As an artist who has long found inspiration along the Mississippi River, I’m compelled to reflect on the living legacy of its incredible backwaters and sloughs. For many years I’ve walked the banks and bluffs, observing these habitats flourish through seasons and years. Though I have occasionally paddle the local waterways, more often I’m content to watch from shore as time flows through these waters like the river itself.
Generations of birds have stopped here on ancient migrations, finding refuge to rest and nest. The old snapping turtles surfacing in the shallows carry the creases of decades in their shells. And certain weather-worn trees have stood watch over these backwaters for centuries.
Each spring and fall, I revel in witnessing one of nature’s great spectacles – the migration of birds along the Mississippi Flyway. This vital route funnels over 40 percent of all birds migrating north-south across the continent. Great vees of honking geese. Flocks of ducks blotting out the sun. Pelicans gliding past in formation. Some of the world’s greatest bird concentrations stage here, like half the global canvasback population. Watching this river of wings flow overhead connects me to something greater – an ancient cycle linking seasons, hemispheres, and generations in an enduring ritual. The Flyway remains a conduit sustaining life, and I feel honored to observe this timeless legacy each year.
In the solitude along these shores, it feels as if the living pulse of time surrounds you. There is continuity in the minnows that spawn where their ancestors did, in the herons returning to the same rookeries, in the cottonwoods anchoring the banks with their deep roots.
But change moves through here too. River channels shift, altering the shape of backwaters. Invasive species advance while natives decline. Pollution and erosion take gradual tolls. The balance is fragile, the future uncertain.
As an artist, I strive to capture the spirit of this place over time – its resilience and wildness, its fragility and timelessness. Through my work, I hope to reflect the deep continuity between land and water, animals and plants, humans and nature. We are all bound together, our fates intertwined with these ecosystems.
My greatest hope is that the Mississippi’s backwaters will flow on, their splendor undiminished, for generations to come. That they will continue to nourish abundance and diversity far into the future. And that we will learn to live wisely alongside them, finding inspiration in their beauty and harmony. There is poetry in these places, and a quiet wisdom nature offers if we listen.
Yet there is grandeur in this living pulse – the timeless resilience as each generation follows the path laid by those before. In the returning herons gracing the same rookeries and cottonwoods anchoring the banks with roots deep as the ages. In the minnows that continue their forebears’ rituals of spawning. And the birds navigating flyways mapped in their ancestral memory, perpetuating that great ritual of migration.
Through my art, I hope to capture the majesty that endures here, to reflect our shared obligation as stewards preserving this legacy. If we nurture the balance of these interwoven ecosystems and listen to nature’s quiet wisdom, then perhaps these glistening backwaters will flow on, gracing America’s heartland for generations to come – the living, breathing spirit of this land immortalized in light and color.