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| Ouachita River at Camden- Margaret Horne |
See and hear it at Mammoth Spring.
Stand amazed at what the harnessed flow once provided. Compare it, fleetingly,
to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam, the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Recall
how the Ouachita River often takes Highway 7 from Arkadelphia to Camden. Reflect
on the devastating 2011 flooding at Memphis and the number of locks put in
place as the Old Man visited Beale Street and Riverside Drive. Remember how
rivers hunger for land. The Black River, the Current River, the White River,
and the St. Francis River gorged themselves with northeast
Arkansas farmland.
Thing is, beyond what man can do to
delay the inevitable, the water will come. From the Mighty Mississippi’s enormous
drainage area, it will drive steadily south. Whether man builds
anything to stem the flow or not, the muddy menace will plow through, gaining
depth and strength, power and speed. Man is reduced to a watchman as he
recognizes the inevitable: water will have its way.
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| Ouachita River - Old Bridge at Camden and Hwy 7 |
Growing up in the Queen Cityon the
Ouachita River, attending college at Henderson in Arkadelphia where we
sunbathed and sometimes fogged up car windows along the Ouachita’s banks, spending
my professional life in the city where the Delta begins, and retiring near the
St. Francis tributary, river water speaks a language I understand. Perhaps that
is why reading The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed
America touched me, carved a permanent inlet.
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| Crystal Bridges Art Museum -Flood of 1927 |
Politics, power, and pride made
decisions in 1927. Lessons were learned. Still...
People build in flood plains; prognosticators forecast crest dates and depths, and newspapers feature stories about levee systems
People figure the odds and take the risk.
People lose, though, when standing against a rising river's trek to the sea.
