Loneliest River in America
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Lower Mississippi River Dispatch No. 895 "Voice of the Lower Mississippi River" Memphis, TN ~ Helena, AR ~ Clarksdale, MS ~ Vicksburg, MS Photos & Text (c) 2023 John Ruskey
February is for Friends of the Sunflower River! Community Canoe Events, Feb 2023: *Sat Feb 11, 1-3pm Sunflower River Cleanup *Sat Feb 25, 1-5pm Mississippi River Community Canoe Sunflower River Cleanup Sat Feb 11th, 1-3pm by Canoe or by foot on land Details: -weather forecast: sunny and cool, highs in the upper 40s -1pm Meet on banks of Sunflower River behind Quapaw Canoe Company -Pack gloves, trash bags, water bottle and snacks, preferably in daypack so you can carry with you -Set out on foot, by canoe, or on paddleboard, and pick up trash along the Sunflower River where it flows through downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi -Also, make piles of any tree limbs and other vegetation from last week’s ice storm for Clarksdale Public Works to pickup -Pack all trash in bags, and make piles on side of roadways on either side of river. City of Clarksdale will pick up piles during the week. -Don't mix piles of trash with piles of brush. Please keep separate for easier pickup. -canoe rental: free for those under 18 (with parental consent). $10 educators of any sort. $25 everyone else. -meet 1pm on banks of river behind Quapaw Canoe Company 3rd & Sunflower in downtown Clarksdale. Drive or walk down concrete ramp opposite Barnes-Petty Financial Advisors and Sunflower Laundry. Parking in grassy field to right of ramp. Cautions: -be cautious handling any hazardous materials -wear gloves, leave alone if too dangerous to touch -document and contact MDEQ (Mississippi Dept of Environmental Quality) for any hazardous materials too dangerous to handle -notify Clarksdale Public Utilities if you notice any leaks or breaks in stormwater sewer system Can't attend, but want to help support? -Make a donation to the Lower Mississippi River Foundation! See below for more information. This is our annual Sunflower River Cleanup, which we have been doing since 1998! In partnership with the Lower Mississippi River Foundation and the City of Clarksdale Thank you, and May the River be with You!
Big Sunflower River has the Blues
(c) 2023 John Ruskey
How many rivers can you put in at one of the best juke joints in the world (Red’s in Clarksdale), paddle directly behind the “birthplace” of the blues (Dockery Plantation) visit another one of the best juke joints in the world (Club Ebony, Indianola) and end up near the birthplace of Muddy Waters (Rolling Fork)?
The Sunflower is the Mississippi Delta. Geographers have named our floodplain the “Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,” since the Yazoo defines the Eastern edge and the Mississippi River the Western. (E.g.: the famous almond-shaped flat landscape with Memphis to the North and Vicksburg to the South, the cotton-rich Delta that gave the world the Delta Blues.)
But if you count the rain drops, the Sunflower is much more Delta than the Yazoo. The Yazoo should be considered Hill Country. If a rain drop falls here in the Delta most likely it enters the Big Sun somewhere in its 225 mile north-south journey. It receives all waters good & bad from Friars Point, Clarksdale, Cleveland, Indianola, Leland, Greenville, Rolling Fork & Mayersville. The only major Delta populations it doesn’t drain are Tunica, Greenwood & Belzoni. Its tributaries include the Hushpuckena, the Quiver River, Bogue Phaila, Silver River, and due to some radical canal work by our public servants the US Army Corps of Engineers, Deer Creek and Steele Bayou. The Little Sunflower, and some minor bayous and chutes are considered its “distributaries,” waterways that carry its excesses during high water. It is sometimes connected overhead via Moon Lake and the Yazoo Pass to the Coldwater River and points North & East, but only during the highest of river levels. Of course, during severe flooding, the entire Delta goes under water and then you could really say “the river connects us all!”
The Sunflower River is born in the bayous and lakes of Northern Coahoma County and meanders South some 250 miles through the Yazoo/Mississippi Delta paralleling the Mississippi River on the West and the Yazoo on the East, (with which it confluences with 10 miles above Vicksburg). A small but dynamic river, once forested, now mostly bordered by fields, the Sunflower is a rich habitat for all creatures native to the region, including black bear and panther. Its muddy current averages 2100 cfs (cubic feet per second) at Sunflower, 3461 at the mouth of Bogue Phalia, and approximately 4500 where it empties into the Yazoo River at Steele Bayou. Its drainage includes most or all of Coahoma, Bolivar, Sunflower, Washington, Sharkey & Issaquena Counties, some 3,689 square miles, inhabited by 169,150 people.
The Sunflower and the Yazoo parallel each other (and not coincidentally the Mississippi River) for the majority of their North-to-South journey, but come from widely different origins. While the Sunflower emerges from the bayous of the North Delta, the Yazoo gurgles out of the Kudzu-covered Piney forests of the Mississippi “Hill” Country, in the form of the Coldwater River. Later it merges with the Tallahatchie (Bobby Gentry: Ode to Bille Joe), and then at Greenwood meets the Yalobusha to form the Yazoo. It also passes through Sledge (home of Charlie Pride), Marks, and Yazoo City. Greenwood was once the cotton stock market capital of the world, and Robert Johnson was reportedly poisoned in a nearby juke joint. Emmet Till was murdered on one of its bayous, igniting the stormiest period of the Civil Rights era.
All Mississippi rivers have the blues to some extent, but the Sunflower has the blues worse than any other. In its journey through the Delta, the Sunflower winds through the layers of mud and history that gave the world its first great blues singer (Charlie Patton, Dockery Plantation), the first mechanized cotton picker (Hopson Plantation), its oldest African-American founded community (Mound Bayou), rural Civil Rights era leaders (Fanny Lou Hamer, Sunflower County; Aaron Henry, Clarksdale), the Teddy Bear (Delta National Forest), King of the Chicago Blues (Muddy Waters, born in Rolling Fork, lived 25 years at Stovall) and the renowned ambassador of the blues (B.B. King, Indianola). The Rev. C.L. Franklin (Aretha’s Father) is just one of many who were baptized in her muddy waters. Bessie Smith died at the G.T. Thomas Hospital which sits on her banks in Clarksdale (now the Riverside Hotel). Today you can hear live blues along the river at Red’s juke joint, Levon's, Ground Zero, and if you wander a few blocks further off river into downtown you can add on the New Roxy Theatre, Deak Harp's Place, Stan Street's Place, the new Club Mellinium, Sean Bad Apple's Juke, 19th Street Red's Place, the Bluesberry Cafe and others I might be forgetting about. Legendary woodsman, Holt Collier (1846-1936), who cornered the Teddy Bear, reported its waters to run clear & clean, and Roosevelt started each day of the hunt with a cold-water swim. One of our long-term objectives is to make the waters safe once again for fishing and swimming.
No sandbars on this river. Nothing but that thick, rich Mississippi alluvial floodplain soil, and the fields and towns and forests adjacent. Exceptional wildlife, especially raptors & amphibians. Muddy banks make for muddy landings, muddy picnics, muddy camps.
Why paddle a canoe on the Sunflower? Why pay attention to this neglected & polluted muddy waterway? I really can’t answer this question. Every year we endure such hardship & miserable paddling that I am sure it will be our last. And yet every New Year we start planning again for the continuation. The best response I can offer for this irrational behavior is man’s endless search for self-knowledge. Its either that or we’re idiots with masochistic tendencies. We all want to know who we are, where we come from, why we do the things we do. Our philosophy on the Sunflower is “Why look outside when its all right here below the muddy banks?” Americans spend entire life savings to make “life-changing” journeys to the Amazon or to Tibet, and its all right here. All the history, all the future, all the answers.
If the Lower Mississippi is the gut of America, the Big Sunflower is the liver. It receives all the bad blood, the poisons, the toxins, the greed & the guilt of a region, and deposits them in her muddy floodplain. And believe me, you feel it as you paddle along. If you live in the Mississippi Delta, or have any affinity for it, then this is your river. Its also your liver, everything that gets sent down the street drains, the sewer pipes and the farm ditches ends up in the river, or in its adjacent floodplains, especially in the 60,000 acres of bottomland hardwoods of Delta National Forest. So its your river, and its your liver. The liver river! Sorry for the unpleasant comparison, but I think its fitting.
The Big Sun has gotten all kinds of bad press, mostly about the various workings of man & machines along its banks -- and true to form there have been countless reporters in our vicinity in the last two years covering the controversial Yazoo Pumps. No one is talking about the Sunflower for the sake of the river. And that is why we formed “Friends of the Sunflower River.” We’re not putting on any magnolia-leaf-colored sunglasses in this, trying to re-paint the pigsty in pretty pinks & purples. But we do believe the Big Sun deserves better attention than it’s gotten, and we intend to share our experiences as truthfully as we can. Who knows the river better than those who paddle it? Only the catfish & the turtles.
Of course, the end of one river is just the beginning of another, and so the Sunflower becomes a tributary of the Yazoo River at Steele Bayou. Not far downstream the Yazoo gets swallowed by the mother river, the Mighty Mississippi. As of press deadline to appears that the EPA will once again veto the plans to build the world’s largest freshwater pumps where the Sunflower joins the Yazoo. We in the Delta feel the effects of the “problem” the pumps are supposed to fix, that is “backwater” building up within the Mississippi Delta, and yes, we have some thoughts about this and the water situation everywhere, the lack of good water, the disappearing wetlands, the extremely low water levels on all rivers in the middle of America – and of course we’ll share with you as we go along. We aren’t scientists or any sort. We know a lot of little things, small pieces of the whole, but are experts at none. I am merely a canoe builder & river guide and leader of a small group of adventurers, the Mighty Quapaws. But we do know the Sunflower river better than anyone else, if nothing else for the simple fact that we are the only people that actually get out and paddle it. Why do we know this is true? Because we don’t see anyone else!
Poor neglected rivers, like the closet you stuff all your unwanted things in, where your guests can’t see them. But what if your guests did see them? Then you’d start keeping it a little neater, wouldn’t you? And that’s what we are hoping with the Big Sunflower – we are hoping that these explorations and writings of the Friends of the Sunflower will take some of the fear out of the mud and trashy banks, and add a little respect & recognition of the beauty & great expressions of life – and that more people will get out and paddle it. As more people paddle, maybe the people who dump things over the bank will be less inclined to do so -- and who knows, maybe they’ll even clean up some of the mess they made last year.
We also recognize that canoeing is not for everybody, especially canoeing a sloppy muddy river in the mosquitoe & snake infested Mississippi Delta. But even If you don’t like paddling, join us and commiserate and read on. We’ll get you out there in the wilds with our stories & photos, and you can share in the wonders of the river from the comfort of your home. But be forewarned: there will be unfinished sentences and metaphors that don’t entirely dovetail, and lastly, it’s going to be a sloppy read that won’t leave you entirely unsplattered with mud!
Friends of the Sunflower River is all about appreciating and caring for the lonely little river that winds its way through the center of the Mississippi Delta, from Friars Point to Clarksdale, from Mound Bayou & Merigold to Sunflower; from Indianola to Anguilla, from Holly Bluff to Vicksburg.
This river has the blues! Besides the many blues & gospel musicians who were born & baptized along its banks, its mussel shell beds (which are reported to be the richest such biota in the world) seem to be in constant danger of overzealous engineering. The Sunflower River has been neglected and over-worked; so much that it was proclaimed America’s “Most Endangered River” in 2003, and again in 2008, and I think other place holdings on that list in since and in between. Sigh, our unique sweet muddy river, she is so well known, and yet so grotesquely misunderstood!
The good news is that its forests constitute the largest bottomland hardwood forests in the National Forest system (they also produce the highest carbon-sequestration of any forests in North America!), and its banks are home to every creature winged, webbed or otherwise, found native to the Mississippi Delta. It’s a beautiful place to get away, to reflect a moment on the rivers and woods of America, to walk along its banks, to paddle its waters, to enjoy its scenery. Most importantly, its home to all of us who live on or near its banks, and second home to many others who love it from a distance. Shouldn’t we be taking better care of our lonely muddy river?
Mission Statement: The Friends of the Sunflower River was established in 1999 to bring attention, understanding and care to the Big Sunflower River and its tributaries, The Little Sunflower, the Bogue Phalia, Mound Bayou, Indian Bayou, The Quiver River, Silver Creek, Deer Creek, Rolling Fork, Steele Bayou and the Hushpuckena River.
Goals: We, the members of the Sunflower River, are committed to a clean-flowing Sunflower River that provides sustainable habitat for the humans, animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish that are found native to the Mississippi Delta. We dedicate ourselves to protect and restore its aquatic environment. We strive to supplement the current body of knowledge with observations, recordings and documentation of animal movement, water quality, soil quality, and other concerns of the natural science of the Mississippi Delta.
Activities: involve understanding and enjoyment of the Sunflower River and its riparian environment: paddling, clean-up, water-quality monitoring, animal tracking, bird watching, crustacean counts, amphibian and insect observations.
Membership: You can become a supporting member to help us appreciate and take care of this lonely little river that winds its way through the center of the Mississippi Delta. Tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Make out check to the Lower Mississippi River Foundation, and send to:
Lower Mississippi River Foundation
P.O. Box 127
Helena, AR. 72342
Great post, brother! Love the ode to the Sunflower River! Especially the closet metaphor. Whoo-Whoop!
All I can send is my love, I’m there in spirit, from the Sunflower Estates, off Sunflower Avenue, thank you all for what you do!! All hail mighty Sunflowers, all hail Mighty Quapaws! All my love, Jen