Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [11]
But the trees were even more dangerous when they were stationary. Many or perhaps most that fell into the river eventually became stuck in the mud. These were known as snags. Snags were so common that a whole specialized vocabulary was developed to categorize them. A tree that was standing straight up on the river bottom, with its branches just under the waterline, was called a planter. A tree that was stuck sideways into a riverbank or a sandbar so that it stretched out at full length under the water was a sleeper. A tree that waved back and forth in the current with a sawing motion was a sawyer. And a tree that bobbed up and down, rising up out of the water and plunging back again, as though it were performing a river baptism, was a preacher. Any of these snags could stave in or capsize a boat that glided blithely across it, and they were everywhere on the river; by one estimate there was a major snag every five hundred feet.
These perils were almost invisible to the unpracticed eye. Most of them showed up only as odd disturbances on the surface, patterns that had to be decoded from the endless fluctuations of the current. A trailing braid in smooth water was a sure sign of a snag; a quilted ripple was a tangle of submerged logs; a line or fold across the water was an undertow; a persistent swirl of froth was a whirlpool, where a strong tributary flowing quickly into the main current had created a vortex beneath the surface. The voyageurs had to teach themselves all these clues by experience, and the river put a premium on fast learners.
The voyageurs came to call the Mississippi the wicked river. The downriver run was so deceptive and so treacherous that it was said that at least one out of every five boats that set out for the delta wrecked along the way. Every traveler on the river got to know the sight of bodies drifting with the current, or hanging from a floating island, or bobbing among the logs piled up on a river bend—the red shirt that the voyageurs wore, the closest thing the river had to a uniform, could be spotted a mile off, like a distress signal.
The landscape through which the voyageurs passed was still extraordinarily pristine. The most basic traces of human occupation were only sketchily drawn in the valley. There were no main roads or highways; there were barely even any trails. There were no long fences or hedgerows marking out property lines. The countryside hadn’t yet been pierced and plotted into an array of carpet scraps, the way it is now; forest and meadow and swamp and prairie still flowed into each other according to their own logic. The air was uncannily clear. The faintest trace of smoke—a line spiraling up from a cabin on a wooded islet, or a smudge over a remote village—could be seen for miles away, as stark as a forest fire.
At night the view was even more glassy and serene. The hills and bluffs were featureless masses of india ink. There were no lights of towns, sometimes not even when there were towns—streetlights were an innovation still confined to big cities. People mostly stayed in after dark and went to bed early. A light on in a house at midnight was a bad sign: it almost always meant that someone inside was sick. Most nights, the only lights the voyageurs saw were the moon and the stars—and the stars weren’t the meager scattering of pockmarks we now think of as the constellations, but the Milky Way in full flood, veil after jeweled veil, reaching down to the treetops and shimmering on the wrinkled surface of the river. The sharpest eyes might also pick out, in the remotest depths of the night, a few tiny flickers of orange: these were enormous bonfires built on the banks of the river, advertising the wood yards where the steamboats could refuel.
There were no beacons or lighthouses or channel buoys on the river then; there were no official markers of any kind. Here and there someone would occasionally paint