Downtown Cairo.
I remember as a kid reading about Cairo, Illinois, the town that sits at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and even then I wanted to go there, fascinated by the idea of such a meeting of waters. The town is mentioned in Huck Finn – it should have been the place where Huck and Jim get out of the Mississippi and head north along the Ohio, but of course they stayed on the river and instead of heading for freedom for Jim they went to Arkansas where Twain could vent his spleen. The site acquires further mystique for being very nearly the navel and center of all America: the waters of the Ohio come from Virginia and New York, while the waters of the Mississippi come from Montana and Colorado; the town is in a Northern state, but is closer to the state of Mississippi than to Chicago. It is East meets West and North meets South. Union troops, commanded by U.S. Grant, arrived at Cairo almost immediately after the outbreak of the Civil War, and had Lee (or Davis) been wise, he would have sent every man he could spare to defend the Mississippi. Savannah, astonishingly, was captured by troops supplied from Cairo, not Washington.
The sun goes down on Commercial Avenue.
I arrived there late afternoon, expecting to eat dinner there and drive as far north as I could later that evening, camping out somewhere along the river (I ended up that night at Cuivre River State Park). There was no dinner to be had, at least not downtown. In fact there was nothing downtown at all – Main Street, called Commercial Avenue, had been completely abandoned. Correction: there was a bar, which seemed to serve the workers who were dismantling what buildings were there. I’m sure I could have gotten some french fries there, but the eerie stillness of the place made me want to explore it with what hours of daylight I had, and by the time I got back the bar was closed. The town appeared to be in the middle of a demolition: the west side of the street had already been razed; the east side was slowly joining it. The buildings were being knocked down, and the bricks reclaimed. Palettes of bricks were awaiting removal.
One writer has claimed that “racism killed Cairo” – there were serious racial problems which were generally solved by white people moving elsewhere – but I think it’s more accurate to say that all the river-towns have been killed off by the transformed nature of river traffic. The barges on the Mississippi don’t need the towns anymore, and if the towns aren’t necessary, then it’s hard to convince people to live in them. Cairo is in constant danger from flooding on either the Ohio or the Mississippi, and the levies on either side of town
create the impression of living in a fortress. Even in its heyday the place had all the problems of a transient hub, with whorehouses and gambling saloons and liquor dens and lynchings and everything else unpleasant that can be imagined. It’s not clear the place really needs saving or represents any especial loss. The troops stationed there at Grant’s Fort Defiance apparently had nothing good to say about it: it was a mephitic cesspool, cold and damp for most of the year, and a stinking miasma in the summer.
But the desolation is striking nevertheless. Cairo had been suggested as the proper site for the U.S. capital, for its centrality and the symbolism inherent in all confluence, but that I take it will not occur. Now it is more or less the Detroit of the river-towns, a striking ruin, most remarkable for what it no longer is.
Turning Commercial Avenue into bricks.
I walked from the main street up and over the levees to the actual confluence and the site of Fort Defiance (which was flooded and inaccessible). The bridge over the Mississippi, built during the Great Depression, was closed, presumably due to vibration from the floodwaters, though the bridge over the Ohio was still operating. There was a marker there commemorating the six nights Lewis and Clark spent there in 1803, after floating down from Pittsburgh. From Cairo they would be going upstream. The flooding river looked wild still, more than two hundred years later.
I was attacked by a pair of guard dogs walking back over the levee into town: I forget what they were guarding, but they snarled with real viciousness and harassed me quite effectively for several hundred feet. I saw no weapons around, but they responded to all my feints even without one. By the time I got back to my truck, which I had parked on Commercial Avenue, there was a sticker on it from the police, promising to tow the vehicle in seven days if it were not moved. I left the sticker where it was, but it blew off when driving, and so I lost my souvenir of Cairo.
Dust to dust, brick to brick.
Packed up and ready to go to the next place.
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