Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [1]
This is a serpentine route, but it’s not an unusual one. There are countless streams just like it. In the nineteenth century, it was estimated that the Mississippi had roughly one hundred thousand natural tributaries—that is, there were a hundred thousand distinct, individually named brooks, creeks, rivulets, and rivers emptying their waters into its gargantuan current. Today there are far more than a hundred thousand, and the majority of them are artificial. They’re like the manhole by the bus stop: they’re conduits and cisterns and sewage pipes, obscure canals and neglected culverts and out-of-the-way storm drains. The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest.
As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years.
Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.
I get a little reminder of the health of this system every time I pass by that bus stop. There’s a reason why the one particular manhole stands out among all the clutter of ancient grilles and grates along the block. It reeks. Winter and summer, it emits a peculiar odor, a compound of sewer gas, stale grease, and some kind of pungent chemical reminiscent of sour mint. I can tell how bad it is on any given day by the behavior of the people waiting at the curb. Sometimes they have to hang so far back that the bus blows past the corner without a pause.
Of course it seems all wrong to think of the Mississippi River this way, as an industrial drainage system the length of a continent. It’s not how we want to picture Old Man River—the river of the paddle-wheel steamboats, the river that Huck and Jim escaped down when they rode their raft to freedom. That river, we like to imagine, is still running wild the way it always was. The wistful old song “Moon River,” popular back in the sixties, caught the feeling perfectly:
Moon River, wider than a mile,
I’m crossing you in style some day.
When Andy Williams crooned this, he was obviously not thinking about something as prosaic as driving across the Eads Bridge at St. Louis. He was singing about the mythical river of Mark Twain (“my huckleberry friend,” the song calls it, just so we don’t miss the point): he was crossing a river bound for the rainbow’s end, not one to be found on the interstate map.
This is the image of the river that I grew up with. I knew all