Mississippi River, Missouri, USA

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20223925-Kathy's_Visit-16Four childhood friends Kathleen Tracy, Billie Simpson, Carole Foekhrobe, and Marilyn Catalp visit the St. Louis Bridge.

The St. Louis Bridge, a massive structure, was completed in 1874 at a cost of over $10,000,000. It consists of three spans, the center one being 520 feet long, and the other two 500 feet each. The piers upon which these spans rest are built of limestone carried down to bed rock. The main passage for the accommodation of pedestrians is 54 feet wide, and below this are two lines of rails. The merchant’s bridge, 3 miles N., was completed in 1890 at a cost of $3,000,000. The latter is used exclusively for railroad traffic.
Eads, James Buchanan (1820-1887), a celebrated American engineer. He was born at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, May 23, 1820. He died at Nassau, Bahama Islands, March 8, 1887. Perhaps no other American engineer has been connected with more notable enterprises. In young manhood he won a reputation by devising some barges for raising sunken steamers. In 1861, at the call of the Federal government, he constructed eight ironclad steamers inside of one hundred days. He also built other gunboats and mortar boats, all of use in opening up the Mississippi and its tributaries. In 1867-74 he built the famous Eads Bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis. It is a mammoth steel arch structure of three spans, resting on stone pillars sent down to bed rock far below the bottom of a treacherous river. It cost $6,500,000. The last great work with which he was connected was the improvement of the mouth of the Mississippi. He designed the system of willow mattresses and stonework by which the water was confined to a narrow passage through which it scoured a deep channel.

Mississippi River, Louisiana, USA

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This project was carried out, in Crescent city of New Orleans, by six sisters who were born and raised in New Orleans: Suzanne Talbot Isaacs, Judith Talbot Heumann*, Mary Jane Talbot LeRouge, Constance Talbot Compagno, Kathleen Talbot Lore, Marlen Talbot Erwin.
*The stick was named for Judith Talbot Heumann who was at the time at M.D.Anderson with her husband who was being diagnosed while we were dipping the cloth.

Mississippi River at the Crescent City of New Orleans, Louisiana on February 2, 2008 at 12:34 p.m. this cloth was dipped in the Mississippi River on the east bank, at a site five leagues upriver from New Orleans in Kenner, LA. On February 3, it was dipped again about two leagues downriver from the French Quarter on the west bank in Algiers, across the river from the Chalmette Battlefield where the British were defeated by troops led by Andrew Jackson during the Battle of New Orleans, the last battle of the War of 1812.
The poem below was written by our maternal grandmother at the turn of the 20th century. She was a remarkable woman who did not let her blindness, which resulted from an accident at the age of three, stop her from doing a great many things.

Who Owns the River?

The river belongs to the nation.
The levee, they say, to the state.
The government runs navigation.
The commonwealth, though, pays the freight.

Now here is the problem that’s heavy —
Which is the right or the wrong?
When the water runs over the levee,
To whom does the river belong?

It’s the government’s river in summer
When the stage of the water is low.
But in spring when it gets on a hummer
And starts o’r the levee to flow,

When the river gets suddenly dippy,
The state must dig down in its tlll
And push back the old Mississippi,
Away from the farm and the hill.

I know very little of lawing.
I’ve made little study of courts.
I’ve done little giving and hawing
Through verdicts, opinions, reports;

Why need there be anything more said
When the river starts levees to climb?
If the government owns the aforesaid
It must own it all of the time.

— Mary Irene Duplan Haden Murray

Vuoksi River, Imatra, Finland

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One evening creatives Tuomas Korkalo, Ninni Sintonen, and Jeff Huebner take white fabric to the Imatrankoski Rapids show (the opening of the dam.)

The Vuoksi is Finland’s most voluminous river, and for centuries its Imatrankoski, or Imatra Rapids, were the country’s most spectacular natural attraction and tourist destination. They are mentioned in the Kalevala, the Finnish national folk epic, as the North’s mightiest waterfall. In 1650, in the first historical and geographical study of Finland (then part of Sweden), professor Michael Wexionius wrote: “The roar is so deafening…Rocks tremble under one’s feet and trees shake on the riverbanks. Watching the fast-flowing water makes the spectator feel faint.”

During the late 18th and 19th centuries (when Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia), Imatra was a fashionable playground for Russians. Members of the imperial family like Catherine the Great, the intelligentsia, and later the middle class regularly traveled by carriage, train, and boat to the once-remote site, located in Karelia in southeastern Finland by the Russian border, a mere 100 miles from St. Petersburg. At the turn of the last century, some 20 hotels and inns sprang up in Imatra, which saw up to 14 trains a day from the imperial capital. The “fantastic, terrifying, and beautiful” rapids (in the words of one visitor) became a symbol for wild, primitive, and mythical Finland (a place where the forest gods still lurk just beneath the modernist surface), although by 1893 a bridge had been built across the falls and colored floodlights illuminated the foaming surge. There was nothing else like it in Europe.

Throughout the 1890s during the period of “Karelianism,” artists, writers, and scholars celebrated the region as the last remaining center of an authentic “Finnish” folk culture – a place where national identity emerged through art, myth, nature, and landscape. Among these figures was the great Finnish National Romantic painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, who captured the rapids in a dozen paintings in different light and seasonal conditions (the most iconic, called Imatra in Winter, hangs prominently in the Ateneum, the Finnish National Art Gallery in Helsinki). For Gallen-Kallela and other artists of the Finnish Golden Age, the Imatra Rapids represented not just unharnessed power and beauty; they were also allegories of Finland’s desire for freedom. Their images helped to forge a liberation movement.

Finland declared independence in 1917. The young nation needed energy. By 1929, the state dammed the Imatra Rapids and built what is still the country’s largest hydropower plant. The “downtown” of Imatra — an oddly sprawling, 120-square-mile town of 32,000, built from a general plan by famed architect Alvar Aalto in the late 1940s — is still dominated by a deep, dry, rocky gorge, steps away from a pedestrian mall. But every night at 7 pm during the summer, and at other special times, hundreds of people line up on the bridge and along the riverbanks in Crown Park to watch as the dam unleashes raging torrents of water during a 20-minute “Rapids Show.” It is accompanied by the stirring music of Jean Sibelius – “Finlandia,” “Karelia Suite” – playing over a public address system. While it may be a wondrously kitschy nationalist spectacle, it also illustrates that in Finland art is as much of nature as it is as nature, and nature despoiled. (While scenic, Imatra is notorious for its pulp factories and industrial pollution.)

I immersed a locally store-bought cotton fabric with Imatra-based artists (and partners) Tuomas Korkalo and Ninni Sintonen about a half-mile downstream from the dam, near where the diverted channel meets the main course of the River Vuoksi again. It was a rainy night, the rocks in the river were slippery, and we initially found ourselves near a sewage pipe. But Tuomas and Ninni, who help manage the Oranki Environmental Art Park in western Lapland, were good sports. They were dressed up for a night out at the 100-year-old Buttenhoff restaurant, a Karelian classic–we had beer and coffee–and they really had no idea what I was getting them into. — Jeff Huebner

Wonalancet River, New Hampshire, USA

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Diana Beliard and Diann Smith hike a trail along one of the many waterways that fill the Wonalancet River, clear water from the White Mountains that runs over endless granite boulders.