Very few people today have any memory of a relatively free-flowing Mississippi River. The scale and persistence of river engineering is staggering, and for many of us, the engineered Mississippi is the only Mississippi we have known. That’s one reason journalist Boyce Upholt’s new book is so important. In The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, Boyce details our century-plus history of tinkering with the natural Mississippi to remake it into a river that suits our wants and needs.
In this interview, Boyce and I talk about how he got interested in the Mississippi, the relentless engineering projects we’ve pursued to alter the river for commerce and flood protection, who manages the river, and what values have ultimately been driving these changes. He describes the costs of these projects, not just the dollars but also the loss of ecosystems and wildlife. We finish by talking about the importance of making a personal connection to the Mississippi and how there are many ways to do so. This interview is ultimately a wide-ranging discussion of the river’s past and future.
In the Mississippi Minute, I praise John Ruskey and the Quapaw Canoe Company for how they’ve influenced me and the importance of their work bringing people to the river. The Quapaw Canoe Company has been struggling financially since the Covid pandemic, and they are currently running a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to secure their future. Please consider helping. The link to their campaign is below in the Show Notes.
Show Notes
Southlands, Boyce Upholt’s Substack newsletter
Waterways: Overbuilt, Fragile, and Misunderstood in the Infrastructure Landscape by Dean Klinkenberg
Neither a Canal nor a Natural Stream: It’s Time We Returned Our “Stranals” to Proper Rivers by Dean Klinkenberg
NOTE: Buy Boyce’s book The Great River and one of these other Mississippi River-themed books this summer and you might win Boyce’s Mississippi River Party Pack:
- James by Percival Everett
- Troubled Waters by Mary Annaïe Heglar
- Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta by Ned Randolph
- Into the Quiet and the Light by Virginia Hanusik
- The Wild Mississippi by Dean Klinkenberg
- Crooked Old River by Trapper Haskins
Support the Show
If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider showing your support by making a one-time contribution or by supporting as a regular contributor through Patreon. Every dollar you contribute makes it possible for me to continue sharing stories about America’s Greatest River.
Don’t want to deal with Patreon? No worries. You can show some love by buying me a coffee (which I drink a lot of!). Just click on the link below.
Transcript
42. Boyce Upholt on the Making…nd Unmaking of the Mississippi
Fri, May 31, 2024 11:01AM • 1:09:59
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
river, mississippi, levees, book, people, project, talk, navigation, work, swamps, boyce, mississippi river, build, place, numbers, write, john, trip, sweeney, spent
SPEAKERS
Dean Klinkenberg, Boyce Upholt
Boyce Upholt 00:00
If you didn’t want to pin it down, and so you didn’t care so much that it was so dynamic, it could be a really great place to live because there was so much, you know, the wetlands provided so much fish, there are birds passing overhead. And then if you were on sort of the edge of the lower river floodplain, you could get into these other ecosystems. And so this is a really abundant place and allowed, even before farming, kinds of settlements and artistic and architectural production that is quite astounding.
Dean Klinkenberg 00:48
Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast, I’m Dean Klinkenberg and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.
Dean Klinkenberg 01:20
Welcome to Episode 42, of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. While we’re continuing the summer book tour today, I have author and journalist, Boyce Upholt, on the podcast today to talk about his forthcoming book, “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippipi.” This is a difficult topic to really squeeze into a one hour conversation. So I think we do the best that we can. There is so much to talk about with the engineering along the Mississippi, not just what we’ve done, but why we’ve done it. So we kind of meander our way around a little bit and through this conversation to give a flavor of the content or the subjects that he covers in his book. But I think ultimately, you’re just going to have to read his book to go deep into understanding what we did to the Mississippi and why we did it. But in this episode, we do scratch the surface on some of those issues. And we have a couple of places that we go a little deeper. So we begin by just talking a little bit about how he got interested in the Mississippi River in the first place. And some of his early impressions of the river from some of the experiences he had paddling on the Mississippi. We’ll talk a little bit about what we’ve done to change the river. Some of the engineering projects along the Mississippi from levees to navigation structures. Then we take a step back and we try to answer the question “How did we get here?” Basically, why did we build all these structures?” I asked him what we have against swamps when swamps become such a became such a bad word. We talked a little bit about the costs of all the engineering that we’ve done along the river. And we touch on the scandal from the late ’90s when the Corps was caught red handed trying to cook the books to justify a project. And what if anything changed as a result of that? We spent a little time talking about who makes the decisions about managing the river, why people should be more engaged, why they should pay more attention and get closer to the river themselves. And maybe a little bit about the future of the river. Are we optimistic or not? And ultimately, I think we do settle on this idea that it’s up to all of us to really get to know the river better. And there are multiple ways to do that. So it’s a wide ranging conversation, just like his book. We squeezed a lot into this this hour or so conversation. I look forward to your comments about this. If you have any comments or questions about this discussion, go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and you can leave a note there. Thanks as always, to all of you who show me some love through Patreon. Your support is touching and of course keeps this podcast alive. If you want to join the community for as little as $1 a month you can have early access to all of these podcasts then head to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If that’s not your thing, you can buy me a coffee. You can show me some love by supporting my caffeine habit. Go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast And there you will find out how you can buy me a coffee and now on with the interview.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:41
Boyce Upholt is a writer and nature critic based in New Orleans. His journalism has appeared in among other publications, National Geographic, the Atlantic, Smithsonian and Oxford American and he was the winner of the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism. His first book, “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi” releases on June 11, 2024, which is the reason that he is on the podcast today and the first repeat guest on the Mississippi Valley traveler podcast. Boyce, welcome back.
Boyce Upholt 05:14
Thank you, Dean. I’m excited to be here. Honored to be the first repeat guest. Hopefully we’re gonna keep it up.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:19
All right, at the rate you’re going you may be the first three peat also. So we’ll see how it’s gonna go.
Boyce Upholt 05:24
We will see.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:26
I think I’m going to ask the hardest question up front and put you on the spot. I didn’t tip you off about this one. So this is a very important question. So Boyce Upholt, winner of the James Beard Award, journalist extraordinaire, “Have you ever eaten carp?”
Boyce Upholt 05:46
I have eaten carp. Yes. I don’t remember if it was several times, so no, very, very early on. Yeah, and not to drag out the story too much but like the way I got into the Mississippi River is I wrote this one story about a canoe guide that we both know, named John Ruskey. And while I was on that trip, or coming home from that trip, essentially a shuttle driver was taking me back to my car after we’d finished camping and canoeing for a couple of days. And he was rattling off all these stories about the river and I was like, well, gosh, this not only did I love being on this river, I want to find excuses to come back. But this guy is just feeding me stories. And one of those stories was how some Chinese company was catching fish out of the oxbows in the Delta near where I lived then freezing them shipping them to China as food. And I was like well, that’s very curious because I had only heard of them as yeah as this like horrid endangered species. So my, I tracked down this biologist who’s now a good friend of mine, Paul Hartfield. And I knew that he kind of went out and caught them every birthday, every year he would go out and get one. Try and get one to jump in the boat and then take it home and throw it whole on the grill. And so I joined him for one birthday. And you if it’s big enough, it’s actually not even that hard to eat. You can kind of just get the meat right off, and it’s just another nice clean white fish.
Dean Klinkenberg 07:01
So it was grilled then, over coals.
Boyce Upholt 07:05
Yeah. And then later, I wrote a little story about the company up kind of near the confluence with the Ohio that makes fishcakes and dog food and things like that. I can’t remember if I ever had one of their fish cakes, but yeah, it’s a fascinating culture of that fish.
Dean Klinkenberg 07:20
Yeah, I have not had the chance to visit a lot of the fish shops on the lower part of the river. But I know up in my area north of here, there, there are still a handful of these little family run fish shops where you can buy fresh caught fish from the Mississippi. And some of them will prepare the fish too. So it’s relatively common to see smoked carp in those shops.
Boyce Upholt 07:43
I actually think I’m trying to remember if I got I think I got some smoked carp when I was doing a tour of the upper river around Alton. Yeah. But and it’s I love that those shops are there because in on the lower river that I know best, there’s it’s a very rare thing. There are a few left, but there’s almost no commercial fishermen. And yeah, that was another thing that I dug into early on. I was just like, Okay, who is left doing this? And what is that culture like?
Dean Klinkenberg 08:05
Yeah, not much of it left. Well, so that first trip, you kind of got hooked on the Mississippi. So what was it about the time out on the river that that interested you so much?
Boyce Upholt 08:18
Yeah, I think there’s a couple things. I mean, one, so I grew up not anywhere near the Mississippi, I grew up in Connecticut. But spent a lot of time very suburban, but we would get out my family would get out hiking and camping. And so I just had this orientation towards the outdoors. And then I moved to the Mississippi Delta as like a 24 or 25 year old for a job working for a nonprofit. It was somewhat random, I was kind of looking for an adventure and I was offered a job and this place I knew nothing about and I said, “Sure. yeah, that’s great, let’s do that.” And then I lived there for like the next six years without ever, I mean, I must have seen the river a few times. But I very rarely thought about it. Right. So this was during the 2011 flood that was happening. And weirdly, I was you know in the floodplain of the Mississippi River and only knew about this flood because I was reading New York Times coverage about it. That’s how kind of disconnected the culture felt to me from the river, but the place was disconnected from the river. And I loved the Delta. I still love the Delta. I lived there for nine years. I think it’s a really beautiful place. But you know, I randomly got this assignment about John Ruskey, like, he was this legendary figure. I didn’t know him yet. But I was looking for fun things to write about and convinced a magazine called ‘The Bitter Southerner’ to let me join John and write about him and so went out there and was just kind of blown away because because I, the Delta is so beautiful, but what had never really occurred to me was that it was so regimented, right. It’s all these soybean fields and cornfields lots of sort of straight lines and hard angles. And it hadn’t occurred to me that I missed something that felt wilder and then I got out on the Mississippi, not knowing anything about it kind of having these preconceived notion that it was you know, engineered and polluted and then it wound up being beautiful and winding and filled with forests and sandbars. And so that fact like like it was the sudden reinjection of wilderness into my life. That’s part of what got me. Part of it was that I just didn’t know that it was there despite it literally being the sort of geological force that had made the place where I was living. So yeah, those two things just made me like, want to spend as much time out there as I possibly could.
Dean Klinkenberg 10:15
Well, five minutes with John Ruskey would also probably be enough to get you interested in spending more time on the river as it is. So it’s a good hook. It worked for me on the Lower Miss too. Like my first my first experience on the water was with John for just a quick one night experience at the end of one of his trips, where I jumped on at St. Francisville and paddled with him down to Baton Rouge. And, but like I, this may have been true for you too, but I had so many misconceptions about that part of the river. I lived in La Crosse, I know the upper half of the river much better. And I was surprised also at the wildness of the area between the levees. I just assumed because of these levees, it was gonna be this sterile area that was gonna be really uninteresting to be on. So that was really eye opening just from that one trip.
Boyce Upholt 11:07
Yeah, yeah, I think it’s it’s interesting that you say like you at least had a conception of the river before that. And um, but I think that you your misconception about the lower river or something I encountered a lot when I kind of read through the history of travelogues and journals that people kept. It’s just like the lower river has never had a great reputation. The upper river around the La Crosse specifically, it feels like it has always been the most praised of the Mississippi’s stretches. And yeah, I don’t know. People have, I think people have really just undervalued how spectacular the lower river can be.
Dean Klinkenberg 11:40
Yeah, but I hope we get into a little bit of the reasons why that might be the case in a little bit, but I don’t want to jump too far ahead. What were what were some of your impressions of the river then from those early trips out on the Mississippi, because you also then you later you were on a trip that basically traversed the entire lower Mississippi. I think that’s maybe when I first met you. You were getting on boat in St. Louis at the confluence…at Columbia Bottoms, it’s a conservation area. And you’re supposed to paddle all the way down to the Gulf. But that trip didn’t quite make it on that particular excursion. You had to finish it later.
Boyce Upholt 12:19
Yeah, we did it all in 2017, two trips in 2017. So that was also with John. And at that point, you know, like, like I said, at that first trip with John, I kind of as soon as I was driving home knew I wanted to write more stories about the river. And that was 2015. By 2017 I kind of was like, you know, like, I’m going to do something. I’m interested enough in this that I can probably have the energy to propel me through the project of writing a book which I you know, I had never done and I just knew it would would be a lot. And so in 2017 John had finished his project River Gator, which is this mile by mile guide of the middle and lower rivers. And so he to sort of promote that to celebrate that he wanted to canoe the entire stretch. And so he said,”Hey, like looking for people to come along.” And I had recently been I had been like freelancing for a couple years and had been part time working part time at a different job. But I had recently gone full time into freelancing. So I was like, well, my life is now constructed that I can take and you know, an open-ended amount of time to join this trip down river. So yeah, we launched at the Columbia Bottoms couple miles up the Missouri. Got down to the Bonne Terre spillway outside of New Orleans, but had had a number of weather fiascos, tents falling on trees and so felt like it was just too much bad luck. And so I had to pause for a while. And then six months later, a slightly different group reconvened and finished up the last 100 or so miles to the Gulf of Mexico. So I mean, what did I saw so much? It’s hard to you know, I think one of the things that always sticks with me is sort of the way that the beauty and industry intertwined. You know, I remember early on near St. Louis, sitting on an island, and we were remarking. This is a there’s a large group of us with kind of changing cast of characters, depending on what stretch we were doing. We were remarking with some of the other paddlers of saying like you know, if we look this way, it looks like we’re in Tahiti, almost, we just got these like willow trees and sands. And we turned around and we see a coal plant. But even the coal plant I found really fascinating because it was this, it felt like this back end of society that is, you know, the river is weirdly so forgotten. And that’s where we tuck away the sort of like the gears and mechanisms that make our society work. And so there’s this chance to tour so much of both of those aspects is wilderness that I didn’t know about and all this industry that why, you know, it’s typically fairly hard to say.
Dean Klinkenberg 14:38
Yeah, it’s a strange sort of contrast when you are along the river, especially the further south you go and when you have that wilderness, but then you’ll have a stretch of chemical plants or other things that are in other industries right there next to the river. To make all that work, though, we’ve made substantial changes to the Mississippi. Your book is fantastic. You know, the writing is crisp and exciting. And the pacing is great. There, there are a lot of details in this book about the extent to which we have altered the Mississippi from the river that Europeans first encountered. I know this is a virtually impossible task, but maybe can you just in a few minutes, do your best to summarize from a higher elevation, the changes that we’ve made to the Mississippi?
Boyce Upholt 15:30
Yeah, I’ll do my best. I mean, to your point of it’s a difficult task. I think there’s a line in the book where I say, like I visited, I visited every single one of the spillways that we use here in the south to kind of divert floodwaters to save cities and traversed most of the levees on the lower river. And I note in the book, like, it’s really hard for me to think of all these components as being sort of one system, but they are one system. And so it includes like, and I think of the Mississippi, you know, at because I’m a lower river guy, this is where I’ve spent my whole river life. I think the Mississippi is the like pulling together of lots of different waters. So the Upper Mississippi to me is like one component that is of equal sort of worth and merit as the Ohio and the Missouri. So on the Missouri you’ve got like massive reservoirs that are largest water containment, like holding system in the country, I think on the continent, maybe. You’ve got these levees. So it’s 1000 miles of levee like 1000 miles on the south, each side leveed, you know, unbroken for large stretches, I think the longest stretch is 380 miles from the mouth of the Arkansas, to the head of the Atchafalaya. And that according to one textbook I came across is the largest human made landform besides the Great Wall of China, anywhere on the globe. And then you got a lot of little things, you got pumps for backwater areas, you’ve got gates down here in the south again to the that we open up to kind of shunt the water in different directions. We’ve got other gates at the head of the Atchafalay River to make sure that that doesn’t become the main branch of the Mississippi River, you got little dikes just to control the flow. I think one of the craziest things to me are the cutoffs that are on the lower river, right. So there’s 14, man made shortcuts where the famous looping bends of the river, the Army Corps kind of slice through those to try and make a straighter, faster river under the theory that if the water moves faster, it will kind of dredge itself a deeper channel and that will help it help reduce flooding. And that’s not you know, we’ve also channelized the Missouri. We’ve channelized the river in lots of places. And so the scale to like we are now a geological entity that is sort of reshaping this continental scale. Thing that is so important to so many ecosystems and places in this country.
Dean Klinkenberg 17:34
It’s mind boggling the amount of work that has gone on and the number of decades for which these projects have carried on and seem as if they will never end. Like the some of these projects are just like the concrete mats. This is just a project with no end. Like they just they get some laid and they go to and replace some of the older ones. It’s a process that can never end as long as they’re trying to manage the river.
Boyce Upholt 18:01
Yeah, and that one there now, my editor had me scrub this footnote, I think. It’s just like too many details. But they’re about to launch a robot run mat sinking unit now and so just like crazy. Yeah, that way. It’s like it’s so much work that that it’s like doesn’t even make sense for this giant crew of people to go out and lay out these concrete mats. So.
Dean Klinkenberg 18:19
So how did we get here? I think one of the things that I find frustrating when I talk with people about the Mississippi is they really have no sense of the scale and recency of so much of this engineering. This is not the way humans typically interacted with rivers. Obviously, humans have changed ecosystems for probably as long as we’ve been around, we burn, we’ve burned prairies or we’ve set fires to manage ecosystems. But this scale of altering the Mississippi is really unlike anything that’s happened before. How did we get here?
Boyce Upholt 18:52
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, like, and I think a lot of different stories trace it back to different places. You see a lot that like the first levee on the river was built in New Orleans in 1720, I believe, which is a version of the story I repeat, but that levee was you know, that’s the French Quarter. No, like, that’s nothing compared to what we’ve done now. And as I, you know, like, as I dug through it, it’s sort of this snowball, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it’s harder and harder to dismantle. But I think you’re sort of asking like, like, why did we get here as much as how did we get here? What was the thinking that happened? I mean, to me, there’s a couple things. One, one key factor was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. That was really the first time in all of history and prehistory, if you count prehistory as a separate era, that like one entity, one state controlled the entirety of the Mississippi watershed or even the entirety of the Mississippi River itself. And so that was that was the sort of prerequisite before we could build any system this big. I think the other thing that happened when the United States became the power overseeing this river and they got a certain certain philosophical ideas that other European societies and colonies like there’s French and Spanish control of the river at certain times. And, you know, I think a lot about the Bible and getting this book, but like the idea of like dominion and control over the earth, there’s language in there, that casts human beings as separate from nature. And that tasks us with controlling it. And so that was a thread that’s in here, that kind of got reworked in the philosophies of like John Locke, and this idea of private property, which was it became a deeply important part of American thinking. And then the other thing that really mattered, I think, was the demographic like just the sheer number of American people that in the early 19th century started coming over the Appalachian Mountains and pouring down this river with these ideas and started saying like, okay, like, we’re going to turn this watershed into a whole bunch of private property, because that is sort of what is morally and politically necessary. And in order to accomplish that, we sort of had to find a way it was such a dynamic, ever changing river and that didn’t really fit with these ideas that these new settlers were bringing in and so, piece by piece, they started to figure out, okay, like, how can we pin this river down so that we can make it what we kind of accidentally imagined it should be.
Dean Klinkenberg 21:16
So what do you what was the what place did the Mississippi have in that world? Right? Obviously, it’s you’re hinting at, folks saw it as an inconvenience in some ways. Yeah, because it kept jumping banks and changing its channel tended to flood. What did they imagine the the proper place of the Mississippi should be in their worldview?
Boyce Upholt 21:41
Yeah, I mean, I think the word that that it’s a word that appears is one of the title chapters, but there’s a big word in early 19th century that was applied to rivers, specifically the Mississippi, which was improvement, right, which was like this idea that, you know, nature needed to be improved. And so before that, there were you know, I quote, some writings of people that are saying, you know, like, the Mississippi is this blank slate, and that blank slate again, fits in with this, like private property idea of like this, this very exciting notion of, here’s this empty landscape that we can go out to and claim but yeah, all this chaos is here. And so we’re gonna have to find a way to, to improve it. So I mean, the Ohio River, interestingly, it was early on described as very beautiful, but the Mississippi, I mean, to the to the point we were talking about before it was it was often described from the beginning is like, long and empty and dreadful. Concepts that quote, sort of freed up this idea of like, yeah, let’s build a levee and get rid of all these swamps that are so boring and useless to us.
Dean Klinkenberg 22:38
Right. There was that period of travel writers, European travel writers coming and traveling up the Mississippi and writing books about their impressions of the country. Many of them did not have nice things to say about the Mississippi. Dickens hated the Mississippi, especially around Cairo, and Francis Trollope called it dreadful or something along those lines. It was very hard for the lower river, especially, to get some good press out of those trips, I think.
Boyce Upholt 23:04
Yes, yeah. That is correct. Yeah. Again, a year, a decade after decade, it felt like just like, empty, empty, empty, desolate, boring, those were the things that keep people kept saying, any American people.
Dean Klinkenberg 23:15
Right. But in fact, it wasn’t empty. And this is so contrast that a little bit like what we know of indigenous views of the river and the floodplain. People did manage to live in that context for probably 1000s of years and did so just fine and flourished.
Boyce Upholt 23:35
Yes, yeah. I think like 13 – 14,000 years, right, as long as longer than the Delta that we know down here in Louisiana where I live people have been on the lower river. So yeah, I mean, like I try and caution this as as a white guy. I have been through writing this book actually become really inspired by I guess, I would say indigenous thinking, but but I can only you know, like, I’m not super deeply steeped in it. So this is I was raised that caution but but the thing that sticks out to me a lot is I particularly think like about like the earthworks, so Cahokia is probably most familiar to readers as the largest earthwork made on the continent and made along the river, but I, you know, like, there were precursors in Florida, made out of shells and things like that, but that the kind of very elaborate system of, you know, almost like citylike multiple mound constructions, with careful you know, cosmological are astronomical orientations that started in Louisiana. And I sort of see that starting here and then moving up all of these tributaries because that later it happened on the Ohio and on the Missouri and other places. And I, again, I have reason to like overvalue the Mississippi sort of but I see that history as a signal that I think the Delta in particular seemed to mean a lot to people all across North America, particularly within the watershed. Because it was it was a really, if you didn’t want to pin it down, and so you didn’t care so much that it was so dynamic, it could be a really great place to live because there was so much, you know, the wetlands provided so much fish, there are birds passing overhead. And then if you were on sort of the edge of the lower river floodplain, you could get into these other ecosystems. And so just a really abundant place and allowed, even before farming, kinds of settlement and artistic and architectural production that is quite astounding. And so even into the historic area, there are tribes that lived in North Dakota, North Dakota, other places up the Missouri that told these stories about a figure named grandmother, who supposedly lived on an island at the mouth of the river in the Delta. And she’s the woman who taught farmers how to raise crops. And to me that that the that fact that story went so far, says a lot about how much this river and particularly southern river, the one I’m partial to meant to so many people.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:57
Right, it’s this, the thing that comes up a lot too, when I talk with folks is that right away, they, they look at the Mississippi, and they go to the value of the river as a way to get around, you know, as a means of transportation. And absolutely, that’s been the case for a long time, obviously, you know, indigenous people traded across the continent, and probably even further to Central and South America and rivers were a big part of those trade networks. But rivers meant a lot more from what we know that river has meant a lot more to them than just a way to get from place to place.
Boyce Upholt 26:31
And it’s a wider definition of river. I mean, again, I don’t know how they conceived of like, you talk about this really nicely in the intro of your book by the way. Some of the names indicate people thought of rivers as almost smaller pieces. But you know, in researching this book, it became important to me to think of the river as not just sort of channel but also a floodplain and that those two things are interwound. And I think that is part of what these earthworks should teach us is that they were built sort of on the edges of the floodplains. And I think it contain references that signal that those floodplains, these places that we saw, as desolate and empty and worthless were quite important to people.
Dean Klinkenberg 27:10
So let’s talk about that for just a minute. And so, you know, we I think we still probably see it as this in this way. In many regards, swamps still have that word still has a strongly negative association. And we use it to describe political corruption. I’d rather use sewer, you know, I’d rather talk about sewers rather than swamps. But what is it that, why is swamp such a bad thing? You know, how did swamps end up having such a bad connotation? And how should we think about them?
Boyce Upholt 27:44
That this makes me think a lot about Thomas Jefferson, who sort of surprised me as I wrote this book, who kept coming up again and again. But Jefferson had a notion of landscape that was also a political philosophy or political theory, essentially. And that was, you know, the land has to be split up and used as property so that, you know, we can have democratic property and democracy went hand in hand, you had to own land to be a good, free citizen. And so that meant land was meant to be owned, which meant it was meant to be farmed, and productive. And wetlands are just not don’t really fit into that concept very well. They’re not, they can be farmed quite effectively, as a lot of indigenous cultures did but only if you’re willing to sort of come in and out of them and farm them when the time is right and let them flood when the time isn’t right. Which requires a little bit more cooperation on the community level than just a society of people that all own their own little individual bits. And so that’s yeah, I tend to think that’s really where we started to think of we, as an American society, started to think of swamps and wetlands as in the wrong way and missed out on how important they are to so many any other forms of life.
Dean Klinkenberg 28:59
And we went on the campaign to eliminate as much swamp land as possible. And it was a federal policy that was also was carried out by state and local governments, in many cases, but we’ve done a pretty good job of wiping out a lot of swamp.
Boyce Upholt 29:12
We’ve done a pretty good job, and I’m afraid that we’re like, yeah, for a while we’ve protected them. But those have been those protections have been just dismantled over the past few years. So.
Dean Klinkenberg 29:24
Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here, interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the Mississippi. My newest book, “The Wild Mississippi” goes deep into the world of Old Man River. Learn about the varied and complex ecosystems supported by the Mississippi, the plant and animal life that depends on them, and where you can go to experience it all. Find any of these wherever books are sold.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:04
So, from your perspective, again, I know there’s a lot of directions to go with this. But what are some of the consequences of this extensive engineering of the Mississippi?
Boyce Upholt 30:15
I mean, I think like, I’ll try and think of some overarching thing like, the obvious overarching thing is like, what we’ve done is not great for ecosystems season, I was like, I don’t know, I, you said at the intro, I’m a nature critic. And one of the things I mean by that is, I think the idea of nature is a little bit flawed in that it implies we’re separate from it. So I often talk about the more than human world, that’s a phrase that I think is more effective than nature. And I think one of the consequences of all our engineering is like, to a certain extent, it’s served humans, but it has not served the more than human world, it’s erased a lot of habitat homes that are really important to other species. And so you see, on the upper river, you know, we’ve we have dams that have, you know, turned what used to be a complex braid of different landscapes just into this wide open water. The channelization does the same thing in a different way, if you like straighten out a river that winds, you lose a lot of complexity. And so in a lot of different places, we see a lot of species in trouble because of that. And then another case, right, when we turned the floodplains into farms, we just literally like, well, we’ll just cut down all these trees and replace them with soybeans. So lost species that way, like, cypress trees aren’t endangered, but the extent of them is just like staggeringly much lower now. So that’s, that’s one obvious thing. But I think the thing that we are seeing now, in some ways, we’ve been seeing it for a long time, but it’s accumulating and it’s a crisis it’s layering over and over is that the engineering didn’t serve a human world all that well, either. The cutoffs that I mentioned, the beginning are a good example of this, they, again, they were meant to increase, like, try and relieve flooding by speeding the river along and they seem to do that pretty well for a decade or two, and then not much longer. Then a sort of you got these like cliffs at the bottom of the river and then the river would erode those cliffs. But as it was rubbing mud off those cliffs, it had to dump it somewhere. And that began to pile up downstream, in Louisiana causing worse local flooding. And even worse than that, I mean, I referenced earlier, the Atchafalaya, there’s this, the river down here in Louisiana, always used to jump from channel to channel and the Atchafalaya is essentially set to be where the river should be jumping at this point. And the accumulation of mud from those cutoffs could potentially make that more likely, because it’s sort of creating this underwater block at the right near the site where those two rivers split apart. And so, yeah, it’s like it hasn’t, it hasn’t served, much of like, it’s worked for a while, we’ve built a very powerful country because in part because of what we do on the Mississippi River, but ultimately, it’s not going to work forever.
Dean Klinkenberg 32:53
Yeah, it seems like when you were doing your research, I don’t know how much this came up, or at least the people were willing to talk about this a little bit off the record. The rivers are essentially are fundamentally dynamic. You know, change is a core characteristic of a river. And we’re trying to freeze the Mississippi and other rivers in time and control or remove a lot of that dynamism. But as you’re alluding to there, there are consequences to doing that, that we can probably never fully know or control. So is that tension? Is that something that folks talk much about in your experience? Or are aware of that?
Boyce Upholt 33:35
Yeah, I mean, I think I was surprised by how many engineers in particular are aware of that. And I think it might be a new thing. But there is, I mean, I think there are, we’re getting more thoughtful engineers lately, which is better. But there’s a hydrologist named Paul Hudson that I quote a few times in the book, in part because he has studied the Mississippi River a lot and he wrote a textbook. But in that textbook, he kind of talks about how, you know, large scale river engineering is inherently experimental. Just like there’s no, you can make models, you can try and make predictions, but you kind of put something in, and by putting that thing in, you’re going to change the river in some sort of unpredictable ways. And so all of a sudden, you have a sort of new set of parameters that you didn’t hadn’t plugged in in the first place. And the same thing, like there’s a large, very large, controversial project down here in Louisiana, looking at sort of opening up the levees so that mud and water can flow out and I wound up talking to the guy who made the computer models for that. And he was like, it’s like the less we tinker with that nature, the better. That’s something I’ve learned as someone who like runs the, builds these models and runs them. And so he that’s the guy that the Army Corps hired to, you know, run the numbers to see if that project worked. And he was like, you know, I’m not going to comment one way or another whether I want this project. I’m just going to give them the numbers they wanted, but I will tell you, the less we tinker with nature, the better.
Dean Klinkenberg 34:56
Let me let me ask this. So one of the other consequences of this of course, it’s expensive. And is this just a full employment project for engineers and hydrologists? Or is that? How, how do we go about trying to quantify? And this is a narrow way of thinking about the consequences, but it’s a it’s an important one in this country. How do we go about quantifying the amount of money that we’re spending on all this? And whether it’s ultimately worth the expense?
Boyce Upholt 35:26
Yeah, I mean, I will say there are literal cases where it definitely was an employment project. I mean, think about the Great Depression in the New Deal, which I’m sort of back then. I don’t know, I’m, uh, my politics make me look back on the New Deal. And like, that was a good moment to give a lot of people jobs. So it’s not necessarily always a bad thing. But yeah, I mean, like, and then the other thing about cost, there’s, I don’t know if you found this footnote. But there is a long footnote at one point where I was trying to account for the cost of the Mississippi Rivers and Tributaries Project, which is the official name of the flood control engineering down here on the Lower Mississippi. I remember I put the number there’s an official number from the Corps, and I put it in the book proposal before I was trying to sell a book. And my agent was like, that can’t be right. Like, like, that number is so low, it was $16 million, I think. And he was like you need you need to figure out what’s up with that number, that can’t be right. We can’t put that in here. Your editors are not gonna believe that. And I had to leave it. Like I called up the Corps and I emailed the Corps and said, “Can you give me more information?” And they started to give me a little more information and then they said, “Hey, why do you want this information?” And I said, “Well, I’m working on this book”, and then they stopped responding to my emails. And then I found more I’m like, I guess, yeah, like, so not clear. You know, they’re not factoring in state contributions to that system. They’re not factoring in a lot. They’re not adjusting for the changing, you know, they’re not adjusting for inflation. And if you, like, managed to find some other figures to kind of were adjusted for inflation. So it’s hard to know, the costs, is one thing. I mean, I also looked a lot at the navigation system on the upper river. And the thing you learn when you really dig into those things is you can put $1 amount on say, like, oh, this generates x amount of dollars to the economy. But what that figure doesn’t necessarily capture is who gets those dollars. Right? And, you know, a lot of people I like, I know, towboat pilots, and I know other people that have worked in the navigation industry that have been willing to think about this more critically, and frankly, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re a big handout for essentially landowners” is what one guy called it if like, people who own a whole lot of lands who like profit off that land by growing soy, that then they like, ship to China or converted into plastic, we help save them money on moving that those that soybean around. So yeah, I do think like, you know, it is, it’s not an accident that most places I know this best on the Lower Mississippi, pretty much every county along the Lower Mississippi River has huge rates of poverty. I think that’s probably true on other stretches of the river as well. And so, sure, what we’ve made has made a lot of people money, but it hasn’t made for prosperity for everyone who lives along the river.
Dean Klinkenberg 38:08
Right? It hasn’t turned those Delta counties into prosperous places.
Dean Klinkenberg 38:13
Nothing has changed from you know, historically, there really. I know, on the navigation site, too, I’ve tried to dig into those numbers myself at various times. And my first, you know, the lessons that were immediately apparent to me are the Corps makes it very difficult to get to the real numbers of what they’re spending. And they make it very difficult to compile numbers across multiple years and multiple districts. And it’s just a mountain of time you have to spend digging through in a lot of cases, what are still paper records to get to those numbers. And I’m not entirely sure if that’s an accident.
Boyce Upholt 38:13
No.
Boyce Upholt 38:55
Yeah, I mean, I hope they’re better now. And that you and I have discussed this before, there’s a historical moment when it was very clear that they were I don’t know about an obscure, like, I don’t know about trying to hide numbers of journalists, but they were definitely altering numbers intentionally so that they could sort of justify projects that might not otherwise be justifiable. And so there are a lot of, you know, like, I have that in my bio, that investigative journalist line and I wish I had had the time to do a deep investigation into a lot of different components of this. There was a lot of instances where I was like, I yeah, untangling the economics in particular, like I can gesture towards what I understand, but I hope other people pick up from certain sections here and say, “Well, let’s really drill down here and see what what can be covered.”
Dean Klinkenberg 39:41
Right. And one of the things that I hope people do is they, they get a little more critical and asking the questions about this, like it’s, as you alluded to, it’s one thing to assert that this project produces economic benefits. Whatever $3 in economic benefits for every dollar public money. But I think what people have to ask is not just who is benefiting from that. In often cases, it’s usually very in a very narrow group of people that are actually benefiting from from those expenditures. But we need to also ask what the public return is for these. So if we’re spending, you know, $1 of public money, shouldn’t the public be getting something back for that other than making subsidized transport for corn and soybeans going to export markets?
Boyce Upholt 40:30
Yeah, exactly. And that’s This is the same thing with a lot of flood control stuff and the epilogue, I talk about this controversial project called the Yazoo Pumps, where there’s some really increasingly organized political opposition to that by local black residents who are saying like, you know, for years, public money is being poured into, quote, flood control projects that really help out a lot of very wealthy farmers. And yeah, here we are living in a county with huge rates of poverty, you know, if the government’s can be pouring money into this place, maybe they should be spreading that money around a little more widely.
Dean Klinkenberg 41:04
Yeah. All right, I want to come back to the money in a few minutes, because it kind of leads into maybe where we go from here. But I want to just stick on the navigation for just a second. I know you had a chance to interview Don Sweeney, who was a critical player in one era of navigation. Could you just kind of quickly recap what happened with him and and then I’ll follow up.
Boyce Upholt 41:28
Yeah, so Donald Sweeney was a an employee of the Corps of Engineers in the 1990s. And he was an economist, and he was asked like, there was this effort, or like, there’s a desire in that moment to expand some of the size of some of these locks, because boats had gotten bigger, and they would have to, they couldn’t get all their barges through. And so they’d have to disassemble their, their tow trains and reassemble them. And so Sweeney said, “Okay, I’ll run these numbers.” And he did. And then he said, “It just doesn’t work out. Like, we’re not going to save enough money to make up for how expensive it will be to like, rip out these locks and build bigger locks.” And then so the his bosses at the Army Corps said, “Okay, great, Don. Well, we’re gonna move you to a different project. And we’re gonna find some other people that can handle this stuff.” But they forgot to take him off the emails. And so he’s still getting his email, “cc’d”. And so he was seeing, like, emails that were essentially directing this new team of people to fudge the numbers, essentially, and find a way to make it work. And so he wound up being a whistleblower. There was this long series of stories in the late ’90s in the Washington Post, looking at the Corps, which had something that they called Program Growth Initiative. I’m hoping I’m getting that right. Yeah, Program Growth Initiative. Which was essentially no, like, the Corp’s rep tells Congress what projects they think should be built. And then Congress listens to them and says, “Okay, here, we’re gonna give you the money, and then they go build them.” And so there’s sort of an inbuilt incentive to find more and better projects. And so they were explicitly saying, like, we want more projects, go go, let’s go find a way to make them work. And yeah, there was like all this investigation. There’s no, like, explicit wrongdoing in the end, but there was a federal office that looked into it and basically said, like, there is there is some, like, objectivity problems in this organization, for sure. But then what happened with that project that Sweeney had been looking at, they made it even bigger. And but then they said, well, we’re also going to do some stuff for habitat. And that seemed to be enough for them to find a path through all the the controversy they got some of these really big corporate nonprofits to say, okay, well sign on for that, because you’re going to build some some things for, you know, to stop Asian carp, or we’re going to build some things to allow fish to survive here. And so in the end, it was yeah, the project was even bigger than the ones Sweeny had looked at and said, this doesn’t make any sense.
Dean Klinkenberg 43:52
Yeah, I guess. I think maybe part of that was maybe there was a little more transparency in the Corps process of running those cost benefit analyses.
Boyce Upholt 44:02
Potentially, the way he talks about it, though, is like that they said, I think rightly, it’s like you really can’t predict as I was saying before, the same thing with engineering you’ve you put in engineering and you can’t predict all these consequences. It’s very hard to predict the future amount of of traffic that’s gonna move through any of these locks and so what Sweeney describes it he he says they kind of like did a whole range of figures and then they said look, it could be this it could be this it could be this but since it couldn’t be this that very high number now we think it makes sense. So in summary, there was like more information and they showed how they ran those numbers but they still picked the favorable one out of a number of possibilities.
Dean Klinkenberg 44:39
Right. Right. But I know the Melvin Price Lock and Dam near me up near Alton is one of the is that that case, you know where their projections that they base the cost benefit analysis on were, say ridiculously optimistic and if they had used the actual numbers that we’ve seen in traffic going through the Melvin Price Lock since then the formulas probably would not have justified building it in the first place.
Boyce Upholt 45:05
Yes. Which has been the case with, you know, like is the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway down here in the South, like lots of projects have gone that way. That’s I mean, like, and that was the that was the case for the history of navigation for decades and decades and decades where there’s like, again, and again, everyone was sort of aghast at the numbers that the government was coming up with and saying, these don’t make sense. And then they didn’t make sense. But there was a moment. I mean, like it required more investments in federal investment in the early 20th century to get the navigation industry really off the ground again, but I do, there were moments where there are moments and stretches of river, where by some forms of accounting, it really has paid off. So.
Dean Klinkenberg 45:42
So how, how does this system keep perpetuating itself? Particularly, almost everything that I’ve seen from any objective perspective, questions the real economic value of the locks on the upper half of the river, and I know like, the Corps likes to think about projects for the entire river. For one thing, it’s convenient to justify all those projects. But if you break it down, if you look at this McDonald’s store, versus that McDonald’s store, rather than McDonald’s as a whole, and you looked at the upper river, there are serious questions, I think about the real value of those projects. But we continue to dump a lot of money into those. The Inflation Reduction Act, they’re using money from that to build, to expand the locks near Winfield. Winfield or Saverton? Almost $900 million to expand those locks. And another what 90 million or 50 million, I forget how much, for a fish ladder. And I just saw Democratic senator put out a press release bragging about a few million dollars that she was able to secure for upper river lock repairs. That’s, it’s not a partisan issue, it’s not Democrats or Republicans. It’s probably a regional issue. But how how do these projects continue to get so much support in spite of the dismal performance for some of them like the Tennessee-Tombigbee in the in the Missouri River, there’s almost no traffic at all. But we continue to spend money to make the river the Missouri River navigable.
Boyce Upholt 47:15
Yeah, it seems like there’s endless hope on the Missouri. Like when I when I went up to Kansas City and talked to the district office there, they’re like, “Oh, man, this is like, these things have changed. It’s it’s finally coming around.” And I haven’t I honestly, I don’t know that maybe it’s better now. And I, again, there’s so many holes I could have gone down. But I think part of the answer there is in the same way that it’s hard to predict how these things will perform. It’s also like somewhat hard to measure how they do perform, and it’s hard. So it’s hard to capture. Just how it as hard to capture how ineffective they are as how effective that could be, if that makes sense, right? It’s like you, as you said, when you dig and find these analyses, but those analyses are hard to do and hard to find. And it’s a lot easier, it’s a lot easier to find is, you know, a local newspaper, or like a local politician who was standing at a ribbon cutting and a local local newspaper shows up and says, “Oh, great, this is like a good story, a feel good story that everyone can feel good about. And this general sense of building things in rural places is, you know, a helpful thing to do.” And so they’re just like, it’s a good way for people to generate goodwill and it’s hard for much of anyone to really trace all of this sort of economic consequences. And so nobody’s thinking of like, when they go to that ribbon cutting of, well, this represents $14 of my tax dollars that are just not going anywhere. It’s more of like, “Oh, well, we hope that this will finally, you know, make our struggling community be what it could be.” So that’s part of it. I mean, the other thing is, lobbying is a big thing here. And in funny ways, I mean, I wrote about the closing of the Upper St. Anthony Falls lock, which is like the only lock that’s been closed on the Mississippi system, I believe. And kind of dug into the legislation of that a little bit, then there was a very funny line in there. In my opinion, funny, it said,”Ttonnage is an arbitrary metric.” Right? Because they closed this lock officially because so little was going through it. And the lobbying industry as I presume that lobbying should be pushed to have that language included to make sure that like a precedent wasn’t being sent here, but like “tonnage is an arbitrary measure.” So how are we supposed to measure locks, if not by how many tons of goods move through them? And I like, it’s probably more complicated that if you have, you could have a low tonnage lock that’s necessary for some boats to get to a higher tonnage lock. But again, it’s just like, if tonnage is an arbitrary metric, and we’re in a world of math, that doesn’t mean anything, and we kind of make up whatever justifications we want.
Dean Klinkenberg 49:37
Right. Right. That’s so yeah, that’s a very slippery argument it seems, so, but you know, the last time I checked, nobody was asking you or me, you know, what we should be, you know, what money we should spend on which river projects. Who are the people that are making the fundamental decisions about which river engineering projects to pursue
Boyce Upholt 50:00
I mean, again, like because of that lobbying, it’s the whoever has the best lobbyists has the loudest voices. And so, on the river, like, the navigation industry has a very heavy hand in the we’ve been kind of talking, coming in and out of navigation and flood control. Those are sort of the two big projects. When it comes to flood control agriculture is a very, very powerful industry with a very powerful lobby. And those two, navigation and agriculture are deeply intertwined. And that like navigation, as I was saying earlier, essentially serves as a cost saving mechanism for big agriculture. And so those lobbyists are, are getting a lot done. And the rest of us, yeah, we don’t have a whole lot of say. I think you and I both know a number of people who would love to see the Mississippi River flooded with more canoeists and more recreationalists, so that there are more voices out there that are saying, “Hey, you know, like, there are other ways of thinking about what this river is, and it’s public property. It’s all navigable rivers are sort of the property of all of us. And so we should have a say.” But there just isn’t, you know, because the the Army Corps is the agency, it’s not an agency that we the rest of us engage with a whole lot. It’s hard to push in other points of view of how the river might might be used.
Dean Klinkenberg 51:16
I was at a meeting of the Mississippi River Commission a few years ago on the lower river at Hickman, Kentucky. And one of the commissioners was complaining about people from Minneapolis speaking in opposition to I think it was the Yazoo Pumps Project, actually, at that time, that they had no right to speak out about what was essentially what he considered to be a local project with local benefits. And completely, I found that completely ironic, considering the whole thing would be funded by federal dollars. Federal taxpayers seemed like they should have a voice and how federal tax dollars were spent. But that was part of the the insular nature, it seemed of some of the decision making that goes on that I don’t think they, they there’s a system that seems to be working for some people. And it’s how do we break into that world and influence the decision making so priorities get expanded, and other other priorities get considered?
Dean Klinkenberg 52:20
I’m sure you’ve got the answer to that.
Boyce Upholt 52:20
That’s what you’re asking me?
Boyce Upholt 52:24
Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s honestly something I covered for the book. Like, I guess one of my hopes would be, I mean, my greatest hope for this book is that it convinces people to go out and like engage with the river in some way. And so I think that that’s the, that’s kind of as far as I got. That’s the first step is like, we need more people to know this river. It at one point, I thought the subtitle of the book might be “America’s Big, Lost, Still Wild River.” And that loss was really important. And that I think that like so few people, either, as I said that at the beginning of our conversation, I moved to Mississippi and yet knew nothing about it and didn’t see it there. And so that that is a prerequisite. I think from there, I don’t really like I don’t know, I’m not a political organizer. So I don’t quite know what it looks like. But I think the biggest thing is like, yeah, we need to reintegrate ourselves with the river and ensure that everyone who, who’s near it, or anyone who’s anywhere had, you know, like, realizes what this river means to our continent.
Dean Klinkenberg 53:22
So I guess that’s the question I do hear sometimes, too, is, “Uh, why should anybody care about the Mississippi?” Especially if you don’t live anywhere near it.
Boyce Upholt 53:30
Yeah, I’ve been for obvious reasons ask this more times lately. And I keep answering in a historical way. I keep saying, you know, truly, America, the version of American culture that we have right now, it was because of the river, right? It was because of the fact that people saw this empty landscape and it was actually was quite empty, relatively empty when America was founded, because there had been so much sort of epidemics, along the river before that. So people saw this empty place, and kind of got drawn westward, and that established so much of what America is. But, you know, lately I’ve also been thinking of that another way important way to answer this is looking forward. It’s clear to me I think it’s becoming increasingly clear to a lot of people that we’re living in an age of chaos like climate, what climate change is essentially chaos where like, the weather’s a lot crazier. And we know this for sure, down here in Louisiana, where storms right, we’ve got we they just announced this will be I think, by far the worst hurricane season that we’ve experienced is the projection. And so, you know, climate change is one form of chaos. But if you want to know like, I don’t know, the river is another form of chaos. And so it has a lot of lessons to teach us for this era, and that people have lived here for 14,000 years, and they’ve found a way to live with and among chaos. And so if you want to look to how are we going to do things as the climate changes, I think thinking about how not how we’ve engineered this river but like how things used to be done here on the river could be a really valuable thing. For even people much farther afield?
Dean Klinkenberg 55:02
Yeah, one of the I guess one of the consequences again, of the engineering that we’ve done is we’ve taken a system that had, and I know this word gets overused, but like a natural resilience, and we’ve kind of engineered a lot of that resilience out of the river in many ways. So what is there is there ,well, I’m not sure where I’m going with that one. It may be it’s just, what do you picture a resilient Mississippi looking like?
Boyce Upholt 55:32
That’s another tough one. I don’t know. Like, I keep telling people, I’m glad that I’m a sort of quasi historian, definitely a journalist. And so I feel much more comfortable kind of diagnosing the problem than suggesting the prescription in some ways. You know, like, the ideal river would look like what it used to look like, like, give it back its resilience. But it’s, it’s really hard for me to imagine the pathway there, in part because, you know, I’ve spent the past 15 years of my life, but the house where I’m speaking to you from is three blocks from the Mississippi River. I love the city of New Orleans. I love the Delta, where I lived for nine years, and these are places that would have to change fundamentally, if we sort of said, well, like, let’s just pull out all the pull out all the metal stuff and all the concrete stuff and let it go back to what it was just like that’s, that’s inconceivable. And so, you know, we have been thinking lately, there are projects that are like trying to give back the river its wildness, for lack of a better term and small bits and pieces. That’s helpful. I don’t think so far, that’s been enough. But like, I don’t know, the the best prescription I can give is like, we have to keep going in that direction and finding places where we are willing to pull back a little bit. And I hope as we do that pulling back, I think the other thing we need to think about is how do we, you know, that means we’re dismantling of people of communities. And so how do we do that dismantling in a way that is just and fair, because so much of the history of what’s been done at the river has not been just and fair for everyone.
Dean Klinkenberg 56:57
Right. I think one of the other consequences of all this engineering is maybe we’ve created a false sense of security for a lot of people. The levees provide some sense that people are protected from floods, but you know, the, the old adage, there are two kinds of levees, which you mentioned in the book, you know, those that have failed and those that will fail. And I worry about the what, you know, the the catastrophic consequences of a levee failure now with the expectations that the levees have created in the amount of development on the other side of the levees in many places.
Boyce Upholt 57:30
Right. A couple of things. I mean, one thing that really struck me, I like, I didn’t really figure this out until I was working on the book, but like, the 1927 flood is famous as this, you know, here in the South, at least, it’s famous as the sort of most the biggest disaster, right? And but like, when you look at the maps, it was a lot less of a flood than 1882. But the difference was, you know, we we built so much. And the other thing its created a false sense of security. And it’s created a false sense of value to go back to that that footnote about costs. You know, as far as I can understand the Army Corps sort of dollars in versus dollars saved figures. There’s some something extraordinary, like $1, like $95 saved for every dollar spent on the levees, but that’s those dollars saved are all like, look at how much property is behind this levee. And so it’s a total counterfactual, right? It’s like, we built this thing. And then all this stuff was built behind it. And now we’re saving money. But if when it fails like that, that figure is not going to make any sense anymore. So.
Dean Klinkenberg 58:27
Right. It’s exactly. It’s a circular logic, because I remember reading some historical data about the Sny Levee District in Illinois. As soon as the levees went up, the value of the land increased something like tenfold almost overnight. So levees sort of inflate the value of the land, which then makes it look like you’re saving a lot of money when they don’t flood. And you know, the next time high water comes through. But yeah.
Boyce Upholt 58:52
It’s a case of moral hazard.
Dean Klinkenberg 58:54
Yeah. So let’s kind of come back to this idea of connecting to the river then. You had a really interesting observation in the book to where you’re talking about the the folks who work on tow boats, and their intimate knowledge of the river in many ways, you know, they can name islands, they know the bends, they know the geography of the river in a way few of us do. But in some ways, that’s, that’s only one way of knowing the river. And in some ways, it’s a fairly narrow way of knowing the river, John Ruskey would probably have a very different knowledge of the river than they do. So can you talk a bit about that there’s more than one way to connect to and know the Mississippi.
Boyce Upholt 59:34
Yeah, there are and it’s so yesterday, I was recording a different podcast that’s actually like a navigation industry podcast and was reading that section to one of the more like, there’s a pilot that I quote extensively in the book who’s super thoughtful man and then sort of loves John Ruskey. So he’s, he’s, he forms a bridge between those two worlds, but I read that it’s like, is this Is this accurate? You know, this is the best I could do because no one would let me on the dang towboats. I kind of wanted to experience that and they wouldn’t let me and he was like,”No, that seems about right.” So yeah, like it’s it strikes me as a really interesting experience to be like on these boats that you know just never stop. Never are they getting you to stop in port I guess to unload but you’re on that boat watching the scenery pass, you know that that may be that one thing we can attribute to that sense of the lower river as being boring is like sometimes when on the canoe it kind of does look boring. What makes it really nice is when you get out of the canoe when you’re on a sandbar and you realize like all the textures and all the the material things that accompany that. Tell me there’s, yeah, I want to feel better. What was the original question?
Dean Klinkenberg 1:00:34
Back to the multiple ways to know the river.
Boyce Upholt 1:00:36
Yes, multiple ways another river? Yeah. So I mean, like that. That’s a great example of that of like, and I think there’s value, I think I have a lot of respect for the towboat workers. You know, obviously, I have a lot of criticisms of the navigation industry, but like, that life seems like a good life. And when I talk to the towboat pilots that helped me out with this book, it was very clear to me like that they had their own intimate connection. There’s a Captain Greer, who I talked to the most. And he at one point, thought about leaving the industry to go study history at LSU. But it was like, I get more history, like being out on looking at these charts and like seeing these these pastimes and can do it on his own, essentially. And so yeah, I mean, like, I think we as paddlers, you know, I sometimes try and remember that the Mississippi River for me is mostly just been a lark, it’s like a place I get to go, you know that that canoe trip in 2017, there was a lot going on in my life, my Dad had passed away, I was going through a breakup. And so like, that’s part of why I went to the book, but it was like, this is a good chance to be out here, away from things like that, it’s great that it can serve that for people that that is not, you know, that shouldn’t be the only way people connect with it. And so there’s fishing and there’s like, there’s divides even with between recreational fishermen, and commercial fishermen, a lot of places down here in the Delta in particular. And so to me, I think the the important thing is like, I don’t know, I love accumulating the stories of all these different ways of, of knowing the river. And I think it’s important to like respect them all. And ideally find ways that there is no right way to relate with a river. It’s just like, to make sure all these different ways of relating to river get to be part of the voices that shape what it becomes.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:00:38
Right. I think that’s the fundamental challenge, isn’t it? Finding ways for all those voices to be represented. Because it certainly looks like right now we basically we don’t manage for all those different ways of relating to the river. We manage for navigation and flood control with a little recreation, but.
Boyce Upholt 1:02:27
Yes, and it’s sometimes hard to overlay, right? Like I, when we canoe, John carries the radio, and he can hear what the captains are saying and they’re essentially cussing us out. But then again, from talking to the tow pilots, I’m like, it’s they’re really worried. They like don’t want to kill someone in a canoe. And a canoe is like little more than a log from the point of view these massive vote boats. And so that’s where the challenge is headed is like, the navigation or recreation neither those necessarily right way. And they often are in conflict. And so can we find ways to resolve those conflicts?
Dean Klinkenberg 1:02:58
So after working on this book, for a few years now, how do you feel about the future of the river?
Boyce Upholt 1:03:07
I mean, in some ways, the river rather, there’s this notion, whenever you talk about nature that like, well, nature is gonna be fine in the long run, right? Like we humans aren’t gonna stick around forever, and nature is gonna be fine. And that’s, that seems to be to be the case with the river, like, eventually, you know, the old river control structure will pop out and you know, all the concrete will crumble. That’s not a particular again, like I talked about the idea of the more than human world, at the beginning, but the more than human world still has humans in it. Right. And I think that’s important. And so the I think the real question is like, how hopeful am I that like, the river can be healthy, and that we can have a healthy relationship with it? And I don’t I don’t know. I like, I think inherently I’m a hopeful person. And so I like, would like to believe there’s a way I mean, there’s, there’s a big study underway down here on the lower river, the Corps is trying to figure out is there a better way to manage this whole system? And I am not, I don’t expect them to come up with like, hugely better answers. But I’m also not convinced like, I’m like, I’m open to it. I hope they do. So. Yeah, it’s, I wish I was more hopeful. But strangely, at the same time, the river is this place that I do go to, and it gives me hope, because it is a reminder of, you know, how much there is in the world.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:04:19
All right, well, I’m think that’s a good place to put a wrap on it too. I a little note of optimism, like we both I think value spending time on the river and we value finding ways to encourage people to spend time next to the river and experience some of that for themselves. So hopefully, your book will motivate more people to get out there and check things out for themselves and maybe apply some critical thinking to what they’re seeing as well.
Boyce Upholt 1:04:47
Yeah, I hope our books go hand in hand because it feel like you can pick up both and you get get this nice guide to where you want to see and then you can get a narrative of what how that came to be as well.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:04:57
Exactly. So tell us about the book. When is it available? Where can people buy it?
Boyce Upholt 1:05:04
So again, it’s called the “Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi.” And it will be out on June 11. That should be available. Hopefully anywhere you get your books, certainly anywhere you get your books along the Mississippi River, I imagine those stores will be carrying it. So yeah, delighted if y’all bought it.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:05:19
And if people want to keep up with your work, what are the best ways to do that?
Boyce Upholt 1:05:23
Probably the best way to go to my website, BoyceUpholt.com. I am on a couple of different social media platforms. I’ve got a newsletter that’s kind of focused on nature here in the south, and then I try and drop in there updates about my writing as well. So.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:05:36
Right, I know, in your most recent substack newsletter, you had a nice list of some of the river theme books coming out this year. It’s a big year for the river, it seems.
Boyce Upholt 1:05:45
It is a big year, which that is one thing that does give me hope actually is seeing, like, you know, I’ve read almost all those books now. And you know, there’s this whole cast of people that see the river in the same way as us and say, like, oh, we need to find out a better way. And so I have this hope that there is sort of this cultural resurgence towards new ways of thinking.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:06:05
Well, awesome, thank you so much for your time, Boyce. I really appreciate it.
Boyce Upholt 1:06:08
Thanks Dean. Yeah, this was great.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:06:20
And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. Well, during the interview with Boyce, the Quapaw Canoe Company and John Ruskey came up a few times. John founded that company 25 years ago, and it’s no stretch to say that he and his fellow guides have had an international impact. People travel from all over the world to Mississippi to take a trip on the river with John and the Quapaw Canoe Company. I took my first trip with them about 10 years ago, just a quick overnight trip where I hopped on board at St. Francisville, Louisiana. Spent the night on Fancy Point Towhead. And then we paddled on to Baton Rouge. It was a an eye opening trip to me and I’ve been lucky enough to take several other trips with John and the Quapaw since then. And I he really has been a major influence in helping me see the Lower Mississippi in a new way. Really helping me see the beauty in the Lower Mississippi by paying close attention to the details around me. He spent so much of his life on the river, getting to know all of the the niches in the river’s world and getting to know the patterns and the wildlife is really remarkable person, you know, with his his devotion and dedication to the Mississippi. Well outfitting is also a difficult business model at times. And they took a big hit during Covid. And then they had some bad luck after that. And they’ve never fully recovered from that those series of events. So they’ve been on pretty shaky financial footing for a little while. John is now asking for a little help. He’s set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise some extra money that they can use to restabilize the business and take care of a few essentials that they have had to put off because the money just hasn’t been there. If you’ve ever known John or been on a trip with John, you may have seen this already. The rest of y’all, at the very least, you should go down to Clarksdale, Mississippi and take a trip with John and the Quapaws for at least one night. But even if you’re not going to do that, I hope you’ll take a look at the GoFundMe campaign. And you’ll send them a few bucks to help out it’s it’s very important for us to have folks who are willing to take people out on the river and get to know the Mississippi in such an intimate way. It’s key to the future of the river that we have people doing this. So I hope you’ll find a little generosity and you can send a little cash his way to help out. So if you got to gofundme.com and look up the Quapaw Canoe Company, you’ll find it there. I’ll also post a link in the show notes.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:08:58
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you helped keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series set at certain places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.
