Low water continues to be the top story down at the Memphis riverfront. As you can see here, my dock is pretty useless these days for the purpose of putting a boat in the water. My boat is the long one in the white cover, and I've been carrying it around to the side of the marina facing away from us, where there's a dock that still has access to the water.
I took this photo yesterday, when the Mississippi River was flowing at -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge. That's just eight tenths of a foot higher than the lowest level ever recorded, which occurred last October. The river was even lower Saturday: -10.2 feet. I guess the good news at this moment is that the river is rising a little: the current forecast says it'll be all the way up to -9.4 feet by tomorrow evening. But it isn't expected to go any higher than that in the near future.
To me, the most interesting thing about this photo is the grass that's growing on dirt that's normally deep underwater. The water has been low for quite a while now.
One point I always feel obligated to make to people who don't live near the Mississippi is that the river is not "dry," as media coverage often leads one to believe. Even at these near-historic-low levels, the Mississippi is still a very big, very powerful river. Most of the national news coverage focuses on the economic impact of low river stages--the disruption to commercial barge traffic, primarily. I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't be concerned about this problem--we should--but the reality is that the shipping industry is not why the river is there. For that matter, paddling canoes and kayaks like I do isn't why the river is there, either. The river is there to drain the continent and perpetuate the hydrologic cycle, like it was doing for millennia before we got here and like it'll be doing for millennia after we're gone.
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