Yesterday, Johntimothy and I took a little drive through lower Vermillion on over to the Mulberry Bend Overlook on the Nebraska side of the river. We hadn’t been up there in a couple years and it was time in enjoy the spring weather, before the rain-on-the-way-to-snow we are getting now. It was a beautiful morning and we both marveled, as always, at the view, but also how different the river looks each time we are up there. Mulberry Bend is a lookout point high on a bluff, giving an expansive view of the Mighty Mo that is pretty spectacular. Johntimothy took some very interesting photos, like the one above, with his phone held up to the binoculars.

Even this panoramic, which I took with my phone, doesn’t capture the scale or the wide expanse of this ever changing river. Massive sandbars exist now where they didn’t previously and in other places, it seems clear that the river has claimed land on either shore. You can imagine, by looking at the land, how the river has changed course over the many centuries. There are places where the dividing line between Nebraska and South Dakota was and still is in question because the river shifts course. We know that the expedition of Lewis and Clark came up the Missouri in the early years of the 1800’s and I like to think they came right along where our house sits on the river. But maps will show that the river’s course was in a slightly different location at that time and even has changed course a number of times since then.

The photos through the binoculars have a nostalgic, pinhole quality to them. They echo the idea of the river as metaphor, as representation of time passing and the flow of history. I am always aware that the land is a keeper of history. The events of the past centuries lie buried in the land and the memories continue to rise up, echoing faintly in the soft breeze. The stories of immense tragedy and majestic beauty mingle in the stillness on a quiet morning, a year into the pandemic.