Entries this day: Church_outside Mud_Island

Church outside

11:01am CDT Sunday 29 September 2002

I'm in my own church, outside with nature, sitting upon some discarded sections of sidewalk dumped into a ravine angling steeply into the mighty Mississippi River.

This spot is nearly underneath a monstrous iron bridge that has borne the loads of many trains crossing the river. I look up and see a layer of rust and paint covering huge erector set beams with rivets speckled across everywhere. Countless XXXXXXXXX form the beams to keep them light yet strong. I wonder how I can get up there.

I see below me a wooden bridge holding up a lush carpet of green that has taken root in a mass of leaves converted to dirt over the years. Looks like an old railroad bridge that travels alongside the river, not across it.

Below that is the enormous granite base holding the larger grander bridge. I see a ladder on that base near the top. I don't know if the bottom of this ladder will be accessible, but soon I shall find out.

11:26am

Wow. I see (saw) evidence that the wooden bridge had been burned pretty effectively. I don't see any close that say if this was before or after it was recomissioned from bridge to garden.

Climbed down quite a pile of rocks, each on the order of a cubic foot or three, and all pretty sharp and not particularly stable. Tricky bare feet get me to the river's edge safely.

Huge barge of 30 big barges being pushed by a barge pusher named Charles C Ottorff or something like that. Lots of waves after that and I notice white stuff floating in the water, some easily identifyable as cans and bits of trash, some are probably bubbles churned up by countless boats and pollution in the water. The muddy river looks like a deep tan leather color with hazy blue sky reflecting on it. Cannot see any more than about 2 inches into the murky brown.

Many beer cans litter this area, along with what looks like some plastic bags, shirts, wire, paper, styrofoam, the 12-pack cardboard case for this beer to be carried down and thoughtlessly discarded into this otherwise beatiful natural spot with lush vegetation carpeting the rocks down to within 30 feet of the river, about 10 feet above the water's surface now.

Even the city itself has condoned littering, with the sidewalk tossed into the ravine, and hundreds of concrete core samples taken from concrete who-knows-whats. 5 inches in diameter, round cylinders about a foot to 18 inches long.

As I write this, I hope my description might be useful to archaelogists or historians who are researching this area. Too bad that I don't really know where I am in terms of the names of this section of Memphis, but I'm sitting on a concrete conglomerate formed as a spillway about five feet wide and fifteen feet long ready to guide water from a 20 inch concrete pipe just on the upstream side of three bridges. The bridge furthest upstream holds two railroad tracks, one with a train coming from Arkansas to Memphis right now as i type. it's on the upstream-most track, as the other track has some railroad cars resting on it ever since I've been here today. The next bridge down holds only 1 railroad track, and has a train traveling from Memphis to Arkansas now. Easy over one hundred grain cars, all like twins holding hands across the entire river.

I do know that I'm sitting below the Unitarian Church of the River, if that gives you a sense of where I am.

Ooh. the train above me is stopping. Very interesting.

So, um, the next bridge is for vehicular traffic, cars and trucks and more cars and trucks. I can see the Wlecome to Arkansas sign above the roadway on that bridge, presumalby with a Welecome to Tennessee sign opposite it. (It's the I-55 bridge)

The grain cars are still going. Now they have ended. Maybe 200 cars there.

A tree is floating down river, stuck maybe on a section of rocks that juts a bit further out into the river.

Across from me trees cover the entire bank, with only a single barge, and 3 radio antennae towers marring the landscape (not counting these three huge bridges). The towers are painted with red and white sections, as is customary since I've been alive. I am guessing the trees are mostly oak, with a few pine.

I shouldn't forget to mention that well upstream from me is the "new" traffice bridge that Lisa said is I-40 crossing the river. It is mostly flat with two hump backed arches supporting the bridge over its longer sections, designed to allow mongo barges past.

The train above me has sarted again and stopped again since I've been typing. The tree has dislodged itself and gently floats toward me like a weightless astronaut with no schedule to keep.

A man in purple shirt, pants, and *shoes* (I'm barefoot) carries a camera and tripod over toward me, mostly with his eyes on the rocks below him (smart) and the river and bridges. We acknowledge each other with a nod and slight wave. He's photographing maybe the train or bridge or something.

Talked to Randy, who develops his own black and white photos at home and works in a color photo lab. He said he was photographing anything at all, so I showed him the charred bridge. I wonder if he'll put that on his website.

Mud Island

3:21pm CDT Sunday 29 September 2002

So Lisa and I are here at Mud Island, which is not actually an island, but an over commercialized penninsula. Not like a damn shopping center, but a boat launch for kayaks and airboats and paddle boats and plenty of water related activites. I felt pretty cynical towards all that so I didn't want to go kayaking as we had planned, but I was willing to wade through the model of the Mississippi river that spans nearly a couple hundred yards in length. Most fun has been two different sets of (model) rapids, where we used our feet to create a dam and watched the water backwash after we let our flood go. I vaguely have a sense of the physics that I imagine are involved, which I explained as best that I could.

I sat my butt in the river basin to block it, but didn't make the water as impressively deep as I had hoped. But my butt still got pretty wet.

The next set of rapids, beside which we are sitting now, we were much more effectively able to block, to the point that the styrofoam boat race up river was stalled until we let it go. I don't think the participants knew of the blockade ahead of them, and I didn't even think about them when we blocked it, but after we let the river go again, they seemed to start moving down river again more quickly.

Lisa suddenly went philosophical about cause and effect and affects that we cause without our awareness.