MONUMENTS UPON THE TUMULTUOUS EARTH

For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids, fifty-acre plazas, and intricate clusters of hillocks along the wild waterway of the Mississippi River. Beholding the 2,200-mile levee system that now curbs the river’s torrent, Boyce Upholt wonders: what do our monuments say about who we are—and the crises we face?

THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER appears on most maps as a line of blue that cuts the continent in half—a convenient borderline between the hidebound east and the wilder west.

A river, though, and especially a river so big, is never orderly, at least not when left to its own devices. The Mississippi’s unruliness grows as each new tributary joins the flow. Many are big enough to lend their names to whole states: the Minnesota and then the Wisconsin, the Iowa and the Illinois. By the time the Missouri arrives, halfway down the continent, the nation’s big river has grown to the extent that—again, speaking here of natural conditions—it can writhe across a floodplain six miles wide. When the Ohio joins at the bottom tip of Illinois, this river becomes a monstrosity. A continental torrent. I’ve heard stories of through-paddlers who, after traveling more than a thousand miles from the headwaters, give up when they reach this confluence, overwhelmed by the size of the water.

To understand the southern river, you have to know that as recently as twelve thousand years ago, there was no river here. There was not even land. Instead, an arm of water reached up from the Gulf of Mexico, the result of much higher oceans. The terrain that now lies along the southern Mississippi was laid down over the subsequent millennia as water poured off the continent, carrying bits of mud that filled this long and narrow bay. Eventually, the mud sprouted into a vast forest of cypress swamps threaded with bayous and streams—one of the most productive ecosystems in North America. After six thousand years, the mud had reached the edge of the continent—roughly the site of Baton Rouge today—and began to grow outward into its delta, a forking network of ridges that give way to the salty gulf. Even after this land was laid down, the river’s floods would reseize the old territory every few years, creating a pool of water that stood in places ninety miles across. The river’s path was always changing, its banks crumpling inward. Early settlers compared the sounds of the trees ripped free by erosion to canon fire.

European settlers had a distinct response to this chaos: Less than a year after he established the tiny encampment that would become known as New Orleans, the commandante-general of France’s local colony set a crew, including enslaved Africans, to work. They piled up soil along the riverbank to form a protective wall. The resulting embankment—the “levee,” it’s called, from the French word for lift—grew through the centuries and now stands thirty feet tall in places.

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