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Highest and Best
- University Press of Mississippi
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- 177 Y Highest and Best It is summer again, and the high water has been receding so slowly that the woods below the power lines still bottom on soft mud, criss-crossed by the tracks of either a herd of wild pigs or one of them on pharmaceuticals. The only human prints are my own as the mud tries to suck off my shoes and claim them for its own. The place has been swept clean by the high water, several years of accumulated beer cans, plastic bags, old tarps, and miscellaneous clothing that humans seem compelled to leave behind. We are the animal that trashes. The river is the animal that comes along and washes it away. Passing by Cooter Brown’s, I look up the Carrollton leg of the trolley line, shaded by live oak trees that go back before the time of anyone living today. In the 1960s, when the interstate highway came through town, the big idea was to get rid of these trees in the name of progress for a four-lane extension to the river. Mildred Fossier, then head of the city’s parks and parkways, put her job on the line opposing it, announcing to the press that she would charge the Department of Streets one hundred and forty thousand dollars per tree. There are times that passion wins. I thank Mildred, passing by. Upstream, past the horse stables and the batture houses, past the Huey Long Bridge, the trees between us and the river yield to a long stretch of open pits, dug out for the sand. Dump trucks roll in and out to feed the appetite of a region built on sinking soils and prone to deny it with street signs like Hillcrest Oaks (below sea - 178 Highest and Best level, no oaks) and, my favorite, Mount Rushmore Drive. I recently came across a real estate advertisement for the sale of this batture property back in the 1980s, several thousand feet along the river. The ad said that its intended use as a sand pit and barge docks was the“highest and best use” of the property, as evidenced by the cash flow it produced. Edward Livingston, arguing for his piece of the batture two hundred years ago, would agree. The same day that I came across this advertisement, I also discovered the story of Papa Dukie & The Mud People. Up the Mississippi , not far, is the river town of Wallace, Louisiana, ringed by sugarcane, industrial plants, and the big river levee. One day in the early 1970s two busloads of hippies gassed up in Wallace, took a look around, and decided to go over the levee and camp on the batture . Led by Eddie“Duke” Edwards, a professional drummer coming home to Louisiana, they were musicians and they would jam all night. They were also cooks and crafts makers, and soon they were serving food and selling tie-dyed T-shirts to the locals. Worse, it was said that the hippie girls were daubing themselves with mud and swimming naked in the river, which struck fear in the hearts of law-abiding citizens. They sent the sheriff out to investigate.Whatever he found and saw he must have enjoyed, because Papa Dukie and the mud people stayed. Until they suddenly left, with the wind, as those years did, too. Was theirs a“lower and worse” use? I think about Ricky and his friends, the teenagers who sneak down to smoke cigarettes and try the sour taste of their first beers, and the kids on their dirt bicycles, the ones coming out in wet cutoffs from the sand pit ponds, the ones on rope swings, and the ones who build forts on the riverbank and tree huts from washed-up logs and doors. Here run the dogs, the wild pigs, and the rabbits, and even the men who chase after them with golf clubs. Here is this accidental space, long, green, and much too thin. A smarter plan would have been to set the river levees farther back and give the Mississippi some space, but that chance came and went. Exactly what space we do have is here, and where it is headed has never been articulated. [54.211.203.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:29 GMT) - 179 Highest and Best The batture, of course, is as unaware of this question as a barnyard chicken. Were it a more stable place, a more beautiful place, it would have been gobbled...