70/30: A Dream of Domination

Pass á Loutre: Otter PassSt. Augustine grass, too thick and wet to cut in this morning's crazed heat glistens in hazy grey light. 

I'm fingering the spongy soil, and marveling again at how absorbant it is.

When BP's gift to Louisiana touches the soil, it will be soaked up, a welcomed poison.

Before humans learnt to speak the name of the ground the black skin of the Mississippi bore this earth here with the water, singing strange songs, and the salty ocean watched indifferently as he lay his burden in the bed of the Gulf.

And the old river wants to move.

For the last nine thousand years, she's been feeling the pull of the Atchafalaya Basin, wanting to abandon the current channel to the intrusion of the Gulf.

You should see the Basin from a canoe.  You should listen to the swamps and marshes, the inlets and branches.

You should paddle the tracks of the River, where she used to come through what is now Lake Pontchartrain, Chef Menteur Pass, Bayou Lafourche, deliberately and slowly changing her course, bringing 400 million metric tons of sediment to lay in the bed of the Gulf of Mexico until she had made her own path too difficult, and changed her path.

But Congress said no to the River, and the Army Corps of Engineers put on its prosaic mathematical hat and determined that 70% of the water will flow into the current course and 30% into the Atchafalaya, and with the indifferent certitude that only comes to those who mean not to adapt to nature, they protected New Orleans and the lower Mississippi for a time.DeSoto "Discovering" the Mississippi in 1541. William Henry Powell's picture. The dream began as a dream of domination. It remains one, for better and for worse.

And they forged chains for the River that would give us a little more time to breathe.

Its chains are usually green around here: long levees covered in grass with tangles of willows growing up out of the banks of the river, wild strawberry and dandelions, birds and snakes and slick greasy river-rats.

And so the River carries its burden past my house, 13,000 cubic meters of water per second with a silence that is almost eerie, transporting barely a quarter of the sediment that it used to carry through Southwest Pass, and through Pass á Loutre, the Pass of the Otter, forty miles south of here as the crow flies and seventy as the river meanders.  The River drops her burden there, where once she had rings of islands, building up her labor so she might abandon it again and move west.

Don't get me wrong: I love my city and its strange relationship with the river.

But sometimes I wonder where the chains will break, and why, and what the revenge of nature will be like.

I have dreams sometimes of the Gulf's intrusion into New Orleans after we have choked the sediment out for so long that we become addicted to our control of it, imagining that the Mississippi carries our water but not her own burdens that we must reckon with.

An earthquake along the New Madrid fault line?   Catastrophic rain and snow-melt?  Who knows.

What is certain is that we have told the River her business and done it long enough that the coastline of Louisiana is profitable, stable, and dying.

But the River is obedient for now, toiling in its appointed channels, still singing its songs, as slaves have always done before they said, "No more."

Comments

[Victoria]

"As the river cuts his path,
though the river's proud and strong,
he will choose the smoothest path.
That's why rivers live so long.
They're steady
as the steady beating drum."

(I watched Pocahontas last night.)

[Shirley]

But sometimes in a time of trouble,
When you're out of hand and your muddy bubbles roll across my floor,
Carryin' away the things I treasure, hell there ain't ain't no way to measure
Why I love you more than I did the day before.
River in the rain ...