“The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.”
—- John McPhee, The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya
(click to enlarge)
The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where? What was solid, what was not? What was directly below the gates and the roadway? With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole. They saw fish.
—-John McPhee, The Control of Nature
Back in 1991, the newest attraction at Woldenberg Park was an 18-foot-high marble statue titled Old Man River located behind Jax Brewery. The sculptor, Robert Schoen, decided to create a monumental male figure with arms stretched up, a stylized human figure made of 17 tons of Carrera marble. The figure’s circular movement seems to convey a harmony between the artwork and its location. The river is connected to the land through the openings of the legs and arms. Old Man River is supported by a twin-tiered base with ridged sides that imitate currents in the Mississippi River.
It has been suggested that the muscular figure is, like the port of New Orleans, cosmopolitan in spirit. Stylistically, the sculpture suggests sources as diverse as streamlined neo-classical statuary of the 1930s and Asian and pre-Columbian art.
“I wanted to make a sculpture that would reflect the river’s embrace of the city,” Schoen said of the statue. “The sculpture is a modern statement with European roots, which is what makes New Orleans unique in America.”
Old Man River A Man with a Past Arms reach empty handed, God to a city in Love with Water Robert Schoen Artist 1991
I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
—-Anais Nin
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
—-Susan Sontag
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
—-Gilbert K. Chesterton
Every tourist in New Orleans has their picture taken in front of the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. Usually, they climb the levee with a lump of sugar-slathered fried dough washed down with bitter coffee sitting in their stomach like the grease of doom to grin at the camera while facing the river.
I prefer this view of the Cathedral, from across the Mississippi at Algiers Point. The water flows by… always different, always the same.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
—-Heraclitus
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
—-Jorge Luis Borges
“I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?”
—-Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
Sunday I hiked the mile or so from the Corinth DART station down through the Trinity River Bottoms on the new Santa Fe Trestle trail. Underneath the new/old bridge is another feature, the contentious Dallas Wave.
You see, in its constant struggle to become… what?… a real city, Dallas decided as part of its plans for developing the Trinity River Bottoms to put in a whitewater feature.
The Dallas Wave with a DART train going by overhead... and the skyline in the background. (click to enlarge)
Before it gets to the artificial rapids of the Dallas Wave the Trinity is a lazy, calm stretch of flat water.
The whitewater of the Dallas Wave with the lighted ball of Reunion Tower in the background.
The water is very high from recent rains - at least four feet above normal. The Standing Wave is almost completely drowned.
BTW, those of you in remote locales who might be wondering what I’m talking about – there’s a very familiar piece of footage I’m sure you have seen. The first few seconds of this introduction features a flyover of the Trinity River Bottoms.
At any rate, the city went ahead and put in their whitewater – basically sticking a couple of concrete dams and walls into the otherwise calm and lazy Trinity. The results don’t bode too well – the rest of the development is stalled for a decade or so because of Federal Regulations promulgated after Katrina. The Standing Wave was constructed and it ended up costing millions of dollars more than planned.
And now, the thing is closed. It turns out that it is too fast and dangerous for canoes to run. The sport kayakers seem happy with the thing, but other folks seem to think it’s a deathtrap.
Now that I’ve seen it in person, I have no opinion. The river was so high the lower wave was completely submerged and the upper wave mostly so. The water looked to be at least four feet deeper than in most of the photographs I’ve seen. It looked like a bunch of fast but navigable rapids to me.
So we’ll see. The lawsuits will fly, the construction will finish, and the water will keep on flowing. The river will always be the same, although with constantly different water.
Bill Chance 