From the wide, meandering drive
you
look away, beyond the lines
of
white anonymous markers,
down
to where the barges
are
pushing past the piers
as slowly as the hour hand of a clock,
while
tiny speedboats whine
as they skip up and down
like
mosquitoes, skimming
the water
to
better their times.
The
digital tour guide at Fort Hill
makes
it a point to say
that
the River isn’t what you see
(“the
River” around here
always
means the Mississippi)
but
the Yazoo Diversion Canal,
an
artificial waterway
created
by the Army Corps of Engineers
after
the River slid away
and
left Vicksburg behind.
The
real Mississippi winds, unwinds
like
a snake uncoiling, on the other side
of
the shifting sandbars and temporary islands
that
lie in the distance, looking like solid ground
crowded
with undergrowth, cottonwood, willow, and pine.
Several
hours farther down,
at
New Roads in the Parish of Pointe Coupée,
the
River once twisted itself out this way.
On
the farther, higher side
they
made the old bed into a resort,
a
playground for aquatic sports,
called
False River Lake.
They
have sail-boating and water-skiing there,
and
trolling, and fishing from the shore,
lined
now with substantial real estate.
It
all sounds fairly dull and safe,
and
perhaps it is.
Perhaps
there’s a point to be made
for placidity, though:
Sometimes you hear someone say,
with ironic politesse,
“May
you live in interesting times,”
—when
they don’t mean to bless.
But
more than once the River has
struck
at a town:
of
that rip-roaring sinful place,
Natchez-under-the-Hill,
there
isn’t much left now;
and
at Grand Gulf,
half
an hour south of here,
fifty-six
blocks of busy, sleepy people
sloughed
off into the water
bit
by bit, without a sound.
Only
a few minutes farther away,
antique
and beautiful,
the
clock-faced steeples of Port Gibson wait,
set
back decorously not-too-near
the
soft slopes of the Little Bayou Pierre,
a
minor tributary that everyone there
calls
“By a Pier.”
They
watch the town’s two bridges—
the
skeletal old one, mostly struck down
in
the great storm of ’Fifty-Four,
and
the squat, heavy new one, that brute mass and weight
have
held in place so far.
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https://mississippiriver.natgeotourism.com/content /historic-downtown-vicksburgmspa915737884acb72d3
