Down the Mississippi #11

Seven and half weeks after we stepped into the headwaters in Minnesota, our Mississippi River drive has ended. We spent Monday afternoon among sport fishermen in Venice, LA, where the River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Then we found a B&B in Buras, LA for the night. Our hosts were Nicole and Red Maurer. When we arrived, Red was out fishing. He has chronic physical and brain injuries from his work helping to clean up the BP oil spill … for which BP has not paid victims a cent. While we waited for him to return, Nicole baked a crabmeat-stuffed flounder for supper.

The place, the food, and the company created a storybook ending to a perfect drive. It set the stage for the real work: writing about and making sense of this unbelievable adventure.

From the headwaters to the Gulf, we’ve seen thriving towns, beautiful vistas, ghost towns, poverty, racism, the economy, enlightenment, the river (over and over and over again), history, architecture, artists, nut cases, chefs, and musicians. Every single day has been an adventure.

I am thrilled by the prospect of making sense of this sensory onslaught, but it will not happen overnight.

Stick with us. All of the stories that did not have time or focus to get written can now start coming into play. We are excited to start the process of reliving it.

After a few days in New Orleans, we head to ….. damn …. we don’t really know. We haven’t thought that far ahead. We’ll keep you posted as time allows.

HOPE YOU ALL HAD A HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

 

Down the Mississippi #10 

The plaque outside the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis reads, “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg … If you stand in the middle of the lobby, where the ducks waddle and turtles drowse, you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta.” The plaque expresses a fine sentiment, and the waddling ducks represent Americana at its best, but none of the quote is true.

Now that I have experienced the Mississippi Delta a few times and read about it a fair amount, I can say with some confidence that I am more confused than ever. I don’t know where “it” begins or where “it” ends, and I am not at all certain what “it” is. If the “Delta” is the “mouth” of the river, it is south of New Orleans in Plaquemine Parish, about 250 miles south of where I am writing. If “it” is the Mississippi Delta of Blues fame and home to the likes of Robert Johnson, BB King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Leadbelly, Pinetop Perkins, James Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite, Keb Mo, and countless others, “it” probably does start around Memphis and end around Vicksburg, but the boundaries are seriously ill-defined.

If “it” is the vast alluvial plain where the river flattens and sediment has spread across the land for millennia, it begins right around New Madrid, Missouri, more than 100 miles north of Memphis … and probably closer to 200 miles if you count the bends in the river … and ends about 20 miles north of Vicksburg, where forests and bluffs start to reappear.

As Wikipedia sort-of says, the Mississippi Delta is not to be confused with the Mississippi Delta.  That is about as clear as I can make it too.

The Peabody plaque is also wrong in its sentiment about seeing “everybody who is anybody in the Delta” in the hotel lobby.

We did meet Anthony Petrina in the lobby, and he is most assuredly somebody: he is the Peabody’s official “duckmaster,” which must be one of the greatest jobs on earth. He gets to wear a really nifty bright red suit with epaulets and chains instead of buttons and carry a fabulous cane with a golden duck handgrip. He gets to perform like a ringmaster twice a day as he escorts the Peabody’s five ducks from their penthouse suite … the “Duck Palace” … to their lobby pool at 11:00 a.m. and as he escorts them back to the penthouse suite at 5:00 p.m. In between, he stays busy doing all sorts of duck-related things, like duck training and interacting with the Peabody’s own duck breeder. The ducks even stop on cue during their parade to pose for the adoring duck paparazzi.

Most of the folks in the Peabody’s lobby, though, are not the shakers and movers of the Delta. Instead, they are a bunch of tourists, mostly parents with young ‘uns, wondering why in the world they are taking part of their valuable vacation time to watch 5 ducks waddle through a hotel lobby … until they witness the actual spectacle, at which time they know they have just experienced a truly hilarious and perfectly memorable few seconds.

I expect that the “everybody who is anybody in the Delta” folks who David Cohn thought of in 1935 when he came up with his now-immortalized quote were mostly landowners and cotton barons and 100% white. That’s just not my idea of “everybody who is anybody in the Delta.” In fact, I turned down an invitation to spend a day in Jackson with 400 farm owners because farm owners as a group just don’t interest me very much. Farmers interest me; farm owners, not so much.

My idea of “everybody who is anybody in the Delta” started to crystalize in the Visitor Center in Tunica when Miss Katie and Angela, the totally sweet ladies at the counter, told us about a marker dedication in Lyon, just outside of Clarksdale, the following afternoon. The 200th “Mississippi Blues Trail” marker would be unveiled to speeches, live music, and a reception at the Clarksdale Visitor Center featuring none other than Super Chikan himself.

Following a schedule on this trip proved to be a bit of a challenge, but at 4:15, we pulled up to the Lyon Town Offices and joined a crowd of 50 or more dedicated officials and blues folks. Fortunately, we were a tad late: instead of 4:00, the speeches actually began around 3:00. Our experience of the speechifying lasted only about 15 minutes, but the ones we heard were inspiring. The festivities took place next to a bright red 1951 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 in pristine condition. Why? Because the 200th marker commemorated the release of the 1951 hit “Rocket 88,” which is credited as being the first-ever Rock-N-Roll record. (YouTube has a terrific photo array of Rocket 88’s to accompany the Jackie Brenston recording. Check it out.)

After an hour or so of music in Lyon, accompanied by terrific conversations with state officials, tourism officials, scholars, community activists, and blues lovers, we headed back to Clarksdale for the reception and Super Chikan concert. The reception provided a few more hours of booze, munchies, music and chit-chat … a perfect kick-off to our time in the Delta.   (Google “Super Chikan” too. His music is great; his penchant for making and playing one-of-a-kind guitars is even greater. He is an extraordinary folk artist!)

After Super Chikan and a day at the Delta Blues Museum, the muses led us to Red’s, a classic juke joint, where we spent the evening with Bill “Howl N Madd” Perry and a small combo: a phenomenal keyboard player/ vocalist and a drummer from England who started coming to Clarksdale for the blues scene with her father when she was a little girl.

The next morning, we brunched at the Bluesberry Café and spent the morning with Watermelon Slim: great musician, scholar, activist, comedian, and all-around good guy. Phenomenal!

(Howl N Madd and Slim are both on YouTube, so check them out too, and Red’s is about the finest blues juke joint imaginable!)

Our eyes and ears for Clarksdale were Bubba O’Keefe and Roger Stolle. Bubba is a native who has become a nonstop promoter and matchmaker. He develops properties, makes outsiders feel at home, and might be the second-most important reason that Clarksdale has become a destination –– next to Clarksdale native Morgan Freeman, of course. Roger is a transplanted Dayton-ite. Articulate, knowledgeable, kind, creative, and really, really smart, Roger calls himself a promoter, producer, and raconteur. Ahh, but he is so much more … including our source for more great Mississippi music. Folks like Bubba and Roger are the catalysts that can turn a sleepy Delta river town into a really exciting place. I can’t wait to return … hopefully to work with young people trying to carve out a good life in a no-longer sleepy burg.

The Delta: harmonicas, hot tamales, the King Biscuit Hour, southern food, super-kind motel housekeepers, Elvis, cypress trees and brown water (stained by the tannins in the cypress roots), a race-car toilet, racists, a visit to Leland, Mississippi ­– the home of Kermit the Frog, miles upon miles of cotton fields, blues, and so much more.

Stay tuned. Like the entire trip down the river, the Delta is too alive and has too many moving parts to jam into a short blog entry. Months will pass before the elements of this trip turn themselves into discrete stories.

Until that happens, this little tasting plate is all I can muster … but the pantry is bursting with crazily cool shit!

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #9

Every inch of this drive reminds us what a workhorse the Mississippi River is … and that is not just the Mississippi itself; it is the entire system: the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Wisconsin, the Iowa, the Arkansas, the Atchafalaya, and all of the other rivers and tributaries that join the Mississippi along the way. It is among the largest river systems in the world, and it supports an almost unimaginable range of activities, from rice harvesting to soybeans and corn to quarries to barges to grain elevators. Railroad tracks are everywhere; the trains run constantly ­– very, very long trains as a rule … that look a lot like Lionel electric train sets. Bird life thrives along the Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge, which abuts the river from north to south. Fishermen (and fisherwomen) are everywhere. It’s impossible not to see the river’s contribution to commerce, farming, and recreation. It’s incredibly beautiful too.

With that thought in mind, we had a real red-letter day last Friday!

When I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep before a great adventure, like a fishing trip or going to summer camp. I still can’t. Last Friday, I awoke at 4:00 a.m. and then waited a couple of hours before rising. Rebecca calls my behavior “Little Boy-ing.” I’ve been a little boy a lot on this trip and hope to never outgrow it.

Just after 7:00 a.m., I climbed aboard a bona fide Mississippi River Towboat (not a “tugboat,” mind you, a “towboat.” One of the big guys!) A few hours later, I stood on a platform over the Mississippi at the intake for the Chain of Rocks Water Treatment plant watching where St. Louis’ drinking water gets sucked out of the river and made healthy. After a late lunch, I spent the afternoon a few miles down river gasping for clean air at the Bissell Wastewater Treatment Plant, where St. Louis’ sewage and stormwater gets treated before going back into the river.

From St. Paul south, it is hard to see the main channel of the river without seeing a towboat pushing a tow of barges. Grains and minerals have no better way to travel long distances. With the help of a little googling, I learned that barges are somewhere between 2.5 and 5-times more fuel efficient than trains and about 10 or 12-times more than trucks. That all translates to atmospheric carbon: the more cargo we ship by barge, the less we contribute to carbon build-up in the atmosphere.

The amount of cargo and freight we ship is damn-near incomprehensible. Our transportation system moves something between 40 and 55 tons of freight PER PERSON in the U.S. every year. That’s 80,000 to 110,000 pounds of stuff. It’s as high as 8,000,000 pounds for each of us in a lifetime. That’s the fertilizer that grows the grain that feeds the livestock that gets shipped to market over concrete highways and steel bridges in enormous petroleum-powered vehicles made of steel and composites that require solvents and polymers and machinery and then have to be remade into other products or moved to landfills; its all the stuff that goes into making the buildings to manage that other stuff, including the dirt that comes out of the ground to make the hole for the foundations, and all of the furniture, paper and copiers and computers that human beings actually use including our beds, sheets, soap, and cooking utensils, and, I guess, just about everything else. And now that I am thinking about it, how the hell do we get by with moving so little?

Barge traffic is a mainstay of the river’s work. About 100 years ago, the U.S. government committed the river system to transportation when the Corps of Engineers guaranteed shippers a navigable channel in the Upper Mississippi that was at least 9-feet deep. The “Upper Mississippi” extends from the headwaters to St. Louis. In that span, the river drops about 400-feet. Navigation would be impossible without a series of locks and dams that raise and lower the barges, allowing them to avoid shallows and rapids. From St. Louis south, the river flows unimpeded. The last of the lock and dam structures is in Granite City, just a few miles north of St. Louis.

Thus far in our trip, all of the barge tows we have seen have been no larger than 15 barges: three barges wide by five barges long. (And just in case you are a factoid geek like me, each barge is 195′ X 35′ with a capacity of 1,500 tons. Towboats vary in length, but 150′ seems to be a pretty good midpoint. That means that each tow is roughly 1,125-feet long  or slightly under 1/4-mile ­­– and 105-feet wide ­– so it can fit in the locks – and can carry as much as 22,500 tons, or 45-million pounds!)

The crews who operate the towboats are a memorable lot.  If nothing else, they work their butts off … 6-hours on, 6-hours off, 6-hours on, 6-hours off every day … but as my host noted, where else can someone earn as much as they do with a high school diploma or less? Each boat has three crews. Each crew works 28 days and then takes 14 days off, so every 14 days the crew shifts … except for the Captain, and I’m just not sure how that works. Family life has got to be a strain, and that 14-day-off period includes travel time from their home port to wherever the tow happens to be at the time of the shift change … which might be darn-near anywhere. From what I learned, most of the boat owners move the crews around via van, so travel might eat up a day or two on each side of the 14-day “weekend.”

I just bought a book of stories from a towboat captain. (His daughters insisted that he write his stories into a book, so he did.) I haven’t read it yet, so I only know the few stories I learned from Captain Berry during the morning we spent together. He’s been on the river for about 30 years. When I asked about “hairy” moments on the river, he laughed, as if he could start talking and not stop for about 30 more years. The story that stuck with me had to do with the time he had to move a barge perpendicular across the river for a dredging operation. The current caught the barge and lifted it across the bow of the towboat. It finally came to rest on top of the port “tow knee.” (Silly me. I thought he called the vertical contraption on the front of the boat a “tony.”) It turns out that the “tow knees” are structural safety elements: each boat has two tow-knees on its bow, one on the port side and one on the starboard. They are steel upright structures that look out of place. They are there to stop a rogue barge if it comes over the towboat’s bow and threatens to crash into the crew quarters and pilothouse. Captain Berry described how the loaded barge came to rest on top of the tow knee. They needed a giant crane to remove it, but the tow knee itself showed no damage and needed no repair. Damn, that’s amazing!

The little boy in me not only wanted to spend the entire day on the towboat with Captain Berry, I wanted to spend the full 28-day shift plying the river. (Careful, Captain, I may be back in touch before my next adventure to see if you have an opening for a near-septuagenarian deckhand.) But the clock drove me away.

The Chain-of-Rocks Water Treatment plant north of St. Louis was still an hour’s drive away, and the plant superintendent was waiting. Bye Captain Berry, and hello Frank, Pat, and Chain-of-Rocks.

If you look on a map, the Chain of Rocks plant appears to be on the Mississippi, but appearances are only half right. The plant is situated a mile or so south of the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi. In that mile, the waters of the two rivers have not yet fully mixed, so the plant actually treats Missouri River water even though it appears to be sucking it out of the Mississippi. The difference is not insignificant. (“Confluence,” by the way, refers to the joining of two rivers while “convergence” refers to the coming together of ocean currents or air currents.)

Despite the nickname of “Big Muddy,” the Mississippi is actually less muddy than the Missouri. The Missouri’s extra goop ­– known as “Total Suspended Solids,” “TSS,” or “turbidity” in the water business ­– makes treating that water a tad easier than treating water from the Mississippi. Near the beginning of the water treatment process – after all the floating crap has been screened out – the water gets whacked with a polymer that promotes coagulation. In the part of the treatment process with by-far the best name, “flocculation,” the solid material ­– called “floc” – settles to the bottom of a basin or floats to the top and gets scraped away. The coagulant works better on the TSS in the Missouri River water than the TSS in the Mississippi, so the location of the plant is helpful. You might say that the chemistry of the Missouri helps plant operators get the floc out. HaHa.

To know how much chemical to add, the plant operators need to know how much stuff is floating around in the water that needs to be removed. The very first bit of water treatment equipment we encountered was a raggedy bucket with a rope tied to it. High tech indeed. With years of experience under their belts, the operators have learned that the best way to draw a sample of raw river water is simply to drop a bucket from the intake platform and pull it up by hand. It works perfectly every time, needs almost no maintenance, and costs practically nothing.

Another very cool characteristic of Mississippi Valley drinking water is that it is high in minerals such as calcium and magnesium. In fortunate concentrations, the minerals form a protective coating along the inside of pipes, preventing contamination from other stuff, like lead in old solder joints. As long as no changes occur in the chemistry, a Flint, Michigan-like problem is not likely to occur in St. Louis, even though it is an old legacy city with a declining population and tax base and very, very old infrastructure.

(That thought about legacy cities is a really important one that deserves much more time than I am giving it … because legacy cities are of national concern and are in no way unique to the Mississippi River. How will a city’s residents continue to pay the costs of water and wastewater treatment and delivery as the population declines and grows poorer while the affluent flee? Along the river, such towns as Clinton, Iowa, Muscatine, Illinois, and Cairo, Illinois have one of the greatest assets imaginable – direct access to the Mississippi River – yet they are cities in decline that leave this pilgrim with a gut-wrenching sense of sadness and concern.)

As we left Chain-of-Rocks, the talk turned to a conversation that is common among drinking water people: the general disdain for bottled water. The folks who run St. Louis’s Water Department and the Chain of Rocks plant are genuinely proud of the product they deliver. Despite the high cost of maintenance and treatment and infrastructure, treated drinking water is one of the truly great bargains of our society. Seeing the process work along the length of the Muddy Mississip is simply amazing!

From the conversations about clean drinking water and the inanity of people to buy water in outgassing plastic bottles when health is not at risk, we left for the Bissell Wastewater Treatment Plant, a really shitty place if ever there was one. HaHa again.

Our host, plant Superintendent Becca Coyle, spent the rest of the afternoon with Rebecca and me. We had met her brother earlier at Chain of Rocks. They are both engineers, him in drinking water and her in wastewater. He had prepped us for Becca, assuring us that she was nothing more than a “turd herder,” and we should tell her so. We did. She rolled her eyes. Brothers will be brothers, you know.

Becca is a phenomenal spokesperson and representative for wastewater professionals. She sparkles with energy and enthusiasm as she shows off her plant, never showing the slightest response to any part of the process, stinkiness included. She sparkled as she showed off the size of the various settling basins, as she showed us the comminutor (a grinding device for getting rid of some of the solids), and as she showed off the crystal clear water flowing over the weirs that had been sewage only 6 or 8 hours earlier.

As had happened a few weeks earlier in Bemidji, our conversation turned to unregulated contaminants, such as personal care products, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine disrupters. We quickly agreed on a lot of things: Decades-old wastewater treatment methods will have to change. Making the needed changes will be expensive. Few if any plant owners or plant engineers will pay for the changes until clear regulation is in place so the permissible limits of contaminants is known and fully agreed upon. Until then, any investment could go right up in smoke.

The reason that these unregulated contaminants do not get treated is because of emerging science. Nobody really knows what a “safe” limit is. Until there is widespread agreement on how clean is clean enough, nothing is going to happen. The river … and our drinking water … will be the repository of that stuff. Our reproductive systems and waterways will be the victims of the inaction, and the field of oncology will be one of the prime beneficiaries. Just as happened in the past with inaction in the face of science related to seat belts, tobacco, fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon, and climate change, deep pockets will do everything in their power to ensure that we, the public, stay confused and frightened. Those bastards!

As a society, we show deference to the doctors and practitioners who dedicate their lives to keeping us healthy. We show precious little appreciation to the front-line protectors of public health: the folks who treat drinking water and wastewater. We’d be a mess without them. Hats off to you Becca, Frank, and Pat. Thank you for doing what you do. There simply are not any more important jobs.

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis