It's getting to be that time of year again--it'll peak in late July into August--when walking around in southern LA feels like moving through liquid. Well, it is that. I'd never make it without some AC, but now and again it's strangely pleasant to walk through thick air. But one must walk at a leisurely pace, because the fat swollen air is exerting all sorts of pressures. The air hangs and you must shove at it a bit to get anywhere. The color of all this is deeper greens, and then there are extravagant dark pinks in the crape myrtles. The vegetation seems lusher than ever, moisture-swollen, a little blurry. At GGLA, if you look across the front yard from the porch you get the sensation of being in a kind of damp green bowl.
Sometimes the idea that we're living across the street from the Mississippi amazes me. I was reading John Barry's Rising Tide earlier this year, so the river seemed for a time to be a kind of menacing enormity hidden just over there. The story of how that levee came to be is pretty amazing too--Barry narrates it so well. As complex and twisted as the river itself, and full of cautionary tales.
But when I'm not wrapped up in the politics of civil engineering and disaster history, the river is a fascinating invisible presence. Our house is raised off the ground a bit and on a little knoll, but the levee still masks the river completely. I don't walk up there and look down at it too often--mainly because the grass is not mown very regularly, but also because I think I prefer to sense the river in other ways. All this stuff is happening, all this commerce, right beyond that hill, but we don't see it at all. Only now and again a big ship that's high enough will pass and we see the very top of it, scooting along the levee top. That's a strange perspective. Now and again we hear calliope music passing along, which is one of the tourist river boats coming through. Something about the acoustics makes it sound quite near. The first time we heard it we were very puzzled for a few minutes. Sometimes I think a radio has been left on or someone is speaking from the road, but that's folks on the barges or in the port talking through some kind of amplification. But mostly what we hear are various whumpings caused by the barges fleeting together. Here's some right in front of us, a pretty big wad of them, fleeted:
"Fleeting" seems like the wrong word for the sound. I know it's not meant to name the sound, but since I experience "fleeting" primarily acoustically, it seems like there should be another better word that names the sound for it. "Whump" doesn't quite get all the reverb nor the deep sound sense that it's happening over the hill.
From above the levee looks like a thin membrane, but down on the ground it seems much more substantial. The "levees only" policy might have messed uo all kinds of things with the river, but I'm pretty grateful to have the reassuring green hump there. Without it I suppose we'd have quite a view. For quite some time, this house did have that view. So it must have felt very different to be here without the sensation of the green bowl. And no AC, so you'd be out on the porch, watching the river.
Going up over the so-called "new bridge" (it's been there nearly 40 years--few people even know this but it's actually the Horace Wilkinson Bridge, as opposed to the so-called "old bridge" bridge upriver of us, which is actually the Huey P. Long Bridge) from the "left bank" to get to work or BR I am actuely aware of the commerce, since one is often in a pack of semi trucks, and right below is the Community Coffee plant, the port, barges fleeting and lumbering away, downtown to the left, beyond that petrochemical plants. I thought it would wear off after we'd been here awhile, but it hasn't yet--the sense of crossing over this river that was mythical in my childhood reading of Mark Twain. There's a spelling jingle that sometimes runs throguh my head:
M I S
S I S
S I P P I
That used to be so hard to spell
It used to make me cry
But since I've studied spelling
It's just like pumpkin pie:
M I S
S I S
S I P P I.
We must have had that on a record album. My folks were always investing in educational stuff on vinyl, like the multiplication table records which I still can't shake when doing maths. Come to think of it, I'm carrying on that tradition with Pimsleur on the ipod. Plus ca change.
