hmmm.....

“My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. It lies flat, like a badly drawn half oval, with Memphis at its northern and Vicksburg at its southern tip. Its western boundary is the Mississippi river, which coils and returns on itself in great hooks and crescents, though from the map you would think it ran in a straight line north and south. Every few years it rises like a monster from its bed and pushed over it banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made. For our soil , very bark brown, creamy and sweet-smelling, without substrata of rock of shale, was built slowly, century after century, by the sediment gathered by the river in its solemn task of cleansing the continent and deposited in annual layers of silt on what must once have been a vast depression between itself and the hills. This ancient depression, now filled in and level, is what we call the Delta. Some say it was the floor of the sea itself. Now it seems still to be a floor, being smooth from one end to the other, without rise or dip or hill, unless the mysterious scattered monument of the mound-builders may be called hills. The land does not drain into the river as most riparian lands do, but tilts back from it towards the hills of the south and east. Across this wide flat alluvial stretch—north and south it measures one hundred and ninety-six miles, east and west at the widest point fifty miles—run, slowly and circuitously other rivers and creeks also high-banked, with names pleasant to remember—Rattlesnake Bayou, Quiver River, the Bogue Phalia, the Tallahatchie, the Sunflower—pouring their tawny waters finally into the Yazoo, which in turn loses itself just above Vicksburg in the river. With us when you speak of “the river,” though there are many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved, the Mississippi.”

These are the opening words of William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee.

I am leaving tomorrow. By the time most of you read this will already be in New York. I have left home before, but this time just has the feeling of finality. It is as if I am leaving this house this town this land this river for the last time. Oh yes, I will return and check up on the old man, Old Man River that is, but I do not suspect I will call him my neighbor again. I will miss him. I will miss the way he glides like a piece of satin beneath the bridge. I will, in some morbid way, miss the stories of those he takes from us. They go to him like a young virgin might go to the edge of the ancient volcano and fall in. They are our sacrifices, and they appease him.

I heard a story once about a boy who wanted to stay in his home town and get married and have kids. He said that he wanted to grow roots. One day a circus came to town. He went to the fortune teller and she granted him a wish. He wished to grow roots in his home town. Before the young man reached his parents’ house he was stopped. He was bound to the soil and he began to grow roots. It was not long before this young man had become a tree. Of course we should all be careful what wish for because we just might get it. I have put out roots here. I love this place I love the magic in the air. Have you felt it? I do! I feel it all the time. I feel it most at night. It weighs down on me like the sticky, humid air. The magic is almost tangible. Sometimes I think I can bottle it and sell it. But of course the people would want to know what the magic does. I would not be able to tell them. I could only say, “It depends.” It depends on who you are. For some he causes words to flow onto the page like mint juleps flowing into a glass. For others it makes paint melt onto the canvas like the ice in my sweet tea. And for others, oh man, for others it causes black eyed peas and cornbread to taste like the finest food in the world. What will it do for you? All I can say is that the humid magic will cause you to put down roots, roots that stretch, but still roots that nourish the soul.

I am leaving tomorrow.

Buddy Nordan tells the story of a young man who caught the slow moving diesel train that ran through his town. Every day that summer the boy caught the train and every day he jumped off. “And then one day, for what reason I cannot say, something changed. I hooked the train, as I had done before. The Delta was what it had always been—endless blue sky, defoliated fields, small African villages peopled with princes and savages and their barebreasted sad women, washpots and collard greens. The train was what it had always been, so slow, so comfortable that it seemed to be stasis in motion. The poison heat of the diesel exhaust which swept back into my face was no different from the normal usual poisonous air that blew across Mowdown in the paddies or the DDT in the ditches and made up the staple air of my comfort and ease. Everything was the same. The train wagged its reluctant head and heaved itself up like an old man and set out with a wonted resignation toward the orchard where I usually jumped clear. Bark from the pulp wood on a flatcar was blowing in my face when I realized that I was not going to jump off. . . I didn’t jump off.” (Music of the Swamp)

I have ridden this train before, this C&G railroad, I have always jumped off at the orchard, but this time I think I might be in for the long haul. We’ll see….