Zine # 3

...its been about a year now and the presses are starting to roll on #4. So here's the full (and partially revised) ish numero TRE3 for your online pleasure. The original impetus for this one was in fact for a school assignement, one of the very last assignments I completed before graduating if not THE very last. My cool Natural History of Louisiana teacher, Mz. D Henry, let us create our own final exam projects and when i suggested I would publish a zine about the Mississippi, she eagerly agreed it would be a great chocie.

In reality, a "zine" can be any and all sorts of self-published pamphlet you can imagine, ranging anywhere from an independent textbook professionally bound and distributed to schizophrenic scribblings on toilet paper barely stapled together. Admittedly I used the "zine" label as an excuse not to properly cite my sources and you can see where DH calls me out on that. She also points out a potentially plagiarized doomsday scenario reminiscent of what Bill Streever wrote about in Saving Louisiana (or was it Mark Tidwell in Bayou Farewell?)

Maybe someday I 'll go back and give this zine the old scholarly polish it deserves. Or maybe I'll just put it online and say to hell with it. But about the passage in question I really do believe now that its almost a moot point anyways. The catastrophes he (& I) described are overblown themselves. I read the some of the same sources he researched and in a report that preceded his the aftermath was broken down much more rationally and calmly. It read something like: 'Yes. Disaster will occur but its nothing our resilient human spirit can't overcome. Life may never be the same but solutions will still be found.' But that doesn't make for good copy. So Streever sexed it up, amped up the damages and inability to respond in his book, and then I took that and upped it a little more just for shits and wriggles.

If (or really When) this big switch occurs (who knows how many years from now) it will probably be an event we (god willing) have some sort of control over and can anticipate a little. That's not to say it still wouldn't pose a shit ton of problems. It would. And it will someday. Its a troubling scenario to imagine. It troubled me when DH first explained it to me in class. And it troubled me to write about it last year. And it troubled me up until the point I stopped letting it trouble me, that is, when I stopped thinking about it sometime last summer.

The dinosaurs didn't wake up each day worrying about the an asteroid coming to hit the earth just as the residents of Louisiana don't live there lives filled with fear about the next time mother nature decides to settle the score again. (But then again: if you know about a problem you should hope for the best and plan for the worst.) Hell though, even Memphis is set for a big earthquake one of these days. Reelfoot Lake, look it up) and how are they preparing for it in 2010?

It is hard to get on with your life if your filled with fear imagining everything that can happen to you. We just have to accept the challenges that come our way each day and decide which ones we actually have some control over. The Mississippi River and the fate of 2 cities is bigger than anybody reading this, so don't sweat it too much.

Really though, I still don't know how to make up my mind on this issue. Maybe that's why I only distributed 36 copies originally (12 for my class and 24 in the 2nd ed.). Read this now and tell me if it makes any sense. Tell me what you think.

Thanks.

B











A tale of 2 cities: Look here and compare if you can the different depths of the river channels. On the left we have Uptown New Orleans by the Zoo where the river is approximately 2000 feet wide and 163 feet deep at its lowest. Compare that to Downtown Morgan City on the right where the Atchafalaya is about 1500 feet wide and only 50 feet deep. Do the physics; them pipes don't match up.