The Pascagoula tributaries

The largest free-flowing river in the lower 48

A quick programming note: I’m getting married next week (!), so I’ll be taking the rest of the month off from the newsletter. I’m hoping to be back in your inbox in December.

I promised to keep secret the precise name and location of the creek we paddled, but I can offer some rough details. So: the water was a murky brown and flowed through southern Mississippi—one of the several tendrils that reach the Gulf of Mexico via the passes of the Pascagoula River.

One way to split apart the United States is into its many different watersheds. Some are vast: the Mississippi River drains more than a million square miles. Other watersheds are tiny: think of the little bayous that drain directly into the Gulf. Almost all of the nation’s rivers have been altered in one way or another—straightened out, lined with levees, or, most devastating for wildlife, plugged with d…