| BY
MARK COATNEY
The thing
about life on the lower Mississippi is that there isn't
as much as there used to be. The fish are mostly gone, and
those that are left are, well, definitely not sushi-grade.
You sail a loopy, twisting course though dozens of miles
of buoys and tree-lined banks. No homes, few signs of animal
life; only the occasional barge for company.
In "Huckleberry
Finn," the river represents sanctuary, a place far
more civilized than the river towns. But there's no action
in sanctuary, no story, and so we've been spending our days
ashore, trolling for stories. But today I stay aboard for
the Vicksburg-to-Natchez run, 70-odd nautical miles, looking
for stories on the river. Or in the river. The local news
has it that two people hit the water near Vicksburg, one
who jumped off the bridge and has not been found, the other
who fell off a barge during the night, found later that
morning, miraculously alive, shivering on a bank downstream.
We pass
the Diamond Lady, an old stern paddle wheeler that later
became one of the first of this new generation of riverboat
gambling ships, back in those quaint days in the early '90s
when riverboat casinos were actually ships and not just
buildings set out over the water. It's a beautiful old boat,
just in need of some paint and a little love, and it's bound
upstream for Vicksburg and mothballs until someone with
a bold vision (or at least lots of cash) buys it.
We picnic
on a sandy bank on the Mississippi shore 10 miles north
of Natchez. With deer and beaver tracks running along the
shore and into the thick stands of willows and cottonwoods,
the setting here looks untouched by human hands. Of course,
we know the place has been touched, touched like a Natchez
hooker—the navigation buoys on the water, the deep,
canalized river and the levees out of sight through the
trees have all drastically altered this scene from what
it looked like 250 years ago when the Spanish were establishing
their post on the high bluffs at Natchez.
But we
chop wood for a fire, and the echoes ringing through the
trees make the whole thing seem very 18th-century. Were
we in fact early Spanish settlers, Eric Pooley, our political
correspondent, would be an early candidate to be our leader,
since he can (and did) split a good-size log with a single
mighty blow of his ax.
And there
in the middle of the channel, right out of Huck Finn, is
an island, a huge sandbar. It looks untouched, unspoiled,
and so we head over to touch and spoil it. We make footprints
in virgin sand, and claim the land for Time Warner. Then
we head over to the high ground, on the island's west side,
and find a beer bottle sitting right where the owner left
it, high on the low hill facing Louisiana.
It may
seem like no one's around, but somebody's always been there
first.
|
