There are three places to view the confluence between the Mississippi and the Missouri.  One is the place on the eastern bank where I had been with my father long before, when it was a wild and forlorn place.  The second place is the very tippy tip of the delta of land between the rivers, the vulvic endpoint where two become one.   The third place to view the confluence is on the western bank of their meeting, on the Missouri River side, and that’s where I wanted to go.  

On the map, I find a road that leads to what looks like a park north of the city of St. Louis, a small road with a roundabout that seemed to lead directly to the place I wanted to be. I regard the confluence as holy ground, a national treasure, a wonder of nature - but this is not a shared feeling, not by the country, and not by the county. That road could lead to a trash heap fifty yards from the riverbank, another neglected and forlorn spot in the dust. I set out early in the sunny morning, hoping I could get close to the actual river, close enough to get my toes in the mud and let the braids of the story flow.  

Driving along the river roads to get there, it was all factories and wastewater plants and industrial emptiness. Burned-out buildings and abandoned train tracks next to massive manufacturing facilities with fleets of idling semi-trucks. Then I turned through the entrance of the park.  The road I saw on the map became a beautifully designed and maintained place, the road curved through flat fields and past marshes with tall grasses, there were signs along the way saying “Confluence Three Miles” and my hope was rising. The road ended in a cool, shadowed parking lot.  I was the only car in the entire place, I hadn’t seen a human for half an hour.

When I parked, I could see a walkway leading into the bushes, and I lept out of the car and jogged down the path and I was there with tears of gratitude, standing in a perfect circle of honoring stones, smack on the river’s edge, with the tip of the confluence point directly in front of my eyes. The center point was right here and I was standing on it, holy ground.

The water from two rivers stretched far across to the other shore, they were smooth and wide and colossal but flowing fast. I could hear the sound of the flow, a gentle sucking, splashing sound like waves on a beach was coming from my right.  A foot path led into the cottonwood grove, a sandy path where copperheads are curled under fallen trunks.  I followed the path with caution and found the source of the sounds, and it looked like this — the water about twenty feet out in the stream was moving smoothly, and then a great boil from below would rise up break through the surface, a blossom from underneath bloomed with a splash and whirlpool and eddy and suck.  

I could hear and see the hydrodynamics at work in front of me as the two continental flows met and reconfigured their calculus.  One river was moving faster than the other, you could follow the meeting line in the far out in the middle of the stream and see the differential.   The shoreline is also a drag on momentum, so this Missouri River in front of me, with all the power of the Bitterroot Mountains behind it, was snagging on two different speeds deep below. The snag delivered up to the surface a great release of tension, waves coming from within, rising from deep conflicts and releasing on the surface.  Like grief.

The bushes rattled with grasshoppers alarmed by my walk, the birds of the marshland were calling and flying, and I got my toes and hands into that cool silken mud, that sticky with clay jet black silt from the ashes of life.  Soft and deep like a pudding, millions of the smallest particles of earth, just a few elemental atoms bonded with clasped hands layered together like a gossamer mud.  Like the lining of the womb, deep and cush, plumped like a pillow, a fertile nest of nutrients ready to give rise to fields of life. My hands and feet sank into the cold softness and the slit of the world slid on like a glove. The dark atoms clung to my skin in a lightless layer. 

I wondered where the grains of my father might be by now, still settled deeply into the rivers edge, covered and tucked into the sediments and seasonal flows, carried upwards by a flood and spread across the flat fields where he drove the tractor in the sun. I turned to face upriver and imagined the spot where we released his remains into the stream. Then I turned my back to the flow and felt the two great wings of watershed, branches and dendrites, smaller and smaller still, covering every hill and dale of a massive landscape, braiding together right here behind me, flowing through and past, and on the way down to the ocean bowl in the south. 

If I didn’t have a plane to catch, I might have painted my skin with the Missouri Mississippi mud from crown to root and worn it for days. But it was time to fly. By the time I kicked off my sandals at security, the mud was safely tucked between my toes and the mica made my skin glimmer.  

In the airport, I began to see men like my father, same age, same shirts, same white mustache on a mid-western farmer’s frame.  They walked past me, stood in line in front of me, joined me on the airplane.  I walked to the back where the seats were clear and I could choose a window with a clear view.  I tried to calculate the route the plane might take, how it would bank through the sky while heading east, and which side I should be on to see the rivers below.  As the plane backed up, I realized my luck, all three seats were mine, a private row for a private journey.  

We taxied and bumped across the sunbaked concrete, and when we swung onto the runway, the pilot swung us like a smooth masterful ballroom turn right into full acceleration, no pause or nod, just a turn and whoosh and lift. As I leaned back into his momentum I thought, I like this pilot, yes please, take me. 

This pilot knew where I had been, and he took me there again.  We crested and banked and sailed in the vectors of the sky that led to the confluence, and soon it was there sailing below me, at the perfect angle for observation. I pressed my head against the plastic window and drank the perfect view of the meeting rivers, the spot where I stood in the mud hours before, where the mud was still damp between my toes. There was the loop of road through the marshland and the parking lot, still empty. There was the circle of stone, and there was the point of land diminishing between the two rivers until they became one.  I scanned the islands in the Mississippi, the ones above the Chain of Rocks, and wondered, which one. 

The airplane cruised by like a log in the center flow, steady, even, stately, reverent.  The sun hit the twin river water in bright blinding flashes, mud mirrors bouncing light from space and right back into my eyes. I cried. I wept. I sobbed.  The salt stung my cheeks.  What beautiful luck, to be on this side of the plane and not the other, to have arc’d to the north and not the south, to make a loop between earth and sky, to be in the river, then above it, holding the braids of memory and mourning, flowing through the continental push and up into the clouds with tender propulsion, saying goodbye, father, goodbye.