In defense of romance
Beauty matters, perhaps most of all on weeks like this
Media & events updates: I was on Madison BookBeat this week, in what was one of my favorite conversations in a while. Listen in here, or in your podcast app.
On November 18, I’ll be doing a ticket online event with American Ancestors, moderated by my friend Ralph Eubanks. Get more details here.
I was starting to put together a short but rather heavy essay on meat eating, and then I realized my editorial schedule had this one going out on a morning when many of us are feeling the weight of the world already. As I contemplated what words of mine might be worth reading on this day of all days, I thought about a talk I gave last week at Tulane Architecture’s Gulf Coast Climate Futures Symposium. The core message—that seeking beauty matters—is something that *I* want to hold onto today, so maybe it can be helpful to you, too. So, from my brief outline, I drafted this essay.
Let me begin with an admission: I’m something of a romantic, at least when it comes to the Mississippi River. My book, The Great River, is largely about the engineering of nature, and the ways that can—and has—gone wrong, but it is very much an outgrowth of that romanticism.
I was not always besotted with the Mississippi River. I grew up in Connecticut, far from its waters, outside its watershed, and while sure the country’s great river came up in my history courses, I have no recollection of what was said, how it was described. I do know that, by the time I was in my mid-twenties and living a dozen or so miles from the Mississippi River, I had settled onto a common stereotype: that it was one big engineered ditch—a toxic ditch, at that. The image that the Wall Street Journal chose to run with their review of my book is a good illustration of how I imagined the river, and confirmation that I was not alone. The image is of the Mississippi River, or at least of an engineered canal upriver of St. Louis that allows boats to bypass a shallow stretch of the Mississippi. It is also the only piece of this river that looks quite so ditch-like—so it is the only image that can be used to confirm a false notion of what this river is.
The irony of that image, appearing in a review of my book, is that what prompted this whole project was the revelation of how much more was out there.
In short, I got my start as a journalist in Mississippi, and a few years into that career, I was assigned a profile of a canoe guide—and now dear friend—named John Ruskey. That, of course, required a few days and nights of camping on the Mississippi River. The sunset I saw on that first night of camping shattered my sense that the Mississippi was tamed and denuded of all its beauty. Shreve’s Bar, where we camped that night, was not just beauty, but as wild a place as I had ever been.
Even after that trip, I continued to make mistakes about the nature of the Mississippi River. I moved to Louisiana in 2018, and as a journalist I soon found myself reading and writing about the region known as “Cancer Alley,” the 85-mile-long strip of riverbank between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that features 200-some industrial and petrochemical facilities. Reading the coverage, and looking at the accompanying images of the sprawling plants, can quickly make you think that Louisiana is mostly one great industrial hellscape. But when you drive the whole of Cancer Alley—or “Death Alley,” as it’s sometimes called now, because there are very real issues of environmental justice—you see there are pockets of wetlands still, little slices of bucolic farmland.
The images of those power plants have come to represent a moral conundrum for me, as a journalist and a storyteller—one that I think is related to one of the fundamental questions all humans face in the Anthropocene: What moral obligation do we have to turn our eyes toward the very real death and destruction, to hold up the injustices that must be righted? To what extent is it okay to notice that, even as things crumble, some beautiful things remain?
In my case, the beauty of that sunset led to an obsession with the wilderness it gilded—with the “batture,” as it’s known here in the South, the land between the levees. I took whatever assignments I could find that got me back. I bought a canoe to explore the backwaters on my own. In 2017, I joined John and a host of other adventurers as we canoed from St. Louis to the Gulf. For me, the river was almost spiritual—which is, importantly, a common way of talking about nature in America. I recently came across a quote from an early employee of the National Park Service, who observed that visitors enter the parks “in a holier spirit,” and upon leaving, return “to daily living with a springier step, a keener vision, and a broader horizon for having worshiped at the shrine of the infinite.” That sunset did feel like a shrine of the infinite; it made me feel small, and connected to this sprawling watershed. Which seems useful: We are a small species, connected to so much else.
That made the river an escape, then, almost literally. That trip came a year after a disastrous election, and not long after my father passed away; it was a chance to reflect, to heal. And that healing was literal: I’ve always suffered from hypertension. The one doctor’s appointment in my life where I got a good review of my blood pressure was not long after that trip. I was calmed.
The scholar Jedidiah Purdy calls this way of imagining nature, as a place for spiritual escape, the “romantic” vision.1 And I noted at the outset that I was admitting to being a romantic—which is because these days, in many academic circles, the idea of romanticizing nature, and the idea of romanticizing wilderness particularly, is deeply out of fashion. There has never been a wild, empty space; “our ‘wildernesses’ are just places where colonialism left the trees standing,” as Emma Marris has put it.
Purdy offers one of the more astute critiques of romanticism, generally. We all know we need a better world, but the romantics aren’t seeking to change the world. At best, they want to change themselves. Too often, it’s not even that: They—we—are looking for a vacation for a few days or week in some beautiful place.
It all collapses quickly into mere consumerism, something I’m reminded of so often when I visit a national park. Just last month, I was in Colorado, caught in a traffic jam atop the continental divide, as cars pulled over to snap their overlook photos to post on Instagram. The bustle of people lined up for hot dogs and tchotchkes at the National Park visitor center atop that mountain did not make me think anyone was heading for much in the way of self-improvement. Certainly, a park like this—or a trip on a river—will not save us from the dark rippling consequences of whatever unfolds today.
So why does any of this matter? Well, in part because the Mississippi River has never been seen by most Americans as beautiful. So it allows us to study what happens when beauty gets ingored.
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville called the Mississippi Valley “the still-empty cradle of a great nation,” a quote that could stand in for a lot of the writing of his fellow white writers over the half-century prior. It was a utilitarian vision: all that land could flourish into something fruitful. I can’t help but notice how abstract it is, though. It’s the river as idea, not landscape, because the landscape was little known.
That was changing then, thanks to flatboats and steamboats, and the rise of the new genre of travel writing. Most of the published works are not particularly kind to the river. Charles Dickens was among the most savage, calling the Mississippi an “intolerable river,” decrying its “slimy length and ugly freight.” Another writer in this era was a bit kinder, saying the Mississippi was “a grand thing to think of at first, but after a few days one gets tired of the perpetual monotony.”2
Part of the problem was the slave economy: The visitors were seeking a reason to view the entirety of the South as depraved and evil, right down to its landscape. Part of the problem was that same old utilitarianism; white Americans liked their landscapes tamed, or at least tamable, and the Lower Mississippi was just so woefully swampy. Empty landscapes—“wild” landscapes, as we sometimes call them—did not hold much appeal to Americans until late in the nineteenth century, as empty landscapes became harder and harder to find.
There were some efforts to bring the Mississippi and its swamps into these new traditions. Artists came south in the 1870s and 1880s. Hunters, too, found a lot to like—including, famously, Theodore Roosevelt, whose failure to kill his prey in the Mississippi bottomlands in 1902 eventually gave us the teddy bear. In these same decades, there was a miniature zeitgeist of big river travel writing, as adventurous men climbed into small vessels and floated the Ohio and the Mississippi; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then, published in 1885, is more of its time than many people realize. But this idea of the Mississippi and its swamps as wild and beautiful failed to take much hold beyond a rather narrow set.3
The public seemed more convinced about big, wild tracts out west—places like Yellowstone, which was set aside as a preserved park in 1872. By 1916, when the National Park Service was born, there were ten more such parks, the easternmost of which lay in South Dakota. The shrine of the infinite lay out west, then, amid the drama of peaks and canyons and caves.
It’s not that we didn’t get public lands here. Roosevelt turned an island near the river’s mouth into one of the country’s first wildlife refuges in 1904; over the next few decades, the state of Louisiana set aside 200,000 acres of marshland as state wildlife refuges. These are spaces set aside not for their beauty, but their ecology, which perhaps helps get past some of the valid objections to romanticism. But my point is that they failed to conceive of the river as an aesthetically pleasing space.
There was a brief and failed effort to create a national park in the Atchafalaya Basin in the 1970s, but here a different idea of nature took hold. Think of the rise of swamp tours in the 1980s, in which a halfway-tamed alligator is lured out of the water to eat a raw chicken thigh. Or think of the annual fundraiser held by our arch-conservative governor, Jeff Landry, which brings wealthy visitors out for an alligator hunt. As Rolling Stone recently reported,
Tickets range from $10,000 a person to $100,000 for a VIP group package, and there’s liquor, jambalaya, and cigars, along with a helicopter pad available for guests.
At one recent fundraiser, Donald Trump Jr. was offered $100 to jump into the swamp; he declined at that price but did it for $500, apparently, and later posed with the alligator he killed. This is not nature as a “shrine of the infinite,” but nature as masculinity, violence, spectacle. This, too, presents nature as an escape—but without the helpful notes of interconnection and humility.
On that first night, out on Shreve’s Bar, I thought the landscape was as beautiful as any national park. Lately, I’ve come to wonder if it’s not too late. We’re still forming new parks, and not always out west anymore: Indiana Dunes National Park was created, in Indiana, in 2019; the New River Gorge National Park was formed in West Virginia in 2020.
I often show the above image to encapsulate the destruction on the lower Mississippi River: The brown you see is the river’s old floodplain, once a ninety-mile-wide tract filled with panthers and wolves and bears and ivory-billed woodpeckers. It’s brown because that habitat has been razed, those animals killed off or driven out, all replaced with monoculture stands of cotton or soybeans—an expanse of farmland so big you can see it from space.
But you can also see threads of green amid the brown, and that is the Mississippi and its big tributaries—a river so big it could not be contained entirely. The levees often sit eight, ten, fourteen miles apart; there are two million acres of undeveloped land along the lower Mississippi River, nearly as much land as in Yellowstone.
Imagine a Lower Mississippi River National Park:4 I can’t help but think if you slap that label on the map, “national park,” suddenly the way we all imagine this river changes. Suddenly that opens up paths to new kinds of futures. To be romantic about this landscape is not enough, of course, but I think it’s still a tool to be used.5
One of the problems with the national park idea is that it implies a corresponding space of sacrifice. If the list of national parks is the list of places too beautiful to be tarnished, that means everywhere else can be chewed up and spit out. I hope we all agree that we need less chewing up, less spitting out. But I fear that as we tell stories about this river—about the whole of the Gulf Coast, about the whole of the planet—if we hold up just the images of destruction, these too lead to sacrifice. If all the world sees of Louisiana are flaring smokestacks and coiling pipelines, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: All that anyone can imagine for us is a future of more extraction and destruction.
The line I’m about to write gives me pause because it sounds like it’s drawn from a dopily spiritual self-help book, which is not my genre. But, nonetheless, it’s true: “We only work to save what we love.”6 Even if you think the old things, the old ways, are beyond saving, we’ll still need to build something new. And that ought to be beautiful, too.
This is true for a river, true for a planet, true for a community and country. Part of the task before us as people who want to build a better future, is to help people see more beauty—find more to love, even in landscapes where that is not always easy. This week, no matter what happens, I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for beauty—not to escape into, but to remember why I’ll need to keep fighting.
Purdy’s book, After Nature, was one of the framing texts of the symposium; it was in the book that I found that NPS quote about a “springier step,” in fact.
I found these quotes in Thomas Ruys Smith’s River of Dreams, a great resource for exploring varied visions of the Mississippi.
Useful sources if you’re interested in this stuff: Craig Colten has explored aesthetic conceptions of Louisiana, specifically; Thomas Ruys Smith, in Deep Water, gets into the river adventure travel writing.
I didn’t have time to delve into this personal history in the talk, but I first read After Nature not long after that long canoe trip in 2017, while I was trying to organize my thinking—trying to figure out how to contain the Mississippi River into one book-length tale. At one point, Purdy critiques romanticism for “defending high-country sanctums while ignoring the environmental politics of everyday life, which belong to the fallen lowlands.” In the margins, I jotted down a question: “Can a Romantic vision of the Mississippi do better?” So I guess this has all been on my mind for a while.
This is drawn, in fact, not from a self-help book, but this interview with poet Jane Hirshfield, and adapted slightly.
Whoo-whoop! Beautiful writing brother! Not to be redundant, but the queen Mississippi, she is like all things of great beauty. Like a flower, she seeks attention. Like a beautiful woman, or beautiful man, she withers under neglect, or inattention. Long live the queen!
This is one of my favorite photographs.
I love the anonymity and the easily identifiable aspects of this.
I drive in my mind from the swampy bayous in Louisiana to my exact yard 233 miles into Missippi with no struggle knowing my location always - from Gluckstadt to Lyon, Pontotoc to Rodney.
ThankYou for including this.