Enchantments of the Mississippi: A Contemplative Journey of Time and Place by Thomas Becknell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Enchantments of the Mississippi: A Contemplative Journey of Time and Place by Thomas Becknell Susan Naramore Maher Thomas Becknell, Enchantments of the Mississippi: A Contemplative Journey of Time and Place, illustrated by Kari Vick. Saint Paul, MN: Beaver’s Pond Press, 2022. 189 pp. Paper, $15.95. The Mississippi River, Thomas Becknell reflects, is “terrible and wonderful” (13). From its birth waters in Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, the Mississippi flows 2,340 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Geographical fact and the linear mileage of the river, however, remain in the background of Becknell’s artful narrative. In gauging the terrible and wonderful, Becknell structures his book in six sections, built layer upon layer from deposits of natural and human history. Having spent decades living near the Mississippi, Becknell folds personal memories and experiences into the mix. In search of “enchantment,” not “the thrill of adventure,” he pursues river stories that intrigue, enlighten, or discomfort. Beauty abounds, but so does tragedy. Much haunts the Mississippi, even as its shores enchant. Indeed, difficult moments in Becknell’s own life tie in with river waters, which exert a continual pull on the author. His skill at weaving in the personal with the longitudinal, the individual’s shortened perspective against the deep layers of the riverscape, is one of the principal enchantments of the book. Becknell has walked, biked, kayaked, and driven the many pathways, [End Page 174] passages, and highways along or in the Mississippi. Proximity to the river defines his adult years. Over millennia, humans have traveled the Mississippi, north and south, in pursuit of dreams, conquest, wealth, escape, safety, refuge, and freedom. Ancient effigy mounds, thousands of years old, speak to the pursuit of the sacred as well. Atop imposing bluffs, Becknell tells us, “what I’m looking for is that fabric of sacred solitude, and it continues to elude me” (143). Becknell sees that earlier people faced frustration, and trauma, too: the French explorer La Salle, “ambushed in 1687 by his own crew” after traveling thousands of miles (25); Joseph Smith and his Mormon followers, who in 1844 faced violence in Nauvoo, Illinois; the Mdewakanton Dakota forced into concentration camps at Fort Snelling in 1862; and more recently, poet John Berryman, who in 1972 “leaped to his death” off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, one of many such suicides off bridges in the cities and towns along the Mississippi. Becknell pulls his readers into the darkness of these stories because they are an essential part of river lore. But they are not the whole of it. In a narrative that is also about “falling in love, all over again,” Becknell embraces “the currents of time, the beauty of life, and the consolation of the spirit” (15). He looks for kinship and connection. He retraces Henry David Thoreau’s final American sojourn up the Mississippi to Minnesota in the year before tuberculosis ended his life in 1862. Thoreau and his friend Horace Mann Jr. pursued scientific studies, visited the Lower Sioux Agency, and climbed up Barn Bluff in Red Wing, Minnesota—He Mni Can, sacred to generations of Native people—to view the grandeur of America’s great river. Thoreau’s pursuit of knowledge from the interior of North America resonates with Becknell. Reading Thoreau’s notes and letters from this Mississippi journey “stirs me to deep contemplation,” Becknell writes (148). It is the grandeur that Becknell returns to again and again. Whether biking around the built environment of the Twin Cities, paddling through locks, hiking the high grounds, peering down the bends in the river, or driving US 61, the Blues Highway marking the migration of jazz and blues northward from New Orleans to Bob Dylan country, Becknell expresses his profound love of the river T. S. Eliot called “a strong brown god” (14). There is illumination, [End Page 175] light along the river, too. Call it enchantment, sacrality, the natural power of confluence: Becknell captures within his memorable stories the Mississippi’s enduring, eternal beauties. His is a book to savor, not just for its lyrical prose and unique structure—Kari Vick’s delicate and detailed illustrations complement the art of Becknell’s text...