River

My family makes a familiar drive this week to Arkansas. It's remarkable only in its sameness, its Americana-drenched stereotype of road trips and gas stations and kids ignoring Dads, noses buried in books.

But the drives I've made criss-crossing the Midwest and the Central South, remind me constantly of how tied my family is to this deep, darling trench carved by the Mississippi. I have lived in Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Minnesota, four states equally beholden to the might of that river. I felt it least, perhaps, in Arkansas, as I was a child and largely remember smaller rivers and streams.

In Missouri and Louisiana, however, it was a powerful, destructive, glorious force. Not long after moving to St. Louis, I remember volunteering with dad to sandbag areas threatened by the Great Flood. I remember that dark, gloomy water creeping up to the topmost steps of the Arch grounds, remember the newscasters and their shock at 100 year water levels. But in most instances the Mississippi in St. Louis was a sleeping giant. A river that loved the Cardinals, and lovingly reflected the blues and greens and reds of fireworks at the VP Fair.

The river in New Orleans was more than a river. More than a highway. It was sister to an ocean that threatened us. Sister to a Lake that flooded us. In every request for directions, it was a landmark, a true North. "Drive toward the river. Drive toward the lake." By the time she reaches New Orleans, the river is so strictly corseted by levees, one can hardly fault her for impertinence. Her deadly, hurricane-laden anger. But in her peaceful moments, she was a beautiful silver thing. And when I watched her spill into the Gulf, watched that brown bleed into blue, it seemed like the world was made correctly, with no flaws, that God knew how to make water, knew how to build land with tiny, tiny, tiny pinpricks of sand, knew how to return it all to the sea.

I have lived away from this river and I have loved the years I spent away from her. But there is something haunting and tempting and simply home-like in driving through the farmland and cities she built. It is land she carried and created, like some happy alchemist, depositing promises of fertility in dark dirt. I feel at home in many places. In the mountains of East Tennessee. In Jackson Square in New Orleans. On top of the Sindi Sud in Marrakech. Climbing those blasted rocks on Pinnacle Mountain. But there is a familiarity and warmth in simply living and traveling and building a life in this cradle of the Mississippi. And that was a five paragraph title for the following poem:

I leave the river often, freedom knit to my brow
And I am strong and unkind to memories of her mud
Wrapped round my ankles, cushioning my falls
I leave and she is worthless in her beautiful flood.

Sometimes I run, breathless in my escape
Fingers stretched wide on the wheel, heel to the road
You are a bitch, you River, you destroyer of cities,
You burn, you break, and you carry me home.

Sometimes I wander, eyes cast on some distant parade
Of adventures and dreams and dark, riverless nights.
I forget the river, her slow, steady explosion
And weave ribbons instead of water into my riverless life.

But always I return, feet, heart, head
Glued to this open, cupped palm of a river
This open wound of a river, itching for new blood
Always I stray, and always I return
Into and away, beyond and beholden
To my sly, angry, precious Mississippi mud.