I took this picture from my boat while paddling from Ashport to Randolph three years ago, and it's a cautionary message for anybody who wants to build a house overlooking the Mississippi River. This home, located some 45 miles upstream of Memphis at Fulton, Tennessee, belongs to a cousin of mine, and I remember attending a family reunion there when I was a kid. At that time, the house was a good hundred yards from the edge of the bluff, and there was even a tennis court between the house and the bluff's edge.
Today the tennis court is long gone, and the house is unlivable to say the least. My cousin's family blames the Corps of Engineers for constructing wing dams that directed the river's flow against the bluff, and for all I know they may be right. But the wandering, meandering river would have claimed the home site eventually, in a few centuries if not in a few decades.
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