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Show RIVER The point had a good feel to it. I sat down on the Mississippi shore and watched the great river roll by. It felt like I was back home and all that rolling water left me transfixed. The movement of the Mississippi River is a natural phenomenon that is difficult to capture in words. It endlessly changes and is eternally changeless. On a windy day the surface of the river ripples with steady, fluid movement: different currents, boils, sucks, and eddies make the water swirl and slide. You can see, even feel, the massive movement of the river, but it moves so quietly and with so little apparent effort, its motion is so smooth, even, and steady that the river hardly appears to move at all. It seems impossible that so much water could flow so relentlessly without a tremendous roar. You can feel the river's power, you can sense its movement, even though they are as invisible as the wind. Even the color of the river is continually in flux. Up close the river is the color of rich, newly turned ground, a deep brown textured with green. It looks so thick that you could almost walk upon it, bringing to mind the old complaint that the Mississippi is too thick to drink and too thin to plow. With distance the river takes on the color of the sky, changing with the weather and the time so that in a single afternoon it can be blue or gray or black or blood red. No one gets rapturous about the beauty of the Mississippi, as they might about the Grand Canyon or the Smokey Mountains, because the river is not physically beautiful, except in rare moments and moods. It is powerful, it is literally awesome. When confronted by the river for the first time, most people stand silently and stare. It is much like looking at the ocean, vast and overpowering, except that the river has an unrelenting, restless, unstoppable, directed movement. It flows. -16- |