dam up there to calm down the Ohio a bit. Cairo is more of a point than a city, mostly just a throughway. It seems to exist mostly because this point needs a town. And bored people look the same as always.

If you look at the Tennessee back to front, from its end to its beginning, it starts at the Ohio, starts in Kentucky really, gets dammed up and pissed, heads into Tennessee and meanders into Mississippi, Alabama, back into Tennesse. It's called the Tennessee by default really. It's the 'T' in the TVA and it colors a whole region. You know that the river is nearby even if it only means a lower electric bill or more mosquitoes. This was the river that Grant used to strike into the Confederacy at first, finding it easier than the Mississippi. You get to the heart here. The heart of country music on AM radio that is. The heart of Dairy Queen.

Down towards Mississippi on the Tennessee is Pittsburg Landing, a former dock now just a cemetary, dead from Shiloh. Walking around the battlefield you forget that the reason it happened here was the river. The river carried the Union straight down into the thick of it. The river carries sounds too. Grant heard the gunshots of Shiloh 7 miles away while eating breakfast in Savannah, Tennessee, along the same river. The river is quiet now it laps. There's a "Stuckey's" in Savannah now or at least there should be.

The "Delta" refers to NW Mississippi, the poorest region of the US by most estimates. The delta refers to the maze of rivers that shoot up into the flat earth around the Mississippi so flat the only hills were manmade. Even for an Illinoisan this is damn flat, where the Mississippi takes the longest way possible between point to point and maybe that's reflected in more than geography. You can feel the river there in the silent cotton fields. It just says come to me, because you have to, eventually. But you may take your goddam sweet time roaming to and fro and up and down and never can tell which way you're going, but you always end up in New Orleans. If you spit or piss, it's gonna end up in New Orleans.

Vicksburg is farther south, along the River and from its bluffs you can see the whole complex maze of water below. The height and the distance don't offer that much clarity to the meandering below. You drive across into Lousiana and listen to Zeppelin When the Levee Breaks and wonder what levee Plant was talking about. If this levee broke it would take most of the US with it, as you stand on top of the world, really only 20 feet above the flattest earth that ever was. So flat you can see the burning fields down the row for miles, just from 20 feet up.

It's late the moon is full, it's wet from recent rains and it's misty and it's hot and the journal is gone and the rain keeps coming and the River is always there and the thunderstorm rolls in and out and moon keeps hiding and coming back so you listen to that old Springsteen album weatherbeaten as Tusk scratchy and all and you drive around in a circle and you get lost in a cemetary and the clouds come in and out and you're going in circles but the river is still there only there are no bridges and you think about that but give up and you stop at midnight and try to smoke a clove but the Man in a Cajun accent gives you a boot and you find out this is the False River and it's nothing more than a long thin lake because the river stopped flowing this way it just decided it had better things to do and the stupid false river don't know any better. And there ain't nothing more discouraging than a river that don't know where to go.

I'm fascinated by infrastructure mostly old and decaying and metal-like, always linking something to something else really. And the rivers were the first infrastructure and the ferries were the next. Big hulking pieces of flat metal churning back and forth Charon perpetually working all hours of the day and night no romance just a job to do to endure until something better comes along or takes it place and it only costs $1 to cross else these poor people would be left more isolated than they already are. $1 ain't much but it was enough for an early morning ferry ride bouncing around Thibodaux. Is this destined to be a tourist attraction of a day gone by?

The Ferry from downtown N'Orleans to Algiers runs back and forth every night. Free to people if you have a fever and want to cool off and want to take photos. Tourists and lovers ride back and forth and the fake steamboats compete with the barges and tankers on their way to Baton Rouge. Barges and tankers can offer a romance that way, romance is nicer when it's far enough away to make a nice photograph.

It's 2 AM and you need to find some sleep so you cross the Missouri for the last time and try to find a motel no luck, try to find a field no luck. So you sleep for 3 hours outside the 24 hour automat car wash where there's some grass and some kids check you out because who in the hell would choose here to sleep? And you leave a statue of the wolf there because it don't fit anymore.