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Show RIVER Maryland, and below Cairo it is joined by the Homochitto and the Yazoo, the Big Black and the Big Blue and the Little Blue, the Red, the White, the Verdigris, the Coldwater, the Sulpher, the St. Francis and the Boeuf and the Sunflower, the Tensas and the Tallahatchie, the Moro and the Eleven Point and the Ouachita and the Hatchie, the Wolf, the Obion and the Neosha and the Cimarron, the Purgatoire, the Huerfano, the Sand Arroyo, the Apishapa, the Fountain, the Canadian, the Republican, the Black Bear, the Arkansas, and a thousand bayous and backwaters. The moods of the river matched the turmoil of my own. A clear sky could cloud over and break into storm in less than an hour, and a day of relentless rain would break into a sunset as quiet and breathless as a desert. Rivermen say that at Cairo the river changes sex. They call the upper river "she" and the lower river "Old Man," and they have good reason. Below Cairo the river takes on an aura of brute power and an overwhelming, slow-moving majesty. The river sweeps south like time itself, relentless, unstopping, unstoppable. All my attention was drawn to the south, where the one huge river rolled till it filled the horizon. Down that torrent, someplace between myself and the sea, whatever it was that I was searching for must lie. Before my eyes rolled the river that I'd seen so many times in dream and memory, the vision that obsessed and still obsesses me. After some months of River Fever it was soothing to sit and watch the real river roll on by. There was a wholeness to it that I'd never been able to complete in my mind: neither memory or imagination could retain an accurate notion of the river's power and size. This was the key to the failure of all the writing I'd done about the Mississippi: I -19- |