The Mississippi

Of Time and The River: All who have sought the Mississippi have found something more, have found their own sources and outlets, as if the river were a god or the oracle of a god. Mark Twain as Huck Finn, on the church of his raft: "It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking aloud, and it warn't often that we laughed--only a little kind of a low chuckle." T. S. Eliot, St. Louis boy Englishing his childhood awe: "I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river / Is a strong brown god...." William Carlos Williams, tough baby doctor sprawling loose before the New World, the New World for him a goddess in wondrous bloody lust baiting priapic De Soto: "And in the end you shall receive of me, nothing--save one long caress as of a great river passing forever upon your sweet corse." De Soto's men, fearful that the Indians would discover by their leader's death that he was not the god they thought him to be, cased him like a nut in a hollowed cottonwood log and dumped him into the river, where he perhaps became a snag, became a towhead, became an island midstream and then was duly washed away to the Gulf, detritus of conquest, discoverer dissolved by the flood he discovered, as are we all. No man steps twice into the same river. Not even his own.

I'm wukin' my way back home,I'm wukin' my way back home,I'm wukin' my way back home, Baby,I'm wukin' my way back home.Timber don't git too heavy fo' me,An' sacks too heavy to stack,All that I crave fo' many a long day,Is yo' lovin' when I git back.

• • •

The Mississippi River drains nearly half the continental United States. Its tributaries head as far east as Pennsylvania and New York, as far north as Minnesota, as far west as the continental divide in Wyoming and Montana. It carries the runoff of 1,245,000 square miles of land into the Gulf of Mexico. If you count the Missouri as its main branch, it is the third longest river in the world; in places, a mile wide and as much as 200 feet deep. Muddy, but not so muddy as most of us imagine: Though it annually transports some 400,000,000 tons of silt and gravel downstream, slowly working to level the continent, its volume of water is so tremendous that all those tons of earth represent an average of only 600 parts per million of its total load. That is a tenth of the Missouri River's average. China's Yellow River, by contrast, often carries a weight of earth greater than the weight of its water. In low water, above the mouth of the Missouri at St. Louis, the Mississippi is sometimes as blue as the Danube once was. It is turbid not because of mud but because it carries suspended within it tiny grains of sand that efficiently reflect sunlight on the wave lengths of the human eye.

Nor is the Mississippi busy at delta building, as the Nile was before the High Aswan Dam choked it, as the Tigris and Euphrates are today at the rate of 160 feet a year. The Mississippi's delta forms not outward but downward: Such is the weight of the alluvium it has deposited into the Gulf below New Orleans that it has depressed the earth's crust there, tilting the block of crust downward and uplifting the coastal lands in the state of Mississippi. Numbers can hardly compass the volume of water the Mississippi carries. Banks full, the lower river can handle 1,000,000 cubic feet of water per second. By comparison, New York City uses 175,000,000 cubic feet of water per day.

It heads in Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota (though some have argued, successfully, I think, that if early explorers had entered the North American continent from the West, they would have counted the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana as its source--until St. Louis, the Missouri is the longer and more powerful stream). Unlike most rivers, within a few miles of its source the Mississippi begins meandering, wandering back and forth in a pattern dictated by the slope of the land and its composition, a pattern shaped by complicated pressures of water and earth into one of the simplest of all mathematical forms, the sine wave, or connected S curve. It picks up the Wisconsin River--French explorers used the Wisconsin as a short cut to the Mississippi from the Great Lakes--then the Missouri, then the Ohio, the St. Francis, the Arkansas, running full and powerful now, then the Yazoo, then down into the bayou South and past New Orleans and another 100 miles out its three delta passes to the sea. A pantheon of smaller rivers enters it all along its way. It is not the father of waters but the gatherer of waters. From the Appalachians to the Rockies and over into Texas, from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast, everything that rains from the sky, everything we pour and flush and drain, eventually runs into the Mississippi. The Great Sewer, one early observer named it who saw the dead trees and the black, bloated bodies of drowned buffalo it freighted by. It is the Great Sewer in spades today.

Once it emptied into an ancient river called the Teays. Ice-age glaciers pushed it south, connected it with the Ohio, and it found outlet into a belly of flatland that reaches up almost to St. Louis, the Mississippi embayment, in ages past the farthest inland extension of the Gulf of Mexico. Down the middle of the embayment, down a depressed line of bedrock called the Mississippi Structural Trough that is covered today with an average of 150 feet of alluvial soil, the Mississippi River ran in full course to the sea.

If huge natural forces are gods, the Mississippi is one of our greatest gods, and its mark is on our past. Relic species of fish and wildflowers that are found in the Missouri Ozarks do not occur again until the Appalachians. They are divided from themselves by the river, which also divided the dense forest that once covered Eastern America, the pelt of God, from the prairies and plains of the West. Anonymous Mongolians who crossed the Bering Strait 20,000 years ago and discovered North America first looked at the river through human eyes, stalking mastodon into the embayment out of Ozark hills. It drowned De Soto's corpse and thwarted La Salle's visionary dreams. It defined the Louisiana Purchase for Thomas Jefferson. Lewis and Clark poled it; Zebu-Ion Pike explored its western reaches; it was turnpike and waterway to 19th Century America. Vicksburg's blood ran into it and the blood of Union men.

It nurtured the genius of Samuel Clemens. He returned to it joyfully, as a man returns to an oasis in an ill-favored land. "The Mississippi is well worth reading about," he began Life on the Mississippi, in words so understated they hardly make a sound. "It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable." He was not a man to gush. He saved his emotion for a later moment, when he might explain indirectly what he felt for the river, he who had been a river pilot until the Civil War with its attendant dangers cut short his career: "Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings." Like Huck, he lit out for the Territory, leaving the river behind. For the rest of his life, he struggled with that decision, and more than once its consequences brought him low.

The Mississippi has claimed men's lives, tens of thousands of them: De Soto's was only a marker, after all. Count drowned voyageurs, their canoes overloaded with beaver pelts; count keelboat men coursing down drunk from Ohio; count escaping slaves and exploding steamboats and sailors cannoned out of gunboats in the Civil War. Count the victims of the river's huge floods: 330,000 people were rescued from roofs and treetops during the flood of 1927, the flood Herbert Hoover called "the greatest disaster of peacetimes in our history." Count all the dead and you still have not begun to measure the river, but at least you may begin to know it as more than the steadfast Ol' Man of Showboat fame.

And know this also about the river: that unlike every other alluvial river in the world, it does not build up the land. The Yellow, the Po, the Nile build valleys to ever-higher elevations by washing the hills where they head into the valleys downstream. The Mississippi does not, because it is so large, because it is so deep. Even its continually changing meanders, once the river has cut through their necks and run on by, fill back in. You can see them from the air all along the embayment, the snaking vines of the past river, memories of past courses solidified into soil as if they never were. The Mississippi is not an American citizen, has not settled here; like an oracle in this also, it is a traveler, it is only passing through.

• • •

Pollution threatens the lower river, pollution from the farms and towns and cities and industrial parks upstream, pollution from 60 refineries and steel mills and chemical plants at Baton Rouge--threatens, potentially, the Gulf of Mexico itself, which may die someday as Lake Erie died--but pollution is not the primary paradox of man's work on the Mississippi. That paradox is subtler, one of first choices and last things. The river must be controlled if people are to live on its vast flood plain. But the river cannot be controlled. Not entirely. The price would be too high and the effects unknown. The river is big as nature itself. That is the paradox, that nature is larger than any man-made controls and includes them.

In Vicksburg, Mississippi, years ago, in grudging response to the flood of 1927, which upset all its calculations, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers built its Waterways Experiment Station. Civilian engineers had argued successfully that gauging the river, as the Corps had done in the past, wasn't enough to understand it, nor leveeing the river enough to control it: They must model it and try out their works on the models before they (continued on page 296)The Mississippi(continued from page 180) built them on the river itself. German prisoners of war built the most comprehensive of the river models at Jackson during World War Two. Good duty, the colonel in charge of the Vicksburg station says today. The Germans still hold reunions from time to time to admire their giant toy. Another model, now defunct but serviceable in its time, occupies an area the size of a football field at the Vicksburg station. You can step across the river on the model as easily as you would step across a ditch. The Mississippi lady who guides you on the tour must call up first and ask the pump house to turn the river on. Here is Vicksburg, a short hike clown the model is Natchez, and down farther the Atchafalaya flows in from the west. Trees of green wire tower above the river on concrete islands and along the batture, the land riverward of the levees. The levees themselves are scaled disproportionately high. They look like the walls of medieval forts. The model is a moment in the river's life and it serves its purpose, but more subtle models await us indoors.

Today, to model the river, the station works on a larger scale along shorter sections. Inside buildings whose tin roofs cover an acre of land, garden bulldozers gouge out buff clay. To known measurements of the river, tinsmiths make templates that guide workers who build up the river bed by hand, flooring it with sand or powdered coal that duplicates the silt on the bottom. City water from Vicksburg pulses up over head bays and flows downstream, meandering, changing course as the real river does, and into this model river the engineers insert locks and dams and jetties and watch the water flow. Engineers in rubber waders walk the river, clipboards in hand, or negotiate miniature barges through model locks with radio controls. It is reasonably accurate work and it has saved American taxpayers millions of dollars among the billions that the Corps's work on the river has cost, but it catches the imp of fancy. It left me fancying that all our military men might live at stations mapped with giant games and that the station compounds might be fenced with high Cyclone fencing, the barbed top wires facing in. The Waterways engineers have modeled Asian rivers in their time and may model the Mekong Delta one of these days, if there is any delta left to model. Models cannot reproduce bomb craters, nor the tiny corpses of the Asian dead, no matter how many might litter the banks. There are degrees of madness: Playing with models would be one of the lesser degrees if the models were not expanded again outward into the real world.

In one of Waterways' buildings stands a model of Niagara Falls. "We used this model to save the falls," says the lady guide. Upriver from the falls stretches a power dam. "They shut off the falls at night"--she means the real ones, not the model--"and store up water in the reservoir above the dam. They turn the falls back on during the day for the honeymooners. Oh, and leave them on until the lights go out about ten o'clock. They don't want to spoil the scenery for the tourists." She would be certifiable if her statement weren't true. The engineers shut off Niagara Falls at night and turn them on by day for tourists. To generate electric power.

They would shut off the Mississippi if they could. Since they can't, they have set out to pave it. Dams on its upper reaches and tributaries, levees and diversion channels on its lower stream contain it from all but the most enormous of floods. That work is nearly complete and it cost us tar more than it cost to go to the moon. But the Mississippi meanders, to its own whim, and a shifting channel threatens the expensive levee works and complicates shipping, so the Corps means to hold the Mississippi to its present bed. To that end, in low water, boats leave stations along the lower river laden with asphalt and concrete mats and fit them against the banks of the river where it works to cut those banks away, on the outside curves of its meanders. And mile after mile on the lower river, jetties jut out into the water, their ends marked with red buoys, deflecting the flow back within the channel. The channel still shifts, but its shifting is at least partly controlled, and river pilots who once rememorized the river every trip now have some assurance that it will flow approximately where it flowed before. But the process of adjustment goes on: Engineering is a matter of adjustment and of adjustments then upon adjustments; the tolerances are coarse and the adjusting must go on, ensuring a future for the Corps.

Men who turn Niagara Falls on and off like a tap aren't likely to leave the Mississippi River alone. A massive challenge elicits from such men a massive response. Is it perverse to imagine that the Corps would bomb hell out of the river if it thought it would do any good? It planned as much for the successor to the Panama Canal until the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty scotched its plans. It was going to blast out a new canal with atomic bombs. Hell of a lot easier than dredging. Sorcerer's apprentices, the Corps, with more funds available to it from Congress over the years than to NASA, and seldom a sorcerer nearby to call a halt.

Here is a model of New York, Long Island, the coasts of Connecticut and New Jersey, and over there is a tide generator and fans to imitate the freshening wind blowing in from the Atlantic that mixes the salt with the less than sweet. Here is Los Angeles-Long Beach, there the Arkansas and the Red and the Rio Grande. They are modeling artificial harbors to be built up and down the California coast to accommodate supertankers. They are planning a navigable waterway into the heart of Texas. They never modeled Florida, more's the pity. The scale of that beleaguered shallow peninsula is too subtle to duplicate on less than the original itself. But from building to building, indoors and out of doors, the Mississippi lady returns you again and again to sections of the river. It has been the Corps's greatest challenge and its greatest reward, more dams, more jetties, more and more asphalt mats, higher and higher levees, and still today not controlled, still evading the turn of the magic tap. For that, at least, we may be thankful.

"One who knows the Mississippi," wrote Samuel Clemens more than 100 years ago:

will promptly aver--not aloud but to himself--that 10,000 River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, "Go here," or "Go there," and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.

It may once have been wisdom to keep still and lie low, but it is not wisdom anymore. The mentality that fetters and handcuffs rivers is the same mentality that threatens to pollute the ocean and poison the air and salt the land; and the unscientific man finds more science walking beside a creek than the engineers yet teach in all their schools, and he had damned well better not keep still if he and all the others like him want the earth to survive. The day of abstruse science is over, because nature is more abstruse yet and evolved her academies over millions of years, and took short-term calculations of benefit into account and proved them wrong, made lush valleys into deserts and pushed ocean bottoms up into mountaintops and long ago worked her adjustments out. They can be modified, but they cannot be ignored.

Only consider one line of the Corps's work, one of its upriver dams. Silt that once the river carried away to the sea now piles up behind the dam. Imagine the extent of that silt, already one third up on some dams, 100 years from now. When it fills the reservoir, where will the floodwater go? Ah, but the Corps is aware of that problem. It will solve it tidily: It will build another dam upstream. But upstream are not deep-carved canyons suitable for a dam, but prairie and plain, where the water spreads out across four, five, ten times as much land, and good land, too. The new dam is wider, the new lake shallower, and the silting there proceeds faster than it did in the canyon reservoir below. The threat, however, is removed for another generation. Where will the water go then? The Corps builds for today, not for generations unborn. The problem is here, in flooding now, not there, in silt-filled reservoirs 50 years hence. Thus, the Corps's mentality matches the mentality of the industries that refuse to stop polluting because the river or the lake is not yet thoroughly dead, or because their competitors haven't stopped, or because the facts aren't all in, or because the cost is high and the dividends to stockholders correspondingly low, or because it's cheaper to advertise their concern.

There is a limit to adjustment. We are near that limit. We will have to do more than flatten our tin cans and exchange our detergents for soap and carry our bottles back to the store. We will have to do more than lie low. The river leads the way, past battlefields and unnamed graves.

• • •

Behind a bluff overlooking the Mississippi at Vicksburg, trenches and redoubts now softened by green lawn barricade the town, marked with memorials of white marble glaring in the delta sun. The Mississippi ran red with blood, a guide says (it runs red today at Baton Rouge with bauxite waste from an aluminum smelting plant--lead in that waste, and mercury, cyanide, 10 or 20 other poisons--in trace amounts, the company environmentalist demurs). At Vicksburg, Grant unleashed the dogs of modern war, siege, trench and mine, espionage and flank attack and blockade, and the citizens of Vicksburg ran to tunnels cut back into the hills of windblown loess on which their besieged city was built. At Vicksburg, before he took the city, Grant for once met his match: tried to dig a cutoff across the neck of a Mississippi meander and saw his men dying like flies of snake bite and yellow fever and looked at the river and knew he had been defeated. And turned back the more implacably to the land. The battlefield, now a national military park, is silent today, the enormous delta trees hardly moved even by the wind of summer, silent as a battlefield in the midst of battle when the ears can bear no more of gunshot and cannonade. Here ran a trench; there artillery boomed from behind earthworks guarded by sharpshooters; nothing now but mounds that might be burial mounds and the sod sealed over like skin grafted to hide an ugly scar.

With elegant foppery, the generals of the War of the Potomac lined up Union and Confederate opposite each other in open fields and marched them forward in European style, while ladies and gentlemen of Washington carriaged out to picnic and to watch, and men were merely pawns, firing and retreating in line, firing and retreating in line, until the setting sun stalemated the game and battle broke off to wait for picnic weather. That was the old way, the way that believed the world genteel and the dreams of men amusing and the gush of blood a tasteless mistake. Parisian ladies had coupled with imported Osage Indians a few decades earlier with no more concern.

Grant believed otherwise. He knew the smell of fresh loam at plowing time and the rage of pride in a man when he blazed the corner trees of a homestead. He knew the taste of sour mash, too, and the way it seemed to clean away the crust of poverty and shame. He took a nation's dismemberment as seriously as he took a man's and counted the lives of common men precious; but he also bore the stain of technology and could batter Confederate wives and children into tunnels, to make a point. He fought a modern war: The war was won on the battlefields of the West. And the paradox of modern war is the same as the paradox of the engineers' work on the Mississippi, because both think somehow to improve the lives of men with technology, but both are partial technologies that do not take the organism of nature, including man's own nature, sufficiently into account. Replace men with cannon, but pound the enemy's homes. Bind the river with dams and levees, but forget the silting of the reservoirs and the danger of settlement on flood plains and pollute the river and the Gulf with metals and with oil.

Behind the Vicksburg bluff, closest to the river, lies the national cemetery marked with rows and rows of the anonymous dead, each body or fragment of a body celebrated with a numbered brick of marble or a headstone inscribed Unknown. The Army buried the dead together in shallow graves after the battle. They would have moldered there forever, but pigs rooted up the corpses at Shiloh. Country pigs rooted at the national conscience and the national-cemetery system was hurried into law and at Vicksburg 16,600 corpses were un-matted and laid out in individual plots with no more identity than the earth that covered them. There is something cynical about this green and peaceful cemetery where, between the numbered bricks, the spaces for the bodies seem all too small. The men were buried in common while the war raged on and only later did the rooting pigs call us back to do the anonymous bones some minor honor. Twain found more to respect at Vicksburg than I. "Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government. The Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first place, and then takes care of it." But the dead lay unnamed at Vicksburg, and who in good conscience could repeat Twain's words today?

After Vicksburg I visited another grave, searching for sources, a grave on a bluff like Vicksburg's overlooking the Missouri River, a grave I had not visited for 20 years: my mother's. She died of a gunshot wound, by her own hand, during the despair of the Depression, in 1938, when I was one year old. Hers was a ghost I had never laid to rest, have only begun to lay to rest now, and, like the soldiers' graves, her grave seemed too small to contain the enormity of her loss. I searched for most of an hour before I found it down a hillside, a wilted peony on the stone dropped there by someone who had visited the cemetery earlier that day and wept not only for his own dead but also for the dead whom no one had yet seen fit to mourn with flowers. But the name was carved on the stone, and the word Wife, and the dates, 1908, 1938, with a hyphen between to call forth to those who mourned her the meaning of her years, if meaning there was. More, at least, than a number. More than the word Unknown. How the families of the Vicksburg dead must have grieved to wander over the freshly sodded earth of the Vicksburg National Cemetery, after the speeches of dedication were done, and find no identification at all, find only a field of corpses conveniently separated and numbered like parts in a warehouse. The Government does its work well in the first place, and then takes care of it.

Of all the Corps's civil works, the Mississippi remains the most recalcitrant, will not be bound, and you must see that engineers do not sleep peacefully with the flood of the river roaring in their ears, must even dream of it sometimes who pride themselves on never dreaming at all, dreams being the very antithesis of order to an engineer, the very stuff of madness, though in truth they serve to keep us sane.

Think of Mark Twain, the public man who intended to make his mark on the world with a machine called the Paige typesetter, a machine with 18,000 moving parts in which he invested $200,000 of Sam Clemens' earnings as a writer. He believed it would revolutionize typesetting; he intended it to make him a Whitney or a Rockefeller. It was a glorious machine, as machines go. It was Twain's mechanical man, and his undoing, which secretly he knew. It bankrupted him and sent him around the world to play the clown at lectures when he might have been home writing books. It was the node of his neurosis, the focus of the division within himself. All his life, he was divided between the rewards of manipulating human beings and the satisfactions of understanding them. Mark Twain worked his machine; Sam Clemens visited the river.

Or think of the hills outside Vicksburg, hills of dense, deep loess cut down vertically 50 feet or more to make room for highways and roads, cut so dramatically that you feel, driving between the cuts, as if you were driving through a battle trench. Above the cuts, the lush delta foliage laps at the edges like the water of the river itself and the vines reach over for root they only barely cannot find. Change the angle of the cuts only a few degrees and the vines would race down the hillside and lock across the road and break it up and carry it away to the river and dump it in. Would do that in the name of an order that has nothing to do with asphalt or the dozer blade. The dead at Vicksburg know, waiting there underground impatient for Judgment Day and the return of their names; and from seeds dropped over their corpses, they have pushed up live oaks and magnolia trees that sometimes encase the stone markers themselves, seizing them within their trunks as the law seizes evidence in a raid. So the river cuts at levees, its 10,000,000 pressures resolved into sine waves as elegant as the paths of missiles, and as unswerving.

... Almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable,Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminderOf what men choose to forget. Un-honored, unpropitiatedBy worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

That is the river T. S. Eliot saw, the real river, the one Sam Clemens could not deny, though Mark Twain urged him to, to pay for his machine.

• • •

Steamboat on the river: the Delta Queen, met at night by one of her stores boats run out from the wharf at Vicksburg. Passing us first as we supplied a diesel tug, lit up like a distant carnival with lights run round her decks, her glorious red paddle wheel slapping the water behind her and her steam whistle tooting twice as she beat on by. Straining up the river at five or six miles an hour, hugging the banks, staying out of the sweep of the channel, the pilot alert in the night to the Corps's jetties buried under high water, his spotlight searching the water and the flooded banks. She is not as elegant as the old steamboats were, but she is the most elegant boat on the river today, a visitor to the Mississippi who made the Mississippi her home.

She was built in California in 1926 for the Sacramento River trade; ran from Sacramento down to San Francisco; then served honorably, painted drab, as a ferry in World War Two; was then crated and towed down the California coast and through the Panama Canal to New Orleans, and then up to Cincinnati and a home berth. Plies the river now on weekend excursions for the young and on one-to-three-week excursions for the old who can afford the passage and the time. Charged with ghosts that enlarge her pacific pleasures of card games and quiet dancing and calliope hikes around the decks into something somber, stately and irredeemably antique: ghosts of ages gone, ghosts of a time in American life when we made choices we must now unmake.

The Civil War ruined the river trade, discovered the uses of rails overland, changed the orientation of the continent from North-South to East-West, prepared us for industrialization. The Civil War put millions of men in ready-made clothes for the first time in their lives, gave them interchangeable rifles, taught them to eat out of cans, forced them to march together who had always before marched separately, to different drums.

We might wish the South had won. The South fought to defend slavery, and in that it was terribly, tragically wrong; but the South also fought to defend the rural and the local, the homemade, and we might wish today it had won that battle, even as we are glad it lost the other. Those today who defend the wilderness, the natural, against technology gone berserk, the Sierra Clubs and the Environmental Defense Funds, are only fighting the battle again, against worsened odds. The Delta Queen struggles to beat upstream where diesel barges laden with oil easily pass her by: The defenders of the environment could do worse than to take her for their standard. She is old and inefficient; her only excuse for being on the river is the excuse that she is scaled to human scale and does not destroy. She may not stay on the river much longer. She is made of wood; wood burns; and a law written for ships at sea has been applied to her. She has received a few years of Congressional exception, but there are those in Congress who do not wish her well.

By daylight, from her deck, because the water is high and the Corps's works submerged, you see the river as De Soto or La Salle must have seen it, brown water and willow-grown banks, and from Vicksburg to Memphis, a passage of two days and nights, hardly any work of man in sight. A single skunk pushing through the brush on shore can fill the boat with its fierce musk. In the early morning, the pilot whistles deer to break across glades at the water's edge. Implacable mosquitoes swarm aboard at dusk as if they have waited like the passengers for the dinner gong. The sun sets red into the green willows as if it were setting into the sea.

If he had poled up the river instead of marching to it overland, De Soto would have thought the continent uninhabited. De Soto brought pigs to America, pigs that would later root up the dead at Shiloh. He fed his men from the river and knew its teeming life, catfish big as a man, paddlefish bigger yet, with snouts like ocean swordfish and mouths baleened to catch river plankton, their white meat fine as sole, their dark meat of a taste like the backwaters of the river under the banks late at night, a taste as yet unnamed.

Indians rowed out to challenge De Soto in 40-foot canoes hollowed from entire cottonwood trees, and since he came not to know the river but to dominate the men who lived on its flanks, he knew how to respond. The river he did not attend: It was only another obstacle. Crossing it must have put him in a fine funk; even on a boat the size of the Delta Queen, you sense its aloofness from the parasites and symbionts it carries on its back. It is as much a wall as Melville's whale, and beyond that wall lurks nature itself. The paddle beats the water into successive vertebrae, peak and trough and peak and trough falling away behind, and you wonder in awe how many forms water can take, has taken, will take in centuries to come before it closes over us for the last time.

The river hardly seems to move, still water running deep. In some lights its brown surface glistens as if it had been greased, and you must work to draw from the flood the sense of its force. The wide channel, wide enough for 50 Delta Queens, helps: No river should be so big. The shuddering of the boat as it works upstream, a shuddering as if it were grinding over granite shoals, helps too, for you have seen the huge cylinders and the massive arms that work the paddle. Debris floats by, logs and branches that might have been torn from a crumbling bank in Montana or in Illinois. This broad channel, this brown water, is the aorta of a continent, the very rush of continental blood, silt like cells and water like plasma, and if sickness is in it, then sickness is in us all.

You think of the dams along the upper tributaries that have drowned valleys where once cattle grazed and graveyards filled through five generations. Half the dams in America have been built with Mississippi flood control for their justification, and here you are, floating on the Mississippi in flood. The willows on the banks and on the towheads, their leaves flashing silver as they turn in the breeze, haven't the look of trees, haven't the patience and the rootedness of trees. They are fragile as grass, are, in fact, the Mississippi's grass, and you remember that once in a Missouri park you saw the kind of trees the Mississippi grows when it is given the chance, a basket oak 20 feet around and 126 feet tall, a bald cypress 22 feet around, its height unmeasured, a sweet gum 17 feet around and 112 feet tall. Those were champion trees and the Mississippi watered them, bubbling by them in slow time like a brook.

And watching the water as the sun sets and it darkens to black, following it with your eyes to the banks and their fragile willows, you realize why the river has evoked such desperate loyalty in the men and women who have worked it over the centuries: because when you are on the river, it widens out wider than the land until it seems to fill all the space below the sky. It is like the sea, this river, but the sea outside its ocean rivers has no direction. Sea winds will carry you where you want to go, but no man can weld his fluids to the wind. On the Mississippi the water itself carries you away, swiftly, in the direction of your destiny; and if that destiny proves false, as it has for most men, then you beat upriver again with the certainty that you are overcoming the most powerful force the land can drive against you. And either way, you win.

James Buchanan Eads, the engineer who bridged the Mississippi at St. Louis in 1874 with a bridge the Corps said could not be built, the engineer who opened up the river's passes below New Orleans so that ocean-going ships might enter it from the sea, walked as a young man on the bottom of the Mississippi under a diving bell of his own construction, walked on the bottom of that rushing river some 200 times. He heard the gravel, gravel big as cannonballs, bouncing off the bottom and arcing up and jetting down to bounce again. He learned the might of the river and what it was made of, learned to control it well enough that his bridge still stands and his passes are still open, but he must have locked the river away in the cellar of his mind, too, and never known the sleep of childhood again. You come back to earth and feel that nothing you do afterward will ever measure up, one of the astronauts is reported to have said. That is how Eads must have felt. To walk on the bottom of the Mississippi is to have been buried under the waters of half a continent, baptism worthy of a Christ. Merely to work upriver on a boat is to know something of that experience, to feel something of that dread, or else why, in the middle of the night, when the pilot of the Delta Queen abruptly cut the engines and the rhythm of the paddle dropped to a funereal meter half an octave below, did a crowd of passengers appear on deck in their night clothes apprehensively started out of sound sleep?

The pilots know. They have pushed through the wall. Beating up the river through the long day, the view is plain, water and trees, the boat shifting westward or eastward to avoid the channel, the water flowing on. Enlarge the Vicksburg models to full scale and in theory you control the river itself. But up in the pilothouse of the Delta Queen, Captain Howard Tate, the hired pilot, 35 years on the river and not, he says, enamored of it at all, is constantly at work at the two long steering arms that have replaced the big pilot wheel, adjusting them this way and that, as if he were threading an invisible maze. He points to a line of water--that's a jetty--to a bulge of water--that's a shoal--threads behind an island to take advantage of its lee, all but brushes the trees on one bank, stays clear from shore on another. The water is alive with obstacles and dangers, including the works of the Corps. Tate is a pilot and knows them all, runs the boat through the night, in shifts with other pilots, as surely as he runs it through the day. Twain said all there is to say about the skill of Mississippi River pilots. I need only add that they are still there, on the river, doing their extraordinary work; but I must also add, by way of drawing a time line for us all, that there aren't five of them left under 50 years of age. One of them, not yet 30, is captain of the Delta Queen this sailing and was born on a houseboat with a paddle wheel behind. He counts himself one of the chosen, modestly. He ought to: He is. "I wonder," wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, "if there are 20 men alive in the world now who see things as they really are.... I don't believe that there are 20 such men alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart."

• • •

Of time and the river, William Carlos Williams: "It must be realized that men are driven to their fates by the quality of their beliefs." Long ago, at the turning of the Civil War or perhaps before, we chose money and its technology as the mode of belief with which we would deal with the continent we intended to dominate, at whatever cost to our lives. Our fate today--pollution and decay--is the fate we were driven to by that choice, a choice of abstraction over association, of the mechanical over the living, as at Vicksburg's siege. If the river awes, inspires, even terrifies, it does so because it still runs half-wild, splitting a continent in two; and sometimes, on the river, all the works of our civilization seem to fall away behind the screen of trees, leaving a space of room on a carnival boat to assess those works for what they are.

They are ways we have attempted to cope with a world that overwhelmed us, but coping is no longer enough, nor could it be. The 19th Century did not know it was merely coping. It thought it had the world in hand. Our fate, our threatening fate, has been to suffer the working out of that arrogance.

But the quality of our belief is changing, and today, two by two, we board the carnival boat for other destinations One of the great historical shifts in sensibility is under way: It is what we will be remembered for, not our technology and our wars. The ecology movement is part of it, a vital part. That movement, preoccupied with deadlines, has not yet had time to study its sources, has not yet looked much beyond romantic naturalists such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. Eventually it will locate those sources among old gods, in religions older than Christianity that worshiped the incredible and benevolent complexity of the natural world. Humility is the quality of belief our sensibilities today are seeking, the spirit that puts human worth before technological progress, love before manipulation, the local and related before the universal and borrowed. And most of all, reverence for life--reverence for life before pride of domination. Wars call us home: We have fought nature for 500 years, but she has no more yielded to our arrogance than has Vietnam. Cannot be forced to yield, because the field is hers, the weapons and the combatants themselves subject to her laws. Clemens marked the vision at the end of A Connecticut Yankee. He choked his Yankee on the poisoned air of the battlefield where lay the dead of the industrial civilization he had created to bring Utopia to a world that has never needed Utopia, the Garden being already at hand.

Amid the century's carnage it has sometimes seemed too late. It must have seemed too late to men of the Middle Ages, when a third of Europe died of plague. It was not too late then: The light of the Renaissance broke through. It is not too late now: The rivers, the Mississippi River first among them, remain to remind us that, like men, if they have the courage to change, if they can move on from old graves and the rust of old arrogance, rivers run through roots, down to the restoring sea.

I'm wukin' my way back home,I'm wukin' my way back home,I'm wukin' my way back home, Baby,I'm wukin' my way back home.Timber don't git too heavy fo' me,An' sacks too heavy to stack,All that I crave fo' many a long day,Is yo' lovin' when I git back.