Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [94]
He didn’t know what the tamed river would do; still, he felt the change in his blood. He saw snag boats “pulling the river’s teeth” and government beacons that made the dark flow into a “two-thousand-mile torch-light procession.” To Twain’s eyes so many navigational aids sterilized the river. “This thing,” he reflected about the network of lights, “has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.”
One thing, at least, seemed the same—the mud. The Mississippi had always been famously muddy; in Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s river men joked about being able to grow corn in the stomach of a man who drank enough of the water. “Here was a thing which had not changed,” he wrote now. “A score of years had not affected this water’s mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. . . . If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.” But although Twain didn’t know it, changes to the Mississippi’s mud were the most momentous of all.
Certainly change seemed unlikely; there was probably more sediment in the river during Twain’s piloting years than ever before, as plows loosed soil from tightly woven prairie-grass roots. Every year the Mississippi had carried some 400 million tons of dissolved earth to Louisiana. Much of it never went as far as New Orleans; before the river reached the city, it branched off into the Atchafalaya and other distributaries, spreading mud and sediment throughout the state’s bayous. Both there and at the river’s shifting, unsteady mouth, this sediment eventually settled, slowly extending the land; Twain wrote that Louisiana’s coast was “much the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.” For seven thousand years, residue from Montanan turf, New York mud, Wisconsin sod, and Arkansan clay had built the swamps and wetlands; Illinois’s and Iowa’s losses were Louisiana’s gain. The state was literally built from half of America.
But as Twain steamed toward New Orleans, all that was coming to an end. If you’re like me, you may have heard about the state’s disappearing wetlands and assumed that development was most to blame: tidal ponds filled in to make lawns, swamps drained for golf courses, that kind of thing. But the truth is that, in Louisiana, the land is melting away. And it’s happening almost fast enough to be visible to the naked eye—a football field’s worth of land vanishes every forty-five minutes. The equivalent of Manhattan disappears every ten months. This land is underwater; it’s gone.
The reason, as Mike Tidwell says in his fascinating, deeply disturbing Bayou Farewell, is that during the 1880s—the very moment that Twain returned to the river—the ancient accrual of land stopped. Dams upstream trapped so much mud and sand that even as agricultural erosion increased, the lower Mississippi’s sediment load fell. Instead of building Louisianan wetlands, the earth from midwestern prairies became sunken river sludge. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers’ dikes and levees held back the floods that had once spread earth for miles alongside the Mississippi’s banks, earth that had once countered erosion and subsidence (the natural tendency of wetlands to sink as sediments compact and organic elements rot away). Then, after the Great Flood of 1927 killed over a thousand people in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, the corps determined