Attempts to control the Mississippi have saddled the country with a slew of problems: floods, federal overspending, land loss, poverty, environmental injustice. Upholt, who lives in New Orleans, suggests it’s time to cede to the power of the river. Locks and levees “aim to freeze an ever-changing river in place; like a map, the concrete and steel will wither with time,” he writes. “Beneath the infrastructure, another Mississippi River persists.”
The Ojibwe people knew the river as Misi-ziibi, which has various translations: “Big River, “Long River,” or, as Upholt prefers, “Great River.” It implies a sense of respect, something the continent’s ancient civilizations must have felt when they built massive riverside earthworks, imbued with their understanding of the cosmos. The order of the sun and stars above, the chaos of water below, “ever changing, but also abundant and fertile,” Upholt writes. “Neither is preferable and both are necessary.”
But European colonists and American pioneers viewed the river as a “terrible enemy,” as something to be tamed. That’s the mindset that gave rise to the Army Corps’ Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, or MR&T, the vast system of levees, locks, and dams that manages flood risk and navigation. It’s a system long plagued by misspending, construction delays, and projects that fall far short of what they promise. Advocates of the MR&T, and the waterborne commerce it supports, highlight the $7 billion to $9 billion in shipping costs saved each year. Upholt notes more than half the cargo that passes through this system is coal and petroleum — “so this amounts to a massive subsidy for one of the nation’s dirtiest sectors.”
The history of the river as we know it, Upholt argues, is mostly unnatural. In his telling, it is also non-linear, snaking its way through time. It can be disorienting, but so goes the water.
Upholt follows a plodding parade of men (it’s all men) who have shaped the United States’ management of the Mississippi. Consider Army Corps engineer Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. In 1849, after a levee breached upstream of New Orleans, submerging the city for a month, Congress tapped Humphreys to study flood control. While Humphreys collected his data, another prominent civilian engineer, Charles Ellet, Jr., warned in his own report that too many levees spelled disaster. “The process by which the country above is relieved, is that by which the country below is ruined,” he wrote. Instead, Ellet proposed a system of reservoirs and bayous — widened in some places and artificially constructed in others — that would intercept and release rushing floodwaters to the ocean.