Confluence I
You would think that the place where two massive rivers meet would be a wild swirl of water. Leaping brown rollers, frothing with sediment, rising up in the middle where the continent braids. Whirlpools, sucking eddies, currents and deep forces clashing, disintegrating, bubbling in chaos before a new rhythm sets in.
The navel of the North American continent, like a bowl between two rising edges, gathers every drop that falls from the sky and rolls it towards the center, streams to creeks to rivers. From the wide curve of rising lands stretching west and east, all water pours inward towards two massive channels, the Missouri River and the Mississippi. You would think that the spot where these channels meet and merge would be a lively, jumping, rumbling piece of land. I expected the ground to shake with the collision.
But no. I stood on the soft, quiet bank in disbelief, looking up and down the flat flow for any sign of chaos. Slight riffles were on the surface, boils of underwater swirls could be seen, but it was minor, not major. I was standing at the spot of confluence and the continental waters slid in together with a sigh, a wide, brown, gentle smoosh from one momentum to the next.
Loads of sediment were shifting energies in silence and simplicity, like a business deal between two greased palms. The banks were gentle, smooth and moist, yet the evidence of much higher, wilder waters could be seen in the branches of the tall trees, like teeth of a comb filled with dander, nests of flotsam twenty feet high.
On the day I asked my father to take me to this place on the great rivers, all was serene. Long barges of commerce, low, slim, and sealed, lined up in lanes in the gentle flow, waiting their turn to join the traffic and deliver loads of goods. So many barges were on the river that day, silent capsules without a captain, commerce and confluence as smooth as could be.
We had reached the spot from a long, bumpy dirt road, a public access that felt private with neglect. It ended right on the river’s edge where there was a monument — not to the geological wonder of the meeting waterways, but to the Corps of Discovery, the group who gathered with Lewis and Clark to set out in wooden boats, from this very spot of soft earth, to reach the limits of the western flow of water. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi, we looked right up into the mouth of the Missouri River, and we were standing on the very camping spot where they made final preparations in the days before they pushed off and headed upstream to the west.
The concrete monument on the spot was humble and old, set close to the water where it had stood through high pulsing floods, then dried out again, lifted and altered. The slabs were buckled and angled, and I read the dark bronze plaques covered in words and that were once under water.
The Lewis and Clark story is one we are thoroughly sick of celebrating. If your fifth grade teacher didn’t kill it for you, “Undaunted Courage” might have, or that Sacagawea coin. But it remains one of our most vivid images of the human need to push into the unknown, to explore, document, dominate, and claim. Small wooden boats, pressed down in the waters with boxes of supplies, the two captains, the young crew, the teenage mother with a baby on her back. Phallic boats pushing into the folds of soft waters, pushed into the opposite flow and the unknown by the ink of Thomas Jefferson’s pen and the impulse of manifest destiny. From this actual bank of earth, they went upstream and over mountains and found the outer edge of the land.
