The Main Tributary: Missouri River
One morning I woke up early in Kansas City and walked to the banks of the Missouri River. It was October and the river was not as wide as it had been earlier in the year, though it moved quickly, brownly to its mother about two hundred miles away. I looked at the walnuts and maples, at the orange sunshine flooding the plain, and felt at a crossroads, in the middle of a vast tract of land that extended for a thousand miles in every direction, and that rapidly-moving brown water below me was headed to a destination with a purpose.
With names like Cairo and Memphis, our forebears knew the greatness of the North American mother river. It ranks with the world’s greatest rivers, which we will come to later on, this monstrous snake, carrying away the sediment of the American continent in serpentine draws to the Delta, the cotton-heavy, thick-aired Delta. All of that dirt is belched out into the Gulf of Mexico to create the bayous and swamps of Louisiana, the shallow riverways and watersheds home to gap-toothed Creoles and gator-wrestlers, a subtropical amalgamation of slave songs and barges, crescent moons and slow drawls.
The History of The Mississippi River
And the suffering! My god, how that river breeds suffering. The human pain it has seen in its history of dividing the American continent from East to West, during the short history of the American nation. How it once must have been a prehistoric sea, the foothills of the river around Illinois a dinosaurean plateau lush with grasses and trees, such fertile land. Sixty-five million years of meandering water so that when it gets to Louisiana, it’s slowed to a crawl, a turbid pulse of mud and catfish and turtles and ochre blood.
Drive the Great River Road and turn onto Highway 61. Huts of black folk scatter the landscape, rich with trees, the air warm and humid like a mother’s breath, buzz of cicadas a deafening plaguelike hum that grows and falls to a cadence unknown by human precision. Plantations of cotton buds, bales with loose strands falling out, sadly tumbling across the loamy brown fields. The sun may never be more human as when she shines on Mississippi. Even in the dark, the sun is only sleeping gently, ready to wake.
What about the catfish? One in every four freshwater fish is one of these nocturnal ancient monsters. They feed on the muddy bottoms, tail-flicking to propel themselves along to attack their prey.
The Eastern Tributary: The Ohio
In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny and the Monongahela join at Three Rivers Park to form the mighty Ohio River. This is the first non-eastern river in the U.S.; it is for all intents and purposes, the edge of the East, the Eastern Continental Divide. In colonial times, it was the border between French Territory and English. To cross this river is to journey into the Midwest and beyond, to the headlands of the Great Mississippi, motherwater of all America. This feeling is palpable as these two rivers join from the refuse-rich low-hilled coal-lands of Western PA. The Ohio, the eastern artery of the Mississippi, is brown and full of silt. It will take you down to the sultry south. Pittsburgh, a great American city, is your last chance to turn back.
The rivers of Western PA caused the great Johnstown Flood of 1889, the result of the failure of the South Fork Dam on the Little Conemaugh River, which led to an output temporarily equal to the Mississippi. Think! The Little Conemaugh equal to the Mississippi because of a dam break. The people of Western PA are used to disasters like this, to grandness, to being a frontier. Water, it seems, has never been their friend. The pollution from coal mining and fracking has led to a rugged, hardy people who abut the Western Edge of the Eastern Seaboard: standing at Three Points, feel that all the water rushing past you is sweeping out into the Middle of America.
The Ohio is the longest tributary of the Mississippi at 981 miles. It is a calm, gentle river, unbroken by rapids or rocks, a transitional river that freezes at its headwaters and becomes subtropical at Cairo, Illinois, where it is wider than the Mississippi at their confluence. Even the Iriquois called it, “Good River.” When you reach the Ohio, you are in good hands, you are ready to continue west, young man, and these waters augur a safe journey.
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