Journeys
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The Mississippi
by Charlene Anderson
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We found the dead snake on the turnoff
across from the river. Nine-year-old P.J. spotted it first: “Grandpa, pull over. There’s a snake over there!” Gene slowed down, backed up and eased off the road. We got out and approached it, carefully, gingerly. It was a small greenish snake, and curled up, At first, we thought it was asleep but soon realized it was dead. “I wonder what killed it,” P.J. mused. It hadn’t been hit by a car or mauled by an animal. It seemed in perfect shape. Yet it was dead. I was born thirty miles up the river from there. “On the Mississippi,” I once told a friend. “Do you mean on a barge on the river?” he asked. I laughed. “No, in the Lutheran Hospital on the banks of the river.” The river is wide there at La Crosse, Wisconsin, wider than in St. Louis where Mark Twain lived. But we both loved that lazy, sprawling river, he so much he changed his name because of it, me because I was born next to it and spent time on it, and even more time watching it flow by. A few days after I was born, my parents took me fifteen miles inland to the tobacco and dairy farm where they lived. Time moves slowly like the river: Year after year, through the long winters, I waited longingly for spring. Without knowing it, I waited too to grow up and move away. For years after I left, I didn’t go back often: San Francisco seemed a lot farther than two-thousand miles away from the river. Lately, I’ve returned more frequently, trying to stem the flow, to move upstream, and get to know the people whose lives still— as mine once did and in many ways still does— move with and on the river. Once when I returned, Gene prodded me into buying a plot in the local cemetery next to his and Barb’s. So, though I haven’t been close to them in life, I will be in death. And as I lie there on that green hill, as with that curled-up snake, no one will know how I lived or how I died, or why. But for that snake and for me the river had always been close, and its death and mine are the same. For though our lives, all our lives, are constantly moving, constantly flowing, with and on the river, at last the river will claim us, take us and carry us away, downstream, through the Gulf, and out into an endless sea. |
