On the Fault Lines

It starts as a soft rocking, a silent vibration. Before daybreak the mind answers impulsively and irrationally–-a storm is testing the windows, the dog has leapt on the bed. Then realization rights itself and opens like a book: we’re having a quake.

Photo by Earl Warren, Jr.

When these tremors wake me from a sound sleep I could be at either of the places I call home, since both sit above separate and major fault lines. My life is divided between San Francisco, on the San Andreas Fault, and the ragged western corner of Kentucky, on the New Madrid.

Kentucky is where my sons are, and it’s the place I’d choose in the event of the big rumble. The county of my childhood is wedged into the southernmost corner of the far end of the Jackson Purchase. It's in the South, but in the northern South, a place of sweeping fields and grassy hills where, during the Civil War, some wore blue and some wore gray.

The course of the Mississippi River defines the western perimeter of Hickman County and forms the edge of the state as well. So besides being where North meets South, it’s where East meets West.

The river is a fickle boundary. Threeponds, a low, cypress-rich hunting ground south of Columbus, was once bisected by the river before the channel shifted to the west and left behind a trio of slender and connected pools. The curving sandbars of Bessie Bend are visible today but might be gone tomorrow. Wolf Island was orphaned by the river, distanced from Kentucky by its fierce and unrelenting course.

Kentucky would be a more tidy, more geometric state without this trapezoidal, sparsely populated, end-of-the-universe county of ours. It doesn’t have the stately elegance of the Bluegrass, but what’s missing in polish is recouped in drama. Balance atop the chalk cliff at Columbus and take in the breakneck, almost perpendicular drop to the rich mud and gravel of the river’s shoreline. Look below and beyond, past tug boats, stray logs, and swirling eddies to see a sweeping, hazy, green and lavender watercolor of Missouri farmland.

As kids we climbed crab-like down the bluff and skipped flat rocks along the murky waves.  The shoreline offered up wet chunks of clay and we let it ooze between our fingers, merging veins of ochre, tan, and red.  We walked barefoot at water’s edge, scanning brown-sugar sand for sharp rocks and glittering shards of glass. In time we headed back toward the bank and made our way upward, gripping saplings and bare tree roots, and sometimes pausing to swing in the knotty cradle of a grape vine rope.

Swimming in the river was not allowed. There were currents that could pull a child to the bottom and under-tows that lusted for the most experienced swimmer. Stories of man-sized catfish added to a river mythology owned by every boy and girl who grew up near the shore.

There’s no bridge, no ferry now,  but the banks of Columbus have hosted a wealth of real and imagined travelers. The earliest mound-builders stole along the water’s edge, as did the Chickasaws. Marquette brought religion downstream, accompanied by the fur-trading Joliet. Confederate soldiers struggled to stretch a great chain across the water, hoping to deter the path of Northern gunboats. Cotton from Vicksburg and Memphis floated up the river along with steamboats carrying the raucous jazz of New Orleans.  And we all believed when Huck and Jim left home they poled along the mile-wide course that we knew well.

To live near the Mississippi is to ever be reminded of forces larger, greater, grander than ourselves. It’s a stern parent, always in charge, a force of nature, God, or pantheistic blending of the two. Stand at water’s edge and learn life’s contradictions: it beckons us, then leaves us on the shore. 

In San Francisco, a half mile from the vast Pacific and firefly lights of Golden Gate,  I still feel the pull of the Mississippi. I see it clearly: it’s dusk. The empty barges seem to defy gravity. The water is a broad slab of glass that mirrors the sky.