One Mississippi: Chapter Eighteen

Surrounded by Lake Pontchartrain, St. John Bayou and the almighty Mississippi River, New Orleans still stands it’s swampy ground, dressed in beads and ready for yet another carnival – sweaty, ruffled and drunk, as always.

Not only is it really difficult to pronounce, but Lake Pontchartrain has some other distinctive features, such as multiple appearances in the Guiness Book of World Records for hosting the longest continuous bridge over water in the world (The Lake Portchatrain Causeway with a length of 38.28 km) as well as being one of the largest wetlands along the Gulf Coast of North America with a truly rich and diverse ecosystem (cypress swamps, brown pelicans, bald eagles, aligator snapping turtles etc).

 

Bayou St. John must be a quiet, magical place, or maybe it’s just my imagination, since we haven’t actually made it to that part of the city and I’ve always believed that bayous are quintesentially magical places – perhaps because of the word itself, “bayou”, that has a certain warmth about it, a warmth no other word in the English language seems to even come close to (except maybe for “dandelions”) that takes me back to summer vacations and most of all, reminds me of “The king and queen of Moonlight Bay”, a movie I’ve seen long ago, about a complicated father-daughter relationship.

It was honest and beautiful and it taught me that there are others just like me, who have come to the conclusion that fries taste better with vinegar, but above all, it gave me a heart-warming version of “Moonlight Bay” – recurrently played on the piano in the small, cozy, trailerlike house on the river.

And what is there to be said about the “Old Man River” besides that it is one of my favourite Mark Twain characters, apart from Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn? Twain himself received his steamboat pilot license in 1859, after two and a half years and 2000 miles of studies about the Mississippi River. His novels “Life on the Mississippi” and “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are both meditations on American culture in which the river is an important motif with multiple meanings such as escape, freedom, independence, a boy’s journey to self-discovery and manhood.

Historically, the river is thought to have been formed during the Ice Age, which started about 2.000.000 years ago and ended about 10.000 years ago, which makes the Mississippi around 10.000 years old. It’s great size and numerous resources have attracted different Native-American civilizations who settled on the vast territory, slowly occupying it. Hernando de Soto, a Spanish explorer is credited for being its first European discoverer, in 1541, but the French were the first Europens to colonize and take control over it’s valley. In 1803, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, Mississippi became United States property, playing an important role in many battles during the Civil War and shaping American history.  

Geographically, the Mississippi River is the second longest river in the Northern United States. With Lake Itsaka in Minesotta as it’s starting point and flowing south for about 4000km towards the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico, it borders or passes through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. It’s part of 32 U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces, the fourth longest and fifteenth largest river in the world and it coincidentally reaches it’s deepest level (200 feet, 61 m) right here, in New Orleans.

The word itself comes from “Messipi”, the french rendering of an indigenous North-American language known as “Algonquil”. During French Louisiana it used to be spelled “Missisipi” but also known as “Rivière Saint -Louis”. To this day, the river is still inhabited by many Amerindian societies which include the Sioux, Ojibwe, Quapaw, Kikapoo, Fox, Co-Chunk, Moingwena, Tamaroa, Potawatomi and Cheyenne people.  In Ojibwe, “Misi-ziipi” means Great River.                

And of course, all these particular facts are of great importance, but not as important as the undeniable cultural mark of the Mississippi.

 

I would rather close my eyes and imagine what it was like in the nineteenth century, when waters were the American highways and New Orleans was an important port, attracting merchants from all over the world; towboats, vessels docking and the steamboats with their calliope whistles and their red, large paddlewheel in the back, elegantly standing up to the most powerful currents and courageously carrying passengers, animals, piles and piles of cotton, secret ingredients of the Creole cuisine, oysters, shrimp, coffee, bananas and hundreds of tones of cargo back and forth. Before this new useful invention, traffic on the river had usually been downstream and at New Orleans, boatmen would break their barges into pieces and sell them for wood, then simply take a walk back home.

 

“Next we slid into the river and had a swim, as to freshen up and cool off, then we sat down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come”.

Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

Green Eyed Kisses,