Mud Island
Park and Beale Street are right at the top of the things we want to see in Memphis.
The day dawns sunny and calm so we decide to brave the riverfront park first.
An aerial monorail takes us across an inlet of the Mississippi to Mud Island,
which is really a long peninsula. We chat with a white-haired Japanese tourist,
at least a decade our senior, who in heavily accented pigeon tells us that he
is touring the USA for a month to see the sights and perfect his English. We
exchange pleasantries and, as we exit the tram, hear him introducing himself to
the attendants at the monorail terminal. If all our language students were as
determined, and as devoid of embarrassment genes as this gentleman, they would
all be fluent in six months.
Our thought
is to spend an hour or so in the Mud Island Mississippi River Museum, and maybe
stroll for a bit in the park.

But the park turns out to be a third of a mile
long topographical map of the Mississippi River, scaled at 30 inches to the
mile with a contour level of one ridge to 5 feet vertical depth. The map
depicts the river from its source in northern Minnesota to its multi-channeled
delta in the Gulf of Mexico. And it is not just the Mississippi proper: side
channels trace the contortions of the Ohio, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and, in
fact, ALL the major rivers that pour into the Big Muddy. Water is flowing
through the river channel, and the stream is deep enough in many places for
little kids to wade and splash in. At intervals of every few feet a laminated
plaque details what happened at that spot in the river during prehistory, the
days of the explorers, the heyday of the stern and side wheelers, the great
floods and steamboat disasters, the Civil War, the depression-era realigning
and the Corps of Engineers’ shortening of the river’s channels. A half dozen
signs point out the location in the floodplain of former bluffside towns that
the great earthquake of 1811 crumbled and then sluiced into the roaring river.
Other signs point to islands that, as the whimsical spring floods opened new
channels and clogged old ones, passed in ownership from left bank Illinois to
right bank Missouri, and

from Mississippi to Arkansas. One hour turns to two,
and then to three. We take off our coats, as the sun warms the riverbanks (both
the real one and the vitual one), and a half hour later our sweaters, too,
disappear into our bags.
By lunchtime we are joined by a swarm of school kids
from Saint Francis school. Their shirts say Superman but they cavort like giant
Gullivers, striding from island to contoured floodplain, leaping from bluff to
lagoon, tiptoeing through the oxbow lakes.
By 1:00 the
Gullivers are eating their sack lunches and our stomachs are growling, so we
decide to pop into the Museum for a peek and then go have lunch. Wrong! The
museum is just as extraordinary as the map. Like the river it flows in a continuous
stream. There is no way for a visitor to cut quickly from Omaha to Vicksburg
and it is just as well, for each new vista is as fascinating as the last. We enter
with prehistory, mammoths and sloths, then the hewers of stone and the builders
of mounds. The artifacts are not overwhelming in number, but each is a gem, and
the explanatory texts are riveting. We trace the immensity of the efforts and
courage of Spanish explorers, and the all-but-nothing that they managed to show
for their epic journeys. We walk with the American pioneers, and work the
fields of the first plantations of cotton in the floodplains. Half-century by
half-century we flow with the history of the river. The pedestrian channel
makes another turn and suddenly we are standing on the deck of a side-wheeler. It
is clear why the Museum rates its 5-star status. The smokestacks and the wheelhouse
tower over us, and a set of stairs invites us to spend a few moments with the
captain and mate. Below us the deck is littered with coiled ropes and steamer
trunks, bales of cotton and gaffing hooks. Far below, the river water —real
water, of course!— eddies and surges in the twilight. We descend from the
wheelhouse through the lounge and the game room, where a quartet of riverboat
gamblers is playing what looks like poker.
A mural
depicts other gamblers, as well as Huck Finn, Becky Thatcher, and all of Samuel
Clemens’ beloved characters. Sam, white bearded with pipe in hand, sits in a
rocking chair, smugly surveying all that he and the river have created. A
family of five takes a hard look at it, but only the father can fathom what
it’s about.
“Come on,
the man in the chair: who is it?” he prompts the kids.
The ten
year old has wandered off, but the sixteen year old girl, an expression of
total befuddlment blanking her features, struggles to come up with someone.
“It’s not
so hard. The beard, the mustache . . . I know you have seen him before.” Papa is giving hints as fast as he can think of them.
Finally the
teenager’s face lights up with recognition. “Colonel Mustard!!”
We make a
few more turns, muttering to ourselves how they will never top the side-wheeler,
when we find ourselves in the gunroom of a Union ironclad, rolling out the
canons as we approach Confederate positions on the bluffs off our port rail.
The sergeant barks an order, the guns fire, and the exhibits roll on and on
like the river. Now it is the sound of Delta blues and the story of the
musicians who created the style that swept the world and gave birth to rock and
roll. Another twist and turn and we are on the bridge of a towboat pushing a
raft of twenty-five steel barges loaded
with grain and lumber and coal. Through
the towboat’s window we can see the water streaming by both sides, the
riverbanks passing and receding, the bridges downstream growing larger and
larger as we approach them. They look very much, in fact, like the bridges
downstream from the river park and, when at the end of the barge exhibit, we
emerge once again onto the riverbank, there are the actual bridges, and there
is a towboat every bit the same as the one we have just been helping pilot, maneuvering
to the center of the channel so as not to hit the bridge’s pillars. We suppose
the captain knows, as we now do, that 150 years ago his boat would have been
towing a single barge, and that when power boats evolved into barge pushers,
the name lagged behind.
By now it
is nearly three o’clock and we are glutted with data and sensations but still
empty of lunch. We take the monorail back to the car park and drive downtown
for California burgers and unsweetened tea at Huey’s, a legendary Memphis
eatery. (Hello to our own Huey, in far off Japan!). Then, restored and sated,
we walk the few blocks to Beale Street. The wind has picked up, they sky has
gone gray, and the temperature is beginning to drop.
Years past,
Linda and I joined the parade of faithful to Graceland (as in From the Ganges to Graceland),
encouraged by all the Elvis nuttiness and Paul Simo
n’s anthem. This time it is
Mark Cohn who sets us walking in Memphis with our ears tuned to W.C. Handy and
the Delta Blues. The Beale Street of song and story was the home of the blues
trumpeter and composer W. C. Handy and the location of the honky-tonks and
juke-joints which gave birth to the style. The Beale Street of 2013 is only two
short sad blocks long, cordoned off by Memphis police as a pedestrian walkway. Beale
isn’t what it was — how could it be?— but its sense of what it wants to be today
is not all clear.
Today’s
Beale leans toward Coney Island boardwalk: ice cream stores a
nd tee-shirts;
tacky memorabilia in overcrowded show windows. Seven or eight bars promote
themselves as juke joints, but they don’t have the look of places where people might
hole up for long hours and wrap themselves in blues. These doors don’t invite
you into a safe-from-the-street world of friends, white but mostly black,
making, listening, and dancing to music. These bar fronts are wide open, gaping
to the street, flashing neon come-ons like gaudy hookers, advertising happy
hours and two-for-one pitchers as if they were tourist traps in Cancún. One-time
drop-ins from Iowa and Rhode Island, not brothers from around the corner. Most of
these joints have music playing inside, music canned and amplified to a painful level.
This mid-afternoon it pours out of the gaping façades and puddles like cacophony
in the street.
In another
way the whole Beale Street scene is a museum. Labels tacked on buildings say
what places used to be, whose house stood where, who did what in which bar, and
when; Statues of the greats, and plaques. Some buildings have disappeared, and
the spaces they have left behind have been reconfigured as performance venues.
In one, a narrow stage crammed between two brick buildings,
three guitarists
and a drummer blast out bluesy rock to an audience of maybe seven people and a
street teeming with seven more. In another space, the site of Handy’s former
house and current statue, on a small stage a singer, drummer, and blues
guitarist with a green guitar entertain a throng of me, an older couple in blue
hats, and a dreadlocked street person asleep on a park bench.
Beale is
midway, museum, and theme park all in one. Salvaged store fronts house gift
shops. Behind one 1920s façade that is propped up by scaffolding, is an open courtyard
with a cafe, a few cast iron tables, and a food cart. A block further down
Beale the façade of the art-deco Daisy Theater has been repainted a red and
white that gleams brighter than it must have ever done when it was a living
place.
I spend an
hour wandering about, listening, taking a few photos, and then head off to join
Linda in a warmer refuge a couple of blocks away. As I leave Beale I look back at the sawhorse
barricade at the end of the street, take one last picture, and walk away muttering
to myself, “What does Beale Street have against reptiles?”