River Road: a Mississippiad

What began as vast waves of fire flows inexorably toward ice. A river beginning in tall grasses, headwaters part northern mist, beyond stoic ancestors, the journey-work of time. A short beeline down the flyway to fading storefront facades, the corseted embrace of lock-and-dam. Bleach bottles, plastic lawn chairs, effluent of the disposable bobbing to shore. So you say history is only a story of things. With folded hands, Madame Cecile foretells. Princess Shoshanna in her twangy TV voice decries. Pop celebrities of spirit joined to commerce, partisans of bile with a show of their own, they entertain the mornings at our motels. Ghost winds, muffled pileus clouds from the melting ice cap seven hundred miles away. Tamarack headlands in Paul Bunyan country. Towering roadside statues of Babe, the Blue Ox. Life in large print. A boy with one leg crops his father’s farm. The courthouse soldier’s scattered child. His baler and twelve cows above the hill and silo. Bales round as Etruscan columns grazing angled hillsides. You think this world is for knowing one afternoon at a time. And even then everyone will tell a different story. At La Crosse a first encounter with the broad river, onset of black clouds. A mood. Moods. We turn more self-conscious. I touch your hair, finger your earrings. Follow the silver sliver of a jet toward sunset. We take bridges at Red Wing and Prairie du Chien. Country roads to nowhere we had ever been, some brushed by the beautiful, poisonous and bitter. Our fingers and palms anodized by dewberries in sunburnt fields. At riverbank mudfish and canoe sidle, slip and twist by beneath the flyway’s excesses, the frenzied frequencies of low, imped wings. We watch a robin’s mosey, hop, bounce and tug. It swivels to watch us. How cordial of Fort Madison and Keokuk to anticipate Dubuque. Weathered plywood up to the dentils. The graffiti-laced lyrics. Failure to survive photogenic. Where is the camera to catch these neglected Roman arguments? An architecture never quite persuasive in a country of the plain. Crowded spaces abandoned to open places. Tires, cans, bottles, things from the American bounty. A yellow Caterpillar stalks the edge of Main Street. Dozer blade ravenous. You suspect at once Bunyan, Babe and Hels Helsen have had a hand in this. Over the river a long, low plume of the nuke plant. Visible sigh of a nation accumulating silences of exhaustion. The undertaker has moved to Bettendorf. No embalmer needed for death by attenuation. Death by fire. By degree and irony. Only death by nodding. The saloon sandbagged. Everything went in ’93. Again in ’11. Broken levee. Faith breached. The past is backlit here. A moon from over water arcs across tower and steeple—bells sold. The stained glass and marble removed to franchised pizza parlors. One last time you look back. Toward home. Birds singing on the branches. Their elegies fishtailing along nerves through moist river air. Toward local lessons of the public square once schooled in late pagan virtue. Until America’s Arcadia morphed into slave lands. Numbered lashes of an overseer’s whip. A garden early on going up in toxic weeds. In the river towns tap tap of the blind man’s cane shuffling behind tomorrow’s shadows. This my patch. Always is the same. Nothing new. History like calamity. Always be. Event mirrors revelation where Nauvoo rises on a bluff above the Mississippi. Riverbanks of winter nahoo and scrub oak obscure craft shops, the tidy houses. Houses of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young. A great steepled temple rising on the hill like a statehouse. America raised with Israel in the sacred annals to exception. There will be a new set of books. And a lynch mob will murder prophet and patriarch. A militia berserk with guns rechannel history. The national faith now forged. Accounts of the lost prophet growing to heroic legend, and foretelling refuge in the West. Stories now grown remote from their hard beginnings. Oxen, mule carts and wagon trains will cross the February river. Passable that year over ice. Handcarts pushed and pulled through a continent’s long winter for fifteen hundred miles, a Via Dolorosa. Graves of perished saints on their way to Zion lie scattered trailside.

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