| BY MARK COATNEY
This
is changeover day. Some of our crew of reporters and editors
are getting off here and heading back home to far less interesting
assignments, and a fresh batch will replace them. So we're
spending a whole day here in Memphis for laundry, loading
and offloading, and R and R. One kind reader has made the
excellent suggestion via email that we become "roaring,
stinking drunk," and a large number of our party concurs.
I notice a large 24-7 bail bondsman's shop nearby, and take
that as a good omen for the evening.
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| DIANA WALKER FOR TIME |
| TIME's Joel Stein tries to put the hustle on one of his shipmates. |
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I'd like
to say that we descended on Beale Street like a bunch of
drunken sailors. I'd like to say we behaved disgracefully,
and were politely but firmly asked to never return to town
again. But I would be lying. It turns out we are a very
responsible group that would make our mothers proud. We
have a few drinks, shoot a little pool — never play
Ron Stodghill, our Chicago bureau chief, for money. He would
smile, and beat you like a drum, and take your money. And
then you would be sad — and return to our boat. Remember
your Huckleberry Finn: The shore is where you get into trouble.
It's the river that's sanctuary.
The Grampa
Woo is docked at Mud Island, just down the bank from downtown
Memphis. Mud Island is home to the Mississippi
River Walk,
a 5-block long detailed replica of the lower river from
Cairo to New Orleans. Full disclosure here — I first
heard about this thing when I was first researching the
trip. It seemed a little goofy, like an overachieving kid's
5th Grade science fair project. But oh how wrong I was.
It's incredibly detailed, a topographical map with a scale
of 30 inches to the mile, with water running through it
and the major towns and bridges thrown in for free (although
I'm worried about one of the bridges in southern Mississippi.
It has a big hole right in the center. You motorists down
there beware). It's an enormous, walkable map. Very cool.
And frustrating.
Now that I'm traveling by boat, I look at interesting riparian
features like the extreme horseshoe bend in the river near
New Madrid and think come on, already—lets just dig
a ditch between the two ends and save everyone a few hours
boating time. Of course, this would suddenly leave the good
people of New Madrid miles from the water, which would not
be a nice thing, but it was the kind of behavior that the
river indulged in all the time before the Mississippi River
engineers started insisting on some sort of regular course.
Walking
the Mud Island map makes you realize how thoroughly we have
domesticated the big river. There are dikes, levies, jetties
designed to keep the waters flowing in a certain way; flood
plains and diversion systems like the enormous one that
diverts excess Mississippi water into the Atchafalaya River
in southern Louisiana. Catastrophes like the 1927 flood
are much less likely to happen today.
The problem
in the delta today isn't mechanical engineering, it's social.
The region is one of the poorest in the U.S. The average
family of four has an income of $16,583, only a little over
half of the national average. In Mississippi County, Arkansas,
35 percent of kids live in poverty and 40 percent of adults
don't have a high school diploma. What can and will be done
about those numbers will be one of the main topics of the
next leg of our trip.
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