Rocket Barges and Giant Cypress at a River Confluence

I meant this to be a short photo essay from our one-night stay at Fort Defiance State Park in Cairo (pronounced like Kayro Syrup), Illinois. I got carried away. Such an impressive place.

This river confluence is one of the largest in North America. The Ohio River is actually wider than the Mississippi where it becomes a tributary here.

In this astronaut’s photo from the ISS, you can see the two rivers’ waters flowing separately for a mile after they meet, the Ohio on the right, unusually muddy that year compared to the Mississippi.

This confluence has been a rich historic site since forever, but there’s little physical documentation at the site and little I could find online, maybe because the stewardship of the land has been passed around from local to state to federal governments. The town of Cairo once was important, with a population in 1920 of 15,000; we drove by art deco government buildings and mansions with onion domes. Now it seems practically abandoned; the pop in 2020 was 1,700. 

The park is now a just a big, beautiful field with an asphalt lot, but must be about 100 years ago someone planted trees in long rows. We walked under giant oaks, nuts trees, willows, bald cypress. We parked in the lot for the night and were the only people we saw but for a cop who drove through.  You can see our trailer, tiny compared to the trees, in the far right corner. 

The cypress are so huge and land-bound after changes in the river beds that they’re almost unrecognizable. 

This huge old willow stands by the concrete lockout point over the confluence.  The structure is odd, shaped like a spaceship with railings on two levels.

A monument (also like a spaceship, to me at least) marks Lewis and Clarke’s camp where they trained their hired help in navigation. 

We watched barge traffic moving day and night up and down both rivers and turning awkwardly at the confluence, including the RS Rocketship, carrying parts from near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, down the Tennessee River, down the Ohio, down the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, then either to Cape Canaveral in Florida or through the Panama Canal to California. Amazing. You can see barges along the Ohio River in that photo from space, above.

After we parked and walked to the point and watched the barge traffic, we took the reflectix insulation paper off the windows and opened them up, which is glorious.  Feels like I’ve been let out of prison, with all that greenery around us and the full moon low and red over the confluence. (Decent pictures of the moon are stuck on my real camera.)

I walked around for a while under the trees with my ukulele, learning a Neil Young song I just rediscovered.  One part goes, “Take my head, refreshing fountain, take my eyes from what they’ve seen. Take my head and change my mind.” I’ll always remember where I learned that, walking under the cypress and willow.

We’d planned on staying two nights so we could ride bikes through Cairo to admire the old buildings, but something fabulous has come up: we’re meeting Doug and Melanie in Indiana, woohoo! We’re traveling up to them today on the Ohio River Scenic Byway, which is still green at the height of summer right now, tasseled corn on one side and sorghum on the other. I better wrap this up so I can see.