I always dreamed of being somewhere else. In my twenties, I took a job with a nonprofit in Mississippi—a state I’d not only never visited but, until the job offer, had never imagined visiting. Which is how I found myself living on soils that had been carried south by the continent’s biggest river. Even then, though, I rarely thought about the Mississippi. There’s a massive wall in the way: The levee that holds back floods stands 40 feet tall or higher.
In 2015, I spent a few nights camping on the river so I could write a magazine story about a river guide. I found a wilderness: miles and miles of raggedy forest, unkept because it’s unkeepable, soaked by water many years. This is known locally the “batture.” It is unmistakably somewhere else, a fact that is deepened by that levee: once you’ve crossed over, you can no longer see the settled world. I became obsessed with the river and its batture. By the time I visited the conference in Memphis, I was at work on a series of essays about life out there. In a notebook, I jotted down the scientist’s question.
What is the purpose of the river? Perhaps the only real answer comes from physics: A river is the path the water carves as it submits the imperative of gravity. But the fact that so much water has coiled together here, in what we call the Mississippi River, has led humans to dream up other purposes for that flow.
For as long as humans have lived along the river, it’s served as a passageway; more than three thousand years ago, before anyone along the river had bothered with farming, Indigenous traders were carrying goods to Louisiana from as far afield as Florida and Indiana. The river’s potential as a highway is why Thomas Jefferson bought out the watershed, too, doubling the size of America with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803: farmers on the far side of the Appalachian Mountains needed access to the river to ship their crops downstream.
That era revealed a second purpose for the river, or at least for one major part of the river. In the floodplain, the low-lying land that was covered in water for only part of the year, the soil was river-carried muck, rich in organic material—some of the best farmland you could find. So the river became property. The problem, of course, was those floods, which is why it took until the twentieth century before the floodplain was fully tamed into farms.