In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa
Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the
Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to
understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how
people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of
environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the
outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways
through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning.
Because Knopp was born and raised just a few blocks away, she
considers the Mississippi from the perspective of a native
resident, a 'dweller in the land.' She revisits places she has long
known: Nauvoo, Illinois, the site of two nineteenth-century
utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian; Muscatine, Iowa, once the world's
largest manufacturer of pearl (mussel shell) buttons; and the
mysterious prehistoric bird- and bear-shaped effigy mounds of
northeastern Iowa. On a downriver trip between the Twin Cities and
St. Louis, she meditates on what can be found in Mississippi river
water - state lines, dissolved oxygen, smallmouth bass, corpses,
family history, wrecked steamboats, mayfly nymphs, toxic
perfluorinated chemicals, philosophies. Knopp first encountered the
Missouri as a tourist and became acquainted with it through
literary and historical documents, as well as stories told by
longtime residents. Her journey includes stops at Fort
Bellefontaine, where Lewis and Clark first slept on their sojourn
to the Pacific; Little Dixie, Missouri's slaveholding, hemp-growing
region, as revealed through the life of Jesse James's mother; Fort
Randall Dam and Lake Francis Case, the construction of which
destroyed White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation; and places
that produced unique musical responses to the river, including
Native American courting flutes, indie rock, Missouri River valley
fiddling, Prohibition-era jazz jam sessions, and German folk music.
Knopp's relationship with the Platte is marked by intentionality:
she settled nearby and chose to develop deep and lasting
connections over twenty years' residence. On this adventure, she
ponders the half-million sandhill cranes that pass through Nebraska
each spring, the ancient varieties of Pawnee corn growing at the
Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, a never-broken tract of
tallgrass prairie, the sugar beet industry, and the changes in the
river brought about by the demands of irrigation. In the final
essay, Knopp undertakes the science of river meanders, consecutive
loops of water moving in opposite directions, which form around
obstacles but also develop in the absence of them. What initiates
the turning that results in a meander remains a mystery. Such is
the subtle and interior process of knowing and loving a place. What
the River Carries asks readers to consider their own relationships
with landscape and how one can most meaningfully and responsibly
dwell on the earth's surface.
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