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Working River

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

I see that the starving artists are back at the Holiday Inn again for their annual sale, room 211. What would those artists do without rivers? Any painting over $19.95 is bound to have a stream or a rivulet winding through it, perhaps even the sweet Afton flowing gently.

One river you will never see on the canvasses in Room 211 is the Mississippi. Our river has work to do, with a set of tasks that rival the twelve labors of Hercules. The Mississippi has no time to move from the lower left corner of an oil painting toward the center, past a couple of Prussian blue boulders, and evaporate in a distant misty valley between titanium white mountains.

The Mississippi was born working. Its first job was to drain all the meltwater from the four great glacial ages which covered most of North America between a million and fifteen thousand years ago.

The Mississippi worked hard to find the best channel through which to drain all that water. For a time, the river came down through central Iowa to Keokuk, then it tried out central Illinois where it met the Illinois River near LaSalle. The last glacier pushed the Mississippi into its present channel past Rock Island.

Having found its proper place, the Mississippi set about self-improvement, cutting off loops and bends, building and washing away islands, never quite satisfied. It lengthened itself, too, from its original mouth at Cairo, Illinois, 700 miles down to New Orleans, carrying all that fill by itself at the rate of 770 tons a minute.

To say nothing of its thankless task of taking humans—Native Americans, hunters, fishermen, explorers, trappers, traders, missionaries and tourists and all their paraphernalia—wherever they want to go for the last ten thousand years—only to suffer the insult and indignity of scores of dams and bridges.

I don't like to see artists starve any more than the next person, but why pay $19.95 for an oil-on-canvas river when you can sit free on our levee any afternoon, watch the Mississippi head downstream, and listen to a real river whisper, "gotta hustle, hustle, hustle.”

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

Community
Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.