River shows its natural beauty

July 8, 2004

Dear Pat,

Living in Northern California, summer was a sometime thing. The sun was a bit brighter maybe, but the ocean kept everything cool. When we craved warmth, we drove Highway 299 inland toward Willow Creek. We knew a secret place to stop where, after a 10-minute climb down from the road, huge boulders caused the Trinity River to pool in places before the river surged on to its destination: The Klamath River, the Hupa Indian Reservation and eventually the Pacific.

The water was clear and cold, the sun hot. We never wore swimming suits because no one else was there to care.

Senses tingled.

Our amphibious nature seems to rise in the summer. We are animals after all.

Our old high school friend, Jane, was home visiting her family last week, just returned from whitewater rafting in the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River thrashed her about and tested her courage. It is a river for exploring your own depths. She still seemed to be taking soundings.

The Mississippi is a different kind of river, brown and deep and wide enough for long barge tows going in opposite directions to slide past each other hardly within hailing distance. Most of us still drink the Mississippi River water once it has been heavily treated, but few people swim in it. A friend of DC's family, an obstetrician, swam across the river once a year from age 17 until well into his 80s. He did it just because he wondered if he could.

For half a century, Cape Girardeau and the Mississippi were estranged, separated by a floodwall built to protect us from the river. "We call it progress, this trading of the ebb and flow of unpredictability for the sure footing of pavement and hill," one of our local seers, Robert Hamblin, wrote in his poem "The River."

The wall succeeded in keeping the river away, but it cost us "the powerful undertow of romance and dream," Hamblin wrote.

Now we are reclaiming the river with remarkable murals painted on the floodwall and with a walkway that follows the river. A new bridge strung with cables that reach into heaven ferries cars and trucks through the air.

We don't swim in the Mississippi River any longer but are drawn to it all the same. When I run next to the river in the morning, people are always on the bank staring out, mesmerized by the patterns in the currents. At dusk, others return to the river to witness the day's end.

A lake does not urge our presence. A river does.

The river is immutable yet always changing. As fireworks exploded overhead on the Fourth of July, thousands watched the surface of the Mississippi River turn kaleidoscopically green and blue and red.

The Mississippi divides America and brings together those who want to live in its proximity.

Blood is mostly water, and the river is in our blood.

Rivers remind us of the power of destiny, that we come from somewhere and that eventually we will return. We do well to ride the current and relish the thrills on the way.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.