On the Beach!

[Riley Smith]

The river is up after a deluge that came through, along with a couple of tornadoes. It had been running under 10 ft at Merrill, MS since summer, and under 5 ft most of that time. Some of my friends upstate spent the night in the closet with Betty, their poodle. There's no way I'd ever live near McComb, MS, the tornado capital of the state. Yeah, rain wrapped. At night. Guaranteed to remodel the trailer! Thankfully nobody was hurt badly, but one of the branch relatives lost their house. She had been peering out of the window and stepped away, and the roof took flight and the outer brick wall collapsed INWARD! She was pretty shaken but ok.


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 The river had been dead low since later summer and the salt water had intruded way upriver due to the mixing of the tides. Now a slug of fresh water is washing all the salt away and bringing brown water where it once was clear and green. I'm reminded of the pools of clear green water in the Escravos River as the tides force clear Atlantic water against the river current, clear green pools shaped by the muddy brown water from the interior of Africa. It was a neat sight especially when you'd add a few of the fisher people in their dugouts. There was also trade with the commercial watercraft; fish and vegetables and staples.
 The slug of fresh water makes fishing the lower river a bust,  but it is still a cycle of nature that washes out the river basin and flushes all the dead trees to wash up on the beaches up and down the river. My buddy upriver is catching catfish on the high water. The bar in front of the Labrot House catches some of these dead heads and stumps and they become temporary markers for a time. Until the rise and the fall of the tides and the constant splash of the waves, as well as marine organisms, wash them away at last. It is not unusual to see a whole tree caught by the current heading toward the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf.


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