Humming swamps

Dec. 3, 2009

Dear Leslie,

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of businessmen began draining the largest wetland in America. Turning the Big Swamp into fertile farmland required steam engines to extract the cypress stumps by the millions. When the project began, forests covered 90 percent of the 11 million acres. Now 95 percent of the land is cleared.

Driving through Southeast Missouri, especially the Bootheel, is like seeing Joshua Tree National Park for the first time. This doesn't belong here, you think. The Earth formed the strange granite monoliths and twisted mountains of Joshua Tree over eons. Men scoured Southeast Missouri clean in 20 years.

How does the place you live determine who you are? Dr. Frank Nickell, a historian at the local university, asked that question at a talk this week. Nickell often speaks to civic groups and has a public radio series about this place where we live. Nickell didn't grow up here, didn't move here until he was an adult. But he knows as much or more about being a Southeast Missourian as anyone. He has made Southeast Missouri his business.

Some effects of place are obvious. People who live in Sikeston, a city just 30 miles south of Cape Girardeau, speak with an accent not found here. Nickell says Sikeston's isolation below Crowley's Ridge helped create that twang. Sikeston was on the edge of the Big Swamp. As the swamp began disappearing families of hunters and trappers nobody knew about were discovered inside.

Immigrants from other states, particularly Tennessee, settled both Sikeston and Cape Girardeau, but the latter had the moderating influence of German immigrants.

Listen closely, he says, and you can hear "The Tennessee Waltz" in Sikeston.

Some effects of place are taken for granted. Many of the men who bought the land from the Southeast Missouri counties for pennies an acre became extraordinarily wealthy. Yet some of these counties remain the poorest in the nation. Growing up in Southeast Missouri, I accepted this as the way things are. Now I don't.

Some of the damage to the Earth inflicted in the 20th century is beginning to be undone. Over the last three years, three dams have been removed from the Rogue River in Oregon. Earlier this fall, a draft agreement was reached to tear down four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Northern California because the dams are ruining the salmon and steelhead fisheries and create toxic algae.

No one proposes restoring the marshes in Southeast Missouri. The crops grown on this farmland are too important to the state and local economies. Besides, tearing down a dam is one thing. Tearing out nearly 1,000 miles of ditches that continue to move water through Southeast Missouri would be something else. How about 10 miles?

On the way to Memphis, a drive most people avoid if they can because the landscape is so monotonous, I can't help imagining the swamp called Dark Cypress out the window, returned to its natural state. In the green splendor of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Swamp, one-twentieth the size of Dark Cypress, a pungent hum fills the air. Life breathes magnificently all around.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.