At 1 Mississippi, we like to harp on loving our River – the fish we eat, the water we drink, the psycho-spiritual calm it provides to a hectic, hurried life, etc. The late Lyle Link was a good example. He grew up on a family dairy farm in Wisconsin that probably fed their cows corn that was raised and shipped by the river. For his honeymoon, he threw his Puffy mattress in the back of his ’36 Chevy and took his bride on a roadtrip. “We spent our first night in that car on a bluff on the Mississippi River,” he tells his granddaughter in a Storycorps interview.
A 1936 Chevy. Can you imagine cruising the River in this?
But in Southern Louisiana, and especially in New Orleans, the relationship is different. The Mississippi is under our feet as soon as we swing them out of bed in the morning. Every bit of solid ground where we have planted our citrus trees, our schools, our homes and ourselves would be water, were it not for the river, which Tulane Geographer Richard Campanella calls a “land-making machine.” Because every year, the Mississippi so obligingly carries 200 million tons of sediment downriver every year. (The bed itself, and the house that holds it, may well be made from cypress trees from its swamps, to boot.)
The river has carried this burden and delivered its gifts humbly, though not without fits and floods. Between 1849 and 1874, the River broke loose of its levees just north of New Orleans and hurled an estimated 150,000 cubic feet of water per second at the city, destroying crops and structures “like chaff before the wind.” Southern Louisiana has had to build defenses against them accordingly, and its system of levees and valves, some 153 miles away from the city, have kept the area as dry as it needs to be for 87 years.
One kind of jetty
Harmonious as it may seem, the relationship hasn’t been without its kinks. The River, as it spills into the Gulf, drops tons and tons of the sediment it has carried from Montana, Pennsylvania, and all points between, clogging itself up with silt and vegetation, continuously finding new routes to the sea. Ships used to run aground in the mess, or they had to wait long periods for channels to be cleared before they could access the cotton and corn at port in New Orleans. That was until the the federal government sponsored the creation of jetties (river training structures) that ushered the course of the River – and all its rich sediment – off the edge of the continental shelf.
As it turns out, these defenses haven’t been healthy for Southern Louisiana’s relationship with its water. They’ve been more like a choke hold. Like a dry sponge, the land is contracting and disappearing into the sea. In 2007, the Times Picayune, New Orleans’ newspaper, ran a three-part examination of coastal land loss. The headline read: “It took the Mississippi River 6,000 years to build the Louisiana Coast. It took man (and natural disasters) 75 years to destroy it. Experts agree we have 10 years to act before the problem is too big to solve.”
The good news is that the river is still muddy. A new report says that the Mississippi River will have land building virility for the next six centuries. We just need to learn to manage it.
Most people agree that this problem isn’t Louisiana’s alone. It has effects on everything from a Wisconsin dairy farm to your cereal in the morning to your household cleaning supplies under the sink. And it is directly connected by it’s waters to the diverse places its basin (the third largest in the world behind that of the Amazon and Congo), whether through dam construction, fertilizer use or drainage practices. I’ll explore those connections in future blogs posts.
I leave you with one of the many cultural gems that the River and its baby city have given to the world: Irma Thomas, Soul Queen of New Orleans.
~ Chris “Wolfie” Staudinger
1 Mississippi Team Member in New Orleans