Reading Now - The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi

 

Upholt's 2024 book The Great River came via recommendation from Places Journal Fall 2024 Bookshelf selections that include a few more from their list I'd like to read this year. 

I chose The Great River mainly for my Christmas camping trip to the Outer Banks, NC, and found it a perfect long winter night's read tucked into my sleeping bag. It was a good learning companion for beginning to understand the mindset of mythology for engineering and controlling nature on the Outer Banks. 

I am very interested in the Mound-Builder Cultures of the Mississippi Drainage that include many found in the river valleys and floodplains of the Ohio River in West Virginia. I visit these mounds when I am traveling through the Mountain State and have the same questions as Upholt, why they were built and where did they go? What are they able to teach us today? 

I like that the questions of indigenous occupation of the Mississippi drainage runs as a throughline to the modern history of managing the river and its tributaries. There is the history of snagboating, steam dredging, upriver and downriver trade, the short age of paddle wheelers, and environmental commentary by Mark Twain.

The million-square-mile Mississippi Valley was the Wild West even before the Jeffersonian Expansion  and also the heart of planation and slavery culture as its floodplains were drained.  Upholt takes readers into the complicated origins of the rise of industrial agriculture, the petro-chemical sacrifice zones of Cancer/Death Alley, and gives voice to the many communities of color that suffer the brunt of government (federal and local) funding abuse meant to help river people causing them harm instead. He covers the complex sciences of engineering and water management and the grand map-making of Harold Fisk.

A chapter covers the most recent hurricanes to hit the Gulf States and the river's response to the massive floods of 2019 that, after two hundred years of fascinating yet troublesome history, the heralded Army Corps of Engineers barely managed. 

Upholt's writing is part historical chronicle of control and part testimonial (some of it personal) to our addiction for control, echoing and updating the story of the battle against the Mississippi begun by John McPhee's Control of Nature (1989). I have always wanted a continuation of that book to see what happens next and with The Great River the story does indeed flow on but with more muck, detritus, and mud. Climate change is an ever present character and while local and state governments and their various agencies cannot seem to utter the words, they do acknowledge that the weather patterns, flood patterns, water flow and volume is most definitely changed from what it was in the 1800s, happening so fast now that technologies and funding can hardly keep up. 

I like that Upholt concludes The Great River with the idea of the beauty of change. This includes ways to think about resilience for both river and people. He visits a modern but impoverished Native American community that for many generations has lived within the ever changing Delta and their advice for the rest of us comes from the deepest consideration of what it is to live with a river - to stop fighting nature because it will never be conquered. It's a war we cannot win.  Like the ancestors who built those mounds, there are ways to adapt and survive as real witnesses to change, they suggest, important lessons learned over thousands of years.

Except that our short-sighted, bottom-line, capitalist society hasn't really learned those lessons well enough. Not yet, anyway. Upholt, however, gives a glimmer of possibility.  

Upholt, Boyce (2024) The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi. W.W. Norton & Company.   (Local library copy - Paul Smith Library, York County, PA) 

McPhee, John (1989) The Control of Nature.