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I’ve always felt like I was at home in the water.
I grew up in Arkansas rice country, next to the muddy Black River. Plenty of rain throughout the year made our already hot summers muggy and miserable. The rain always provided temporary relief from the humidity, but as soon as it stopped, misery set in with a new wave of wet heat, mosquitoes, and chiggers. I spent every summer with red, itchy welts up and down my legs, but it never stopped me from celebrating the rain by dancing around in it barefoot, with my face held up to the sky to catch raindrops in my mouth. I loved splashing through the puddles in the driveway, and disrupting the mini-waterfalls created by the rocks in the ditch. By the time I was done, I was always covered in grass clippings and pine needles.
We would go fishing in the river, but you couldn’t swim in it unless you wanted to risk getting bit by a cottonmouth. Best catfish I’ve ever eaten came out of that river. We’d run across the gravel road barefoot, scale the muddy levee, and pull out our fishing poles and snack bags full of dry cereal or baloney sandwiches. We didn’t care if we even caught a fish, we just liked being outside in the shade.
The rice fields surrounding my childhood home were always full of water. We never had a big swimming pool in our yard because the dried pecan husks and leaves would fall into it. I don’t think Dad wanted to add “cleaning the pool” to his already never-ending list of chores. He was a farmer, and he sometimes dug us out a little area in the corner of one of his rice fields near the well pump because the water was too cold for the snakes. That was our swimming pool.
From the beginning of May to the end of August, I really only wore shoes if we were going to church. When we came back inside from playing, we had to wash our feet off with the water hose because running through Mom’s nice clean house with muddy feet was grounds for a whoopin’. That water hose was one of our most favorite things to play with. We’d hose down the carport and porches, and pretend we had an ice-skating rink, falling into a pile of giggles when we messed up our “triple-axel cow deluxe toe spin” like we’d seen on the Olympics. We’d use it to turn some of the dirt at the edge of the garden into mud. We’d sink our little feet up to our knees in the mud, eventually letting the cool mud bake onto our skin under the hot sun, then pretend we were ducks. We’d plug the hose into the sprinkler and spend hours running back and forth through the jets of water. That water hose fueled our balloon and water gun wars, our spray fights, and made rainbows dance in the sky.
As we got older, we were able to go on float trips on Spring River with the cousins. I always enjoyed laying on my back in the cool water, feeling it trickle through my mane of hair while the fish occasionally brushed by. You could see to the bottom of Spring River in most places as it wasn’t very deep or muddy. The water was cool enough to be refreshing in the summer, but warm enough that your skin didn’t go numb. We knew to stay out of the reed-like grass because there were leeches. Once the float trip was over, we’d go up on the bank to the pavilion where the adults had delicious, juicy BBQ cooked. Then we were right back in the river to rinse our sticky hands and ride the 30 ft current like it was our own personal water-slide.
Even through my most difficult times, I turned to the water for comfort and belonging. It always felt like my sins were getting washed away as I drifted half-submerged down the river. Sensory deprivation has a way of making the world feel far away and unimportant. This was a way for me to align my thoughts and feelings, and come to terms with decisions I’ve had to make. As long as I was in the water, I knew it would protect me from the world, even if just for a little while, and I had time to make sense of everything going on.
Every year, right as the summer starts to come around, I get excited about going back into the water. Though I’ve finally found my own place in the world to call home, I still look forward to that feeling the water gives me —
— that feeling of Home.
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I-55 runs along a few miles away from the Mississippi for a good chunk of the way through AR. The river.
Oh! I’m not 100% on that being good rice ground but it is likely decent. Northwest of Crowley’s Ridge is basically swamp-land with many rivers and is primo rice farmland.
There are rice fields in view from I-55 in a few places. Mostly what you see from I-55 is cotton, soybeans or sorghum. But if you get off the interstate and head west you run in to rice country real quick in the St. Francis watershed. If you continue west and cross Crowley’s Ridge you get back down into rice country in the White River/ Black River watershed. Rice takes a lot of water.
Rice became a real science in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, in order to be competitive, a rice field is graded flat using enormous laser-guided scraper pans following surveyed field plans. Large areas are divided by small dikes that follow the terrain, maintaining a fall from one dike to the next of only an inch or two. Water levels are strictly controlled to optimize yields. Several new varieties and species of rice have gone into commercial growing in just the past decade.
Rice is big agri-bidness.
I-55 through Arkansas runs parallel with the Mississippi River, just a little ways west of the levee. The levee is actually an interconnected system of levees, each levee section belongs to a levee district. The Corps of Engineers does levee inspections pretty rarely, but the levee districts also do their own inspections and maintenance. The Corps of Engineers sends a dredge up and down the river twice each year, maintaining a deep channel in the middle of the Mississippi River. It is way deeper than what would be needed for barge traffic on the river. The reason for the deep channel is to keep the river in its place. It takes both the Corps and the levee districts being on the ball in order to keep the Mississippi River from pushing out of its banks and creating a new channel.
There are very few floodgates or pump stations along the levees from Blytheville down to Marion. In that area, a drop of rain that falls on the west side of the levee will flow west, down through a system of sloughs, bayous and ditches and into the St. Francis. If the Mississippi River ever breached the levee in that area, the water would form a new channel that would run to the St. Francis, and not re-enter the existing Mississippi River channel until it got down past Helena.
I used to have to help put in rice spills as a kid. Dad would only let me drive the tractor in the bean field though because I wasn’t very good at it.
Sounds wonderful. Thanks for your post!
This conversation is part of a Group Writing series with the theme “Water”, planned for the whole month of April. If you follow this link, there’s more information about Group Writing. The schedule is updated to include links to the other conversations for the month as they are posted. May’s topic is Winning, please sign up!
Black River levee breached at Pocahontas.
http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/may/03/levee-northeastern-arkansas-breached-flash-flood-e/
I would’ve though they’d shore up all those levees after the flooding back in 2011. Success had to be evacuated yesterday too and I think it’s just supposed to get worse. Spoke to my grandma on the phone this morning and she said they’re still getting rain. Currently, every single road in Missouri and Arkansas that I would drive on to get to Corning from Montana is closed.
Everything on the east side of Pocahontas is flooded. Here is the drone video.
http://www.arkansasonline.com/5317floodvideo/
This is a tough hit to a struggling little town.
This is sad. Prayers for all.
Highway 62, East of Corning, AR