#999

Glorious Glowing of South Louisiana

Lower Mississippi River Dispatch No. 999
"Voice of the Lower Mississippi River"

#999 -- with my mother's passing, and my daughter's start in college, I haven't had a chance to recognize this milestone, but we're crossing a big island here -- paddling around a very long bend of the river -- in fact twenty-seven years long! -- this is River Time issue #999 -- nine hundred and ninety nine issues since I started writing these as simple emails to friends & family back in 1990s, and now goes out to 7,327 subscribers on the Substack platform.

In celebration, I am returning to one of my favorite subjects, and that is the mysterious but glorious glowing light of South Louisiana.  I am not being sarcastic here.  I don't mean the night time glow of petrochem.  But the quality of daytime light, and the glowing of the universe after sunset.  As seen through the eyes of an artist, through daily sketches & paintings.  Recently revived as result of our summertime foray during Rivergator 2025.  This was one of many rewards received as result of our brutal days (weeks) of paddling in extreme heat summer 2025, Jupiter & Venus approaching conjunction.

South Louisiana: Here, the river winds through increasingly swampy bayou-filled wetlands, with brackish bays encroaching on either side, eventually passing the crescent city, and getting funneled down through that tuba-shaped bird's foot delta, with Lake Salvador and Terrebonne & Barataria Bay on one side, and Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, Breton Bay & the Chandeleurs on the other, everything seems to glow with an internal glow, not reflecting light necessarily, but seeming to be actually glowing from within, as if set afire in rainbow effervescence.

Note on writing style: run-on full paragraph sentences, connected by commas, all observations from the pencil & paintbrush of the artist, sketching with words, and coloring with vocabulary, the words & watercolor paintings are ripped right out of the pages of my notebooks, I don't know why, that's just the way it comes out.

Fri, Aug 1: St. Maurice Island fully bathed both lateral sides by late afternoon oven sun, battered by long day of extreme heat, we finally dug across last slow moving waters bottom end, (punctuated by a large gator maybe 10 footer who launched with big “ka-splosh!” off shadowed, willow shoreline), and saw tattered, bottom end, which to us looked like heaven (fully bathed in blessed shade), a muddy cliffhanger of a location, classic chemical corridor cancer alley, which we are looking at over trees, just around the band, staring glaring at us like the teeth of the monster in one focused downstream view, the Thompson Creek nuclear power plant, the three giant smoke stacks of the Big Cajun power plant, and the New Roads cable stay Bridge, busy highway, town sounds, and moaning train whistle over levee.

Sat Aug 2: a cool breeze blows through the willows, the fish are jumping, repeated screech owl calls, the frog nation is holding giant powwow in co-champion bald cypress Cat Island Tunica Hills wetland, and the Milky Way stretches out overhead and crosses our river channel at slight diagonal, with Aquila the eagle over back channel, and Cygnus the swan over main (channel), Casseiopia the queen directly above in fiery fronds of whistling willows, Pleaides seven dancing sisters nearby in the chain of the noteworthies below, Orion the water warrior, driving a spear directly into the three big Cajun smokestacks, as if in combat with a sulfur smoke breathing fire-belching dragon, a line drawn between Venus and Jupiter this morning, now parallel to Orion's forearms, seeming to drive a mortal blow to cooling tower of nuke plant, first light coming on a soothing clarified blue, silhouette of swimmer appears above, same downstream view, like a Phoenix, swimming being the solution to it all.

Incredible cloud and river light expressions, Rivergator last camp, last morning, the humidity, the sweet swampy coastal air (when not infected with benzene, Clorox, fecal chloroform, and other industrial nasties — or hydrocarbon toxicities in all their many forms), and the effect of all the land & water reflections and interplay between the two, mixed in with filé and atmospheric roux, atomized grease, and sonic syncopated reverberations sprightly bursting forth out of derelict doorways and up & down alleyways, and through the cypress swamps and sugarcane lowlands, and live oak avenues and pecan parkways, all tingling and pouring over & outward and imbuing all solid shapes with a wild essence, the presence of which seems to excite their own internal structure, spinning electrons and nucleic rhythms, exciting fresh subatomic eruptions of protons (like the flaring of the sun, to compare it to something we know on the macro scale, or maybe the chemical phosphoresce of a lightning bug), we know the trees and the forests themselves — and the islands, the mud bars and sandbars — are all imbued with a certain spirit, and all possess an internal life of their own, as all natural formations do world-wide, the river of course being the most vibrant of all, we already know that, in the same way the rocks & canyons, the deserts & mesas, the plains & steppes, the lowlands and the highlands, the valleys and the mountains, all have a life of their own, they are all alive, as of course do all the layers of creation thriving there, from the subsurface microbiota to the lively apex predators of the macro above, the eagles and black bear and alligator gar, and everything in between, so colorfully and elegantly expressed by the millions of years of care and attention of the creator, funneled forwards by ever-evolving patterns & motions of the universe.

Here at the end of North America’s greatest river is also discovered one of the greatest surprises of all, and that is the levees & rip-rap walls, the revetment, and the harsh hot pavement, and the rusted steel pylons and steel mill abutments, and refinery docks covered in algae and crustaceans, also vibrate with an internal glower, even the bridge structures, and all the man-made structures along the way, the factories and warehouses along the wharves, the power plant super structures, the granaries and concrete mills, the cooling towers & tailings, and even the smoke stacks and cell towers, and the nuke shapes, and the benzene barbarities, the petrochemical plumbing atrocities, to find some sort of vital life force also bubbling over from within, and emitting some kind of glow of their own, not from without but from within, herein is the most radical distinction, to the eye & soul of the artist, it all seems to be glowing in harmony with everything else surrounding, the boils & eddies & bends of the river, the overhanging forests and the never ending islands.

Gulf Coast dawn, I can feel the edge of the continent by the shape of the clouds, cool, northerly, breeze, sweet and forest, freshened, barred and great horn owls, calling, far away wren, and others, all is in perfection.  I took a last plunge, to check my pulse, then resurfaced and “existed” as Dad would have put it, in the euphoric super glow of it all, as a 49-barge triple screw tow pushed upstream past Cajun Condo Cat Island Point, in endless finely attenuated cloud (and blue cloud shadow) pattern radiating overhead and magnifying everything under its lens, molten sun globs roiling in moisture motions, razor-edged reflections, bright brilliances, below, one last inhale and take it all in, and then we pushed off and carried onward downstream, the beginning of fresh new visions & experiences down around the bend.

#999 River Time: The Lower Mississippi River Dispatch

Ready to get out of town? (Like Huck & Jim?)  Ready for some river time?  Warning: you may not want to return!  Through personal stories, music, photos, news items, and realtime opportunities, seasoned Mississippi River Rats from the Quapaw Canoe Company will guide you over the levee, and then down the muddy banks of the river — and into the expansive forest and floodplain of the biggest river in North America!  For some “river time!” The Lower Mississippi River is a thriving paradise just over the levee, where the waters flow forever wild and free — as they bounce back and forth between the big sky and the big islands -- and your imagination is set free amongst the whirlpools, eddies and boils, and the profusion of wild birds, fish, and mammals.  We might have our feet in the mud, but our eyes are on the heavens (to paraphrase Camus).  We call it "river time."  This is our reality.  Come with us, and get a taste of it.  You may not want to return once you sample!

Quapaw Canoe Company ~ Celebrating 27 Years of Service
Custom Guiding & Outfitting on the Lower Mississippi River
Winner of the SBA 2024 Small Business of the Year Award

End Note: we discover the Rivergator: the previous day, we scared a 3-foot alligator into the water before pushing off from lunch break, exploratory, stop, collapsing colorful, cliff bottoms of the Tunica Hills bluffs after bathing and pouring bailers-full of cold mineral spring water over our heads (with cold shudder!), in water it was difficult to decide, was that driftwood? Or was that really an alligator?  Pushing on past Como Plantation the dancing stick appears again — that is a gator! And to my utter amazement, gator turns and swims towards us, maybe attracted by our long, dark green shape, and rides a boil around us, eyeing us closely and us him, fellow Voyagers of the New World, he might be missing an eye, something seems off, another example of injured nature seeking our sympathy, the bright green beetle with broken antenna, the green darner dragonfly with ripped-off wings, and then the eagle missing feathers.  For video of one-eyed river gator, return to LMRD River Time #994