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Giver and Taker, “Mighty Mississippi” Never Tamed

           

            The Aamerican Indians, says author Lee Sandin, imagined it as “a giant sleeping snake that would wake up ecery seven years and attack who ever was alongside it.”

            Flowing naturally or overflowing menacingly, it is impossible to over estimate the Mississippi River’s importance to the American economy and pyshce. And right now, engorged neyond the limits of our control, the river is awake on the attack.

            Says Clyde Dufour, a fish wholeseller in Simmesport, Louisiana, north west of baton Rouge : “The river been making our lives.” But he adds, “It ain’t our friend right now’”

            If the Appalachian Mountains are the nation’s spine, then the Mississippi is its aorta. Winding through 10 states on its 3,782- kilometer course, it carries nearly half of all US inland waterbourne commerce, generates megawatts of power,and produces a bounty of protein from catfish to bowfin caviar.

            No one has put a dollar figure on all of the jobs directly dependent on the Mississippi. But when a barge collision and fuel spill closed a 161-kilometer stretch of the river in 2008, the Port of New Orleans estimated the cost to the US economy at $275 million a day.

            On an average day, the rivers carries about 20 ‘’tows” with 30 barges each, which each of those barges respresenting about 60 tractors-trailers, says Bob Anderson, a spokesman for the US Army corps of engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. About 500 million tons of cargo is barged through the river’s mouth each year, he says.

            “we call it America’s Superhighway,” he says

            According to the Corps, 250 tributaries drain into the Mississippi from a 3,24 million square-kilomater basin that gaters water from 41 percent of the continental United States. The name comes from a Chippewa Indian word that translates roughly as “very big river”.

            Spanish cconquistador Hernando De Soto, believed to be the first Europian to explore the river, dubbed it “Rio Grande” after entering its stream in 1541. When he died a year later, legend has it, he waswrapped in blankets, weighted down with sand and buried beneath its muddy water.

            Unfettered access to the Mississippi has been crucial since the nation’s infancy. When the Spanish revoked American’s access to the Port of New Orleans in 1802, Thomas Jefferson dispatched special envoy James Monroe to Napoleon’s France for negotiations that would eventually result in the Louisiana Purchase.

            “All eyes, all hopes, are now fix on you,” the president wrote to Monroe in January 1803, “for on the event of this mission depent the future destinies of this republic.”

            It was during two flatboat trips down the Mississippi that a young Abraham Lincoln got his forst full understanding of the evils of slavery. Years later, on July 4, 1863, it was Ulysses S. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg and reopening of the river that restored President Lincoln’s flaging hopes of saving the unions.

            “The Father of Waters,” he wrote to the confidant, “again goes unvexed to the sea.”

            The great river’s head waters are a glacial lake northwest of St.Paul, Minn. Where it empties from Lake Itasca, the “Mighty Mississippi” is only about 20 feet (6.1 meters) wide and 3 feet (0.90 meters) deep – “just a small crick,” says Dave Evenwoll.

            But that’s enough to draw up to 6,000  visitor’s a year to Bert’s Cabbins, the resort he and wife Pat run at Lake Itasca State Park.

            “we’ve had people from every continent practically, other than maybe Antarctica,” says Pat Evenwoll, whose father opened the resort in 1939.

            Adds Dave : “if it wasn’t for the river, we wouldn’t be here.”

            The Evenwolls say many of their visitors come with plans of canoeing the Mississippi from its source to the Gulf of Mexico. But it is traffic of a much larger variety that dominates the waterway-and makes it so  vital to the nation’s economy.

            Sandlin says that role is relatively new one. “Mississippi shipping had almost entirely died out by the end of the 19^th century,” says Sandlin, author of last year’s “Wicked river : the Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild.” “And then the Army Corps of Engineer’s work on it over the course of the 20^th century began bringing the shipping back up again.”

            Rivers are living things. And the thing about the stream is that it always seeks the path of least resistance to its designation. By the late 1800’s, the Mississippi was wanting to jog to the left, by passing the Louisiana capital of baton Rouge and the busy Port of New Orleans. That’s when the Corps stepped in.

            In his book, “Life On The Mississippi” Mark Twain observed : “The Military Engineers  have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again --- a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.”

            After 130 years  of building locks and dams, levees and floodwalls, canals and spillways, we have corralled the Mississippi to the point, says Sandlin, where “its almost entirely an artificial creation.”

            We have felt relatively save building along its banks. And that is what raises the stakes so high when the river doesn’t do what we want it to.

            Barclays Capital estimates that nearly 20 percent --- 3,5 million barrels a day ---- of the country’s total oil refining capacity is located ‘within a floodable distance’ of the river, with more than 14 percent located adjacent to the Mississippi.

(Allen G. Breed, Associated Press Simmesport, Louisiana, The Jakarta Post)

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            “if it wasn’t for the river, we wouldn’t be here.”