Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944)

Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944)(publicdomainreview.org)

43 points by dthal 4 years ago | 7 comments

There is a bridge in the sculpture garden of the New Orleans Museum of Art that has you walking over the lagoon on about a dozen historical paths of the Mississippi, stretched somewhat straight.

The photo on their site really does not do it justice: https://noma.org/collection/mississippi-meanders/

Walking along it and thinking about how we've tried to keep it in place for the past few hundred years, and the ephemerality of human affairs, is an interesting experience. Especially if you live along its course.

rnoorda 4 years ago |

There's something sad to me about how rivers, especially in cities, have been changed to a set course, with reinforced banks. I know there are massive benefits, and "natural" rivers with changing banks cause plenty of problems, but it makes them feel overly manmade, as if we just dug a canal where a river used to be.

asdff 4 years ago | |

When white people first came to Los Angeles, they mocked the Californios who built their houses upland, and had to come down to the river to utilize it or collect water. Then it became clear why that was, when nascent Los Angeles was pummeled again and again by flooding. The worst of which in the 1930s resulted in the Army Corps of Engineers intervening and channelizing the river, converting much of it into the cement gutter we know today.

It wasn't just the LA river, but also all the creek beds that fed into it were also channelized or buried under roadways and development:

https://i1.wp.com/www.hiddenhydrology.org/wp-content/uploads...

jihadjihad 4 years ago |

It wasn't until I read The Histories by Herodotus that I realized the English word "meander" is based on the name of a river [0] in modern-day Turkey which was well known for its tortuous path. I had a similar realization when reading The Odyssey and I came across the character Mentor [1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander#Origin_of_term

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mentor#Etymology

bryanrasmussen 4 years ago |

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five."

-- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

ropeladder 4 years ago |

Very cool! While the colors serve an obvious purpose, I initially viewed the page in grayscale and I think the maps are even more beautiful that way.

peter_retief 4 years ago |

Really is a work of art, as are many maps.