Not far east of Carlisle, we took a room in a pleasant lodge, just south of where the wall once stood, so we could make jaunts to sites along it—Birdoswald, Housesteads, and, on a mainly dull and damp Tuesday, Vindolanda, a Roman garrison a mile behind the wall and twenty miles south of the present Scottish border. We walked around the stone foundations of what remained of ancient buildings, and tried to picture structures formerly atop them. At Vindolanda, one’s fancy can get an assist from the reconstruction of a short section of the turreted wall done by the well-known archaeologist Robin Birley who grew up there during the years his equally famous father, Eric, excavated the site. I knew the Birleys’ books.
While we were up on the rebuilt wall, Lucy asked what it was three men could be doing mucking about with shovels in a fenced-off pit outside the clipped grass of the fort foundations. The laborers wore standard English, working rain gear—Wellingtons and woolen sweaters. Seeing a pipeline in the fifteen-foot-deep mud hole, I surmised they were a sewage crew. By the time I came down from the wall, she was already at the edge of the trench. She informed me in a voice beyond what was required, “Your sewer men are actually archaeologists.”
I pretended not to know her until one of them looked up to say, “Some days there’s not a lot of difference.”
Every so often the men, totally absorbed, stopped to ease a glob out of the mud, examine it closely, and cautiously place it in a plastic bag. When we were in the museum, Lucy motioned me over to a photograph and asked, “Isn’t this a picture of renowned sewer-man Robin Birley?”
A fellow, possibly an archaeologist, scowled at me, and I was forced to reply to her, in my version of Cockney, “ ’Oo are yer, lidy?”
In the museum shop, I was buying Birley’s book Vindolanda, his account of the Roman frontier post and the stunning discovery of hundreds of so-called writing tablets there, when this lidy comes up to me agin and her says loud ter me, she does, “The sanitation crew just popped in for a spot a tea.”
Indeed, there sat Robin Birley, Director of Excavations. In what I hoped was a deft stroke to snuff further sarcasms, I took his book to him and asked would he sign it. He was in a jolly mood and pleased to accommodate: That morning the trench had yielded eight more tablets, each the size of an opened matchbook, to bring the total to almost thirteen hundred. Joining us was his wife, Pat, who had just come from the laboratory where she prepared the little slips, hardly more than shavings from a wood plane, for deciphering. Birley said, “One of them we examined today adds new material to our understanding of the Roman presence here. Things forgotten for two-thousand years.”
In 1973 at the site, he made one of the astounding discoveries in European archaeology. While excavating the officers’ quarters that predate the wall, he picked up a soggy square of something stuck together, and he gently pulled it apart. What he saw stunned him: wafer-thin wooden sheets inked with strange, unpunctuated characters in a language he didn’t recognize. Almost immediately he took the artifacts to a nearby university, but by the time he got them there, the priceless rectangles had gone entirely black, the oxidized letters vanished.
He returned to Vindolanda to dig further. Along with fragile but remarkably intact wooden tools, pieces of fabric tents, and leather slippers, he found more tablets inscribed with carbon-based ink. Slowly epigraphists came to recognize the hieroglyphics as cursives in a language Birley knew well, Latin. With the help of infrared photography, he began reading the growing archive, a veritable library he was assembling from the anaerobic mud. The small, lettered slips were largely personal correspondence on bits of limewood or birch or alder incredibly preserved for nearly two millennia because, as Roman soldiers leveled old buildings for new construction, they covered the debris with clay to make a smooth surface, thereby sealing off whatever was underneath from destructive oxygen. The low acidity and temperature of the damp soil further helped keep them. Birley began to realize that those letters were the oldest—about A.D. 100—written material yet found in Britain and were in fact the earliest written evidence from ordinary hands yet found anywhere in Europe.
Among the cache was an invitation to her birthday party from Claudia Severa to the wife of a Vindolanda commander; a scribe had written the letter, but at the bottom was Claudia’s own scribble:
Farewell dear sister.
Birley believed those words to be the earliest handwriting of a woman ever found anywhere.
The tablets from soldiers don’t speak of religion or the empire. Rather they complain about money, bad roads, dishonest merchants, pink eye, and “wretched Britons.” One letter says: “Two men have been held for committing an offense and have been lashed with rods until they were covered with blood. Can they be spared further punishment?” On another, a schoolchild copied out a line from Vergil and beside it the teacher’s evaluation: Sloppy.
Birley said, “The people living here on the northern edge of the Roman Empire got their spelling and declensions wrong—which doesn’t help us—but we have to remember that they wrote as they spoke, with no thought to style and no idea their humble words would be studied by people this far from their time. We’ve examined less than ten percent of the site, so there are surely more tablets here. Now that we know these letters—under certain conditions—can survive for centuries, imagine what may lie under York or London.”
One of the Roman “letters” found at Vindolanda by Robin Birley
When Lucy and I left, we walked past the excavation, the one Birley described as “a hole that’s one of the richest archaeological sites in Western Europe,” she, again with volume greater than required for my ears, said, “One hell of a sewage pit.”
Mock on, I muttered, but remember, to the Romans, those old shoes and letters were trash, and she said, “You know, in spite of it all, even if it was late and delivered to the wrong person, the mail did get through. That hole’s a two-thousand-year-old dead-letter office.”
Once again returned to our homes, to thank her for help during our travels, I sent her a postcard picturing one of the Roman messages, and I signed it: I M WYL T.
THE GREAT MISCELLANEOUS
“A Residue of History” with its very title continues themes appearing in several of my writings. It’s an extension or maybe an analog to ideas that otherwise can be summed up by words like memory and connection because our bodies, our lives, and all around us are residues of the Great Mysterious Miscellaneous. As a concept, if not a word, residue should have a sweeter and grander connotation than it does. Perhaps residuum, despite its Latinate peculiarity, sounds more philosophical and spiritual, more like something we’d be honored to be a part of.
A Residue of History
There’s something to be said for starting from the bottom—a necessity in mountain climbing and bricklaying—but I’m starting out from the lower end of the lower Mississippi merely because I have a notion that this river, more than any other in America, has seen as much go up it as come down: For the 63,000 tons of soil the Mississippi carries down each day, it has permitted people to ride it upward with loads of furs, cotton, rice, sugar, coffee, money, petrochemicals, tobacco, jazz, pronunciations, filé gumbo, the blues.
During most of the Civil War, gunboats worked the river both directions, finally meeting near the middle of it to decide with cannons whether our grandest navigable waterway would sever the Union or bind it. After the Siege of Vicksburg, the Mississippi did indeed hold South to North as an artery helps link legs to torso. To change my metaphor, this river is also a spine holding us together latitudinally, and the ribs are the “stately” tributaries: the Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas. I can think of no other single physiographic feature in America that so brings us together in both topography and legend. From the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Rockies to the Appalachians, waters flow to this so-called Father of Waters, a misnomer if there ever was one since rivulets in Montana and New Mexico, New York and West Virginia, and twe
nty-seven other states and two Canadian provinces sire this river from sources unnumbered over more than a million square miles. But it’s useful to keep in mind the Mississippi is the offspring not just of rainfall but also of flushed toilets in Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga, Louisville, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Denver, Cheyenne, Bismarck, Missoula. The Father of Waters is more accurately the great-great-grandson (or -daughter) of many forebears. If you walk along the levee in the French Quarter in New Orleans, you can see the contributions from almost half of our contiguous states flowing by. Nowhere else in America is the environmental apothegm “We all live downstream” more apt.
Toward sundown one May evening in New Orleans, I followed the levee and the flood wall toward the Robin Street Wharf where the Delta Queen sat ready. She was the oldest genuine steamboat still carrying overnight passengers on American waters. Built in 1926, she worked as a ferry on the Sacramento River in California until World War II, when she became a U.S. Navy yard boat. Then she got laid up for a spell. Sometime later, Tom Greene of Cincinnati saw a new life for her, and he bought the Delta Queen and succeeded in getting her towed into the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, across the Gulf, and up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to be refurbished so she could resume carrying travelers—not on the modest Sacramento but on the biggest rivers in America. The Queen once again was full of polished wood and shined brass, and I’d booked passage to Memphis on her.
A little before dusk, the paddlewheel began to turn, the Queen blew her throaty and somewhat mournful whistle, her lines got hauled in, and we pulled into the current. The steam-calliope at the stern spewed cold condensate as the squalling growls and screeches slowly turned into notes, and the brass pipes warmed and cleared and blew steam into song: “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee,” “Dixie,” “Cruising Down the River.” As I listened, in my mind’s eye was a sepia, soft-focus photograph of a sternwheeler under way near St. Louis; my father took the picture in 1924 when he was fourteen-years old. Sometime later, in the 1940s, I found the photo in an old cigar-box still smelling of tobacco, and his image became an icon, a call to rivers I’ve heeded ever since.
A sternwheeler on the Mississippi River at St. Louis in 1924
Like a visitor from 1850, I sat in a rocking chair on the high sundeck to look down on the grim faces of automobilists grinding their way home. A woman at the rail asked me, “How far is it across the river here?” I guessed it was farther than it looked, and she, perhaps sensing not space but time, answered, “I think it’s farther than that.”
The industrial scenery made up in curiosities what it lacked in beauty, and the river from New Orleans to Baton Rouge was full of oceangoing ships from Singapore, Russia, Japan, Liberia. In the low sun, the deck of the Delta Queen shone and made the freighters appear tubs of rust and corrosion. Half an hour upstream, we passed a buoy marking the graves of two ships blown three miles upriver—against the current—by a 1965 hurricane before they foundered. In that stretch of the Mississippi, the depth can be nearly two-hundred feet.
Marine terminals and industrial docks began to thin out and in the dusk the factories and petroleum-cracking plants changed to black skeletal forms and then to distorted constellations of golden lights. From the edge of New Orleans to Baton Rouge, oil refineries and petrochemical works often alternated with eighteenth-century plantations, a few houses tumbling and some wonderfully kept: Next to the famous Oak Alley was Transocean Oil and near Houmas House was Texaco. A juxtaposition of eras.
That forty-mile section of river was the Côte des Allemands, the German Coast, an area settled by immigrants from the Rhineland some years before New Orleans was platted. Their German turned to Acadian French and their names changed from Schneider to Schexnayder, from Vogel to Faquel. Today the French has much yielded to English, and what had been rice and sugar lands were now occupied by Agrico Chemical and Matador Pipeline. The effects such side-by-side existence of industry and homes may be having on the health of the residents has made the Côte an environmental hot spot.
The next morning we pulled in near White Castle, Louisiana, across from Carville and its historic hospital where new treatments for leprosy were developed. I was at the rail with my binoculars. A man and woman paused to ask what I was looking at, and I said the Federal Leprosarium, and the woman said, “Oh! We don’t call it that anymore. It’s the Hansen’s Disease Center.” They were Ruth and Lloyd Carville. He grew up in the town that carries his family name, and he recently had retired from the local agricultural extension office. Carville pulled out his new business-card; in addition to the usual information was this:
USED IRON & STEEL—BOURBON WHISKEY
SQUIRREL TRAPS—CHIGGER REMEDIES
W W II STORIES SWAPPED—EXCUSES INVENTED
BARSTOOLS WARMED—MARTINIS MIXED
WIVES COUNSELED—FISH TALES TOLD
AGRICULTURAL EXPERT WITNESS
From a conversation that followed, it was clear he could have added:
RECIPES FOR OKRA-SEED SOUP CONCOCTED.
About halfway to Baton Rouge we passed the little mouth of Bayou Manchac, a waterway the Army Corps of Engineers closed up even though it was once the route from there to the sea. The name comes from the Choctaw and means something like “back door,” a tip the British took when they tried to sneak into New Orleans during the battle of 1815. The bayou had silted up to become only a ghostly presence. The power of the lower Mississippi is not its scenery but its omnipresent aura of things passing—up, down, away—and yet often remaining in peculiar fragments. To sit quietly in the dusk, atop the current, was to perceive remains, even in legend: North of there, at Parlange, a 1750 plantation has the usual resident wraith required of such old places, this ghost a young woman forced to marry an aged and hideous French nobleman; as the tale goes, she answered her father’s demand by dropping dead at her wedding.
Baton Rouge, one of the farthest inland seaports in the world, is 250 miles from open salt water; the terminus is there because the U.S. 190 highway bridge is too low for ships to pass under, and so the forty-foot-deep channel the Corps maintains for seagoing vessels ends at that point, leaving the river northward to strings of massive barges moved by prodigious towboats (also called tugs although they no longer tug or tow—they push). From Baton Rouge, for miles and miles north, riverside industrial plants disappeared to turn the shoreline back to an older aspect of willows, willows, willows.
At two a.m. I roused myself to go on deck: Beyond the boat, there were no lights anywhere; in the darkness and near silence the Queen became a steamboat Sam Clemens would recognize. Standing just below the pilothouse, I could perceive our movement only by the whisper of the river slipping under the prow, and I understood how easy it once was to hear a leadsman throwing his weighted line and calling out, “Half one!” Throwing again: “Quarter less twain!” Pitching the lead forward once more, and announcing to the pilot a safe depth: “Mark twain!”
But the river I saw, while just as dark and quiet, was not at all Twain’s river with shorelines stripped of timber for boilers, the muddy water snag-ridden, the currents erratic, channels less deep, sandbars and towheads more numerous. In 1882 when Samuel Clemens (by then he was also Mark Twain) took his last trip down the Mississippi, a couple of decades after leaving steamboating, he saw with some regret a river different from the one he learned, a waterway beginning to be shorn of the romance created by a steamboatman’s defining challenges. He wrote, “The military engineers of the [River] Commission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again—a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.” Yet he also saw a new myth and romance coming forth, a view he helped create: One afternoon on that final voyage, he turned his spyglass on a distant steamboat: To his surprise, it was named the Mark Twain.
Some seventy miles above Baton Rouge the engineers have met what some people believe to be their match. In 1831, at the former juncture of the Red River with the M
ississippi, Henry Shreve, its first engineer, dug a channel so effectively that it now threatens to pull the big river a couple of miles westward and dump it down the Atchafalaya, a course to the Gulf 173 miles shorter, a change that would leave Baton Rouge and New Orleans and all the industry in between on a silty trough.
The Mississippi was high that spring, and as we passed the Old River Control Structure, the Queen got slowed in the hard current, and she moved to the eastern bank and away from the flashing amber warning-light. It couldn’t have been, of course, but the river seemed to be shaking, vibrating, waiting for some stormy night to take up a new course, suck careless boats down into the Atchafalaya while remaking life for hundreds of miles around.
The next morning we tied up at low-lying Vidalia, Louisiana, along an ugly piece of riverbank, a necessity because a new gambling “boat” (floated but didn’t move) had occupied the historic landing at Natchez, Mississippi. I took a shuttle across the bridge to the bluff town and wandered along the streets of the celebrated, antebellum mansions until I remembered it was not architectural elegance I was after but a muddied river. I walked back to the edge of the loess bluff and down steep Silver Street to Natchez-under-the-Hill which writer Bern Keating once called “the most wicked hellhole in the Western world” for its murders, thievery, mayhem, prostitution, and gambling. As far as I could see, only the last remained that morning in the person of Lady Luck, a new floating casino.
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