Mississippi River at Flood Stage

The Army Corps of Engineers, charged with thwarting nature by keeping the Mississippi River in its current course (and therefore with keeping New Orleans from becoming Morgan City), has always had a bit of a hydra to contend with.

If you keep the Mississippi chained up in its levees, you kill the annual flooding that keeps the wetlands of Louisiana healthy.  You take responsibility for a sort of assault and battery of the ecosystem.  But at least you keep the River where you want it.

Or do you.

I visit the river several times a week at various points around New Orleans.  It soothes me.  Since I was a kid I've found the Mississippi to be a dangerous but sleepy thing, slow but heavy and deadly, dark and beautiful.

Pictures copyright 2011, Riparian Church

Right now it's a few feet below the top of the levees in New Orleans, and the Corps of Engineers predicts massive flooding of New Orleans if the Morganza Floodway isn't opened to ease the pressure of about two million cubic feet of water per second flowing by... flooding that will make Katrina look like a wading pool.

James O'Byrne quotes T.S. Eliot's Dry Salvages:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

Unpropitiated indeed.  

You can travel down to Thibodaux (I used to teach there) by driving along the old course of the Mississippi, now the slow, sleepy, tired Bayou Lafourche that was already a decrepit memory of the River when its sources were dammed in 1905 at Donaldsonville.

Now the river, swollen with the rains of Southern Illinois and western Kentucky, wants to change course again and flow into the Atchafalaya Basin.  The Corps warns that, whether they open the Morganza Spillway or not, the Atchafalaya Basin and its scattered but tightly-knit communities will be flooded.  If they do not, massive levee failure will result in the inundation of New Orleans.   After the great flood of 1927, the state's flood-control measures fixed the primacy of the City over those communities.  I suppose the logic is that, if the water rises high enough to flood New Orleans, they're doomed anyway.

Already the Bonnet Carre spillway is open to relieve a little pressure on the city.  But when the disaster comes, if it comes, there will be little time to think, "If only."  So they will open Morganza. 

There is no "I'm sorry" in the face of nature, which remains unpropitiated.