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It's never been
good luck to be the seat of justice of Desha County, Arkansas. Behold
today's Arkansas City—beat-up, broken-down, devoid of the trappings
every county seat deserves. No four-lane road. No Chinese restaurant.
No muffler shop. No Wal-Mart. There is a newly renovated county courthouse
(if county courthouses are your thing) and, for the well-guided visitor
with a generous imagination, the shabby remnants of great things long
gone.
"People pulled their steamboats up there and you could walk right
off the river, into town," said Mike McElroy, the Desha County Judge,
driving along the gravel road atop the levee. "They had gambling houses
and hotels. This was sin city, man!" It was spring, fishing poles
and tackle boxes bounced around the back of his SUV. The Judge, a
part-time actor and river enthusiast, wore a trimmed beard and jeans.
He pointed out the old opera house, barn-shaped, abandoned, and in
need of a fresh coat of paint; the trackless railbed scars of the
Little Rock, Mississippi River & Texas Railroad; and the old drunk
tank, which doesn't have a ceiling and never did. "That old jail there,"
Judge McElroy said, "Miss Dorothy said on Sunday you went to church
you could hear the drunks, Uuuuurgh. They'd fill it up, too."
"That would be Dorothy Moore," said Charlotte Schexnayder, who was
riding shotgun. "She's ninety-four and really one of the anchors of
this county." Schexnayder, who is eighty and a pillar of the community
herself, was filling in historical details. "Dorothy received her
high-school diploma from a rowboat, if you can believe it. They rowed
her up to the second floor of the building, and the superintendent
handed her diploma through the window." McElroy drew our attention
to a monument the size of a small gravestone halfway down the levee
that marked its former height. A historical sign nearby explained
the rowboat commencement: the flood of 1927 was the greatest disaster
ever suffered by the country…four to thirty feet of water in April,
parts remaining until summer… a drought and the depression of the
1930s followed the flood. years were required for the county to recover.
"Recover" is a term used loosely here. The flood, which inundated
large portions of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, devastated
the agricultural economy, encouraged the migration of black workers
to Northern cities, and altered permanently the politics and culture
of the South. In the decades since the Depression, more subtle events—the
consolidation and mechanization of farming, the decline of railroads,
the gradual urbanization of America—have also taken their toll. Desha
County may have recovered from the flood per se, but its population
today is three-quarters what it was in 1926, the year before the flood.
A still more terrible fact, not mentioned on the sign but alluded
to by the boarded-up windows and trailer homes and junked cars nearby,
is that Arkansas City, the county seat, never recovered at all: When
the levee broke upstream, the deluge cut a channel that changed the
course of the river, and by the time the waters finally receded that
summer, the Mississippi lay two miles to the east, and the once rollicking
river town found itself landlocked. On the other side of the levee
today sit the cypress trees and swampy wetlands of an oxbow lake named
Kate Adams, in honor of a popular paddleboat from Memphis that used
to dock there, back when "there" was the river. In its heyday, Arkansas
City teemed with some fifteen thousand people. Today there are 589.
Arkansas City was the up-and-coming railroad town, a terminus on the
river, when the citizens of Desha County voted to make it their county
seat in 1879. The previous seat, a whistle-stop called Watson's Station,
had been picked five years before, but it flooded too frequently,
and the railroad pulled out. The original county seat, Napoleon, sat
fifteen miles north, where the Arkansas River meets the Mississippi—the
very confluence, Mark Twain points out in his autobiographical book
Life on the Mississippi, where "three out of the four memorable events
connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river occurred,
by accident, in one and the same place." In 1682, Robert LaSalle staked
his cross into the ground there, claiming both rivers and their lands
for France. Nine years before, in 1673, the less presumptuous Louis
Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette, having been warned of hostile
Indians and Spanish explorers, ended their expedition there, and paddled
back to Canada. And in 1542, Hernando DeSoto became the first white
man to see the Mississippi River, keeled over on its banks, and was
buried—all at the future site of Napoleon, Arkansas.
By the time Mark Twain came through on a steamboat sometime around
1875, Napoleon had drowned: "It was an astonishing thing to see the
Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the
spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years
ago. Town that was county-seat of a great and important county…town
of innumerable fights—an inquest every day; town where I had used
to know the prettiest girl…a town no more—swallowed up, vanished,
gone to feed the fishes."
"Napoleon just fell, block by block, into the meandering river," Schexnayder
said wistfully as we drove out of town along the levee. Locals assert,
perhaps spitefully, that it was the trenches dug by Yankee occupiers
during the Civil War that hastened the erosion of Napoleon's banks.
But the point is more biblical than that: The river giveth, and the
river taketh away. "Literally, the townspeople stood and watched it
just decay into the river."
A little farther along, next to a small white ranch house in a meadow
full of cows, McElroy came to a stop. "Now, this is the right-of-way
line right here," he said, motioning out the windshield, "where Interstate
69 is supposed to come through. The Great River Bridge will start
right here, at this levee, and go up and all the way across to the
levee on the Mississippi side."
Here, finally, was what McElroy and Schexnayder wanted to show me.
According to state and federal plans, this pasture by the river, thirty
miles from the nearest bridge, and ten miles from the nearest four-lane
road, will someday play host to I-69, a superhighway that will run
from the Canadian border in Michigan to the Mexican border in Texas.
Halfway between, near Arkansas City and the submerged site of Napoleon,
the new "NAFTA highway" will cross the country's original north-south
thoroughfare, the Mississippi River. And because everything the river
and the railroad once brought to a town—trade, work, wealth, bustle—comes
today on concrete, community leaders like Schexnayder believe this
highway is the rope the Delta needs to pull itself up.
McElroy drove us to the riverbank. There had been rain earlier in
the day, and it was still gray out—the river and the sky—but the trees
along the Mississippi were turning green. Schexnayder apologized.
There wasn't much to look at. But we parked anyway and got out. Schexnayder
took my picture. I took Schexnayder's picture. We took pictures of
a barge motoring up the river. She pointed to the patch of horizon
that she had spent twenty years trying to fill, and I tried to imagine
what she could already see—a huge, modern, four-lane highway bridge
bustling with tourists and trucks and commerce. A new river reaching
across the old one. A concrete river. A river that never moves away.
The Great River Bridge, which the state legislatures
of Mississippi and Arkansas have resolved shall be named the Charles
W. Dean Memorial Bridge, will be just over four and a quarter miles
long. The river, bank to bank, is a little less than one mile wide
at the crossing, but it is prudent for a bridge to soar levee to levee
as if everything between were rolling water. Because someday it will
be.
Charles W. Dean, the civil engineer who first conceived of the bridge,
died rather suddenly of lung cancer in 1998, at the age of seventy.
His whole life had been intimately tied to the river. Dean spent the
flood of 1927 in the womb, and as the waters rose dangerously high
that spring, his grandfather, a county sheriff in Shaw, Mississippi,
organized patrols to guard the levee against sabotage. It seemed inevitable
that the river would break through somewhere, and it was the job of
nervous, armed men on both banks to make sure that it was God, or
fate, or flimsy engineering—not an armful of dynamite—that
decided where.
By the time Dean was born, in December of that year, the waters were
gone, and so were his chances for an aristocratic life. The Dean family
owned the Buckshot Plantation near Shaw, but the flood and the Depression
would wipe them out. But Dean liked hard work, and knew how to make
friends. At the University of Mississippi, where he studied engineering,
Dean was elected student body president, president of his fraternity
(Kappa Sigma), president of his graduating class, president of the
National Leadership Honors Society chapter, president of the Ole Miss
Hall of Fame, and captain of the varsity football team. Schexnayder,
who calls Dean the consummate Southern Gentleman, loves the oft-told
story of a big game when Dean, a tight end, got injured. "In
the first half, Charles got knocked out, and they had to take him
to the hospital to work on him," she says, in gleeful disbelief.
"And his brother appeared at halftime and said, "Boy, get up!
We've got to have you this second half!' And Charles got up off the
emergency room table, and went and played the second half!"
Dean was a father of three, a Boy Scout troop leader, and a faithful
churchgoer. And, like any Southern gentleman, he liked to have a good
time. There are countless stories of him drinking whiskey at a White
House reception, or lunching decadently at Windows on the World in
New York City, or chaperoning American beauty queens on a trip to
Tokyo. Throughout his lifetime, Dean's congeniality and go-getting
won him a web of influential friends, and his expertise in the area
of river transportation and economic development made him a coveted
expert abroad. He consulted in Japan, Korea, England, Belgium, Germany,
and Mexico, and in 1983 the U.S. State Department sent Dean to the
People's Republic of China, only recently opened to Westerners at
the time, to advise them on managing and developing their river systems.
At home, a large part of Dean's work involved taming the Mississippi,
either by controlling its consequences or by reaping its benefits.
During the 1970s and '80s, Dean devised a new drainage system for
the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, that solved a decades-old flooding
problem, and he lead the construction—and, more importantly,
the politics—of an inland shipping port in nearby Rosedale, a
facility that has arguably saved that community from extinction.
Ancil Cox also grew up in Shaw, and played peewee football with Dean.
The two were roommates in college, and sidekicks thereafter. Cox,
too, moved to Cleveland after Ole Miss. He opened a law practice and
loyally performed pro bono legal work for Charles's civic projects.
"It was just one of those things you do," he told me. "Charles
didn't say, 'Come do this for nothing.' He just said, 'Let's do it.'
And we did it." Cox's wood-paneled office in downtown Cleve-land
is overflowing with topographical maps and printed studies for I-69
and the Great River Bridge. On the wall just above his chair is an
artist's rendition of the port of Rosedale, drawn thirty years ago
when Charles Dean was the only one who could see it. "Most of
the time Charles came through with what he said he would do,"
Cox said. "He was conscientious, and not just full of bull."
In 1984, after the port was completed, Dean proposed an even grander
scheme. There was no bridge for almost fifty miles north or south
of Cleveland. If a two-lane highway and railroad bridge could be built
across the Mississippi, he thought, it would open the entire Delta,
on both sides of the river, to badly needed economic opportunity.
This was eight years before NAFTA, well before the combined mid-South
clout of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tom Delay, and Trent Lott would advance
the idea of I-69. Charles Dean wasn't thinking in terms of international
trade corridors. He wanted, quite simply, to get to the other side.
"I don't know how well you know the Mississippi River, but it's
a big river," Cox said. "You don't go out there in your
little boat and go across to visit Aunt Nellie—it's too big for
that. So we've always been split off from each other by the river.
My grandmother grew up in Rosedale back in the late 1880s and I never
heard her ever mention visiting people in Arkansas. She'd ride the
Kate Adams to Memphis or down south, but they never went across."
Cox remembers his own childhood trips to Memphis, a five-hour drive
up the gravel Highway 61. "I can remember sitting there eating
in the Peabody Hotel and being astounded when I saw a lady light a
cigarette at another table," Cox said. "It's funny how you
remember little things. My mother smoked, but not out in public like
that. I guess that's what blew my mind. Like the first time I was
sitting in a restaurant with my dad and I saw a lady have a highball
at noon."
Memphis had it all: rails, rivers, roads, ladies smoking and boozing
in lush hotels. But the very same river that brought Memphis prosperity
and sophistication kept Cleveland detached from the West. Not every
place needs to be Memphis, but if you're no place with no port and
no bridge, then that mighty, majestic Mississippi might as well be
the Great Wall of China.
Though Charles Dean was an engineer, he did not design his eponymous
bridge. Large-scale public projects like this one are no longer the
work of visionary independent builders, but of huge construction conglomerates
that like to trace their histories back to visionary independent builders.
In this case, it is the HNTB Corporation, a Kansas City firm that
traces its roots to the 1890s and the bridge pioneer Dr. John Alexander
Low Waddell, whose major design contribution was the large-scale,
high-clearance, vertical-lift bridge. Although HNTB branched out to
develop airports, sports stadiums, and military facilities, it still
designs roadways (including the New Jersey Turnpike) and has designed
hundreds of bridges around the world, including nearly forty over
the Mississippi River, such as the new Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge
in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and the US-82 Bridge under construction
at Greenville, Mississippi. The Charles W. Dean Memorial Bridge will
cost some $500 million, or about $23,000 a foot. Its main navigation
channel will stretch 1,520 feet wide, with 685-foot spans on either
side. It will be a cable-stayed bridge, with tall towers like a suspension
bridge, except that the cables supporting its deck will fan down diagonally
from its tall piers, rather than hanging vertically from draped support
cables. A cable-stayed bridge has a sharp, angular, and vaguely futuristic
look, much less lyrical than the swooping arcs of a suspension bridge.
But the beauty of the cable-stayed bridge is in its simplicity and
efficiency, factors that made the cable-stayed design so popular in
Europe after World War II, when countries had to rebuild their infrastructure
quickly and cheaply.
"The concept of a cable-stayed bridge is four or five centuries
old, but they didn't have the technology then to build them,"
Steve Hague, the project manager and lead designer for the bridge,
told me. "They're very highly indeterminate structures, and anything
you do in one part of the structure affects everything else."
More like a spiderweb than a clothesline, the cable-stayed design
relies on hundreds of simultaneous mathematical equations—essentially,
computer modeling. "Whereas a suspension bridge is a very determinant
structure, and fairly simple to calculate. That's why in the 1800s,
people like John Roebling could design and build suspension bridges."
John Augustus Roebling's bridges conquered several American rivers,
starting with the Monongahela, in Pittsburgh, in 1846, and ending
with the East River, in New York, in 1883. Roebling's masterpiece,
the Brooklyn Bridge (called the East River Bridge at the time), finally
opened that year for public traffic. Roebling was not there to cross
it. He died in 1869, before construction began, from a tetanus infection
after a ferry crushed his foot on the Brooklyn waterfront. John's
son, Washington Roebling, also an engineer, continued his father's
work and saw the bridge to completion. Charles Dean never got to see
his bridge either. And as lovely as it would have been for his son,
Charles "Chuck" Dean, Jr., to pick up the Great River Bridge
project where his father left off, life—and the river—pulled
Chuck in other directions. He learned surveying from his father as
a teenager, but ultimately chose to work the river as a barge pilot.
"I grew up in the '60s. I was kind of a rebel-type person that
resented a lot of different things," he told me, unrepentantly.
"And I kinda rebelled. And that's life. But my father always
told me, 'Son, whatever you do, I will be one hundred percent behind
you.'" At his father's request, Chuck tried a year of Junior
College. "But I told him, 'Pop, this just isn't for me.'"
The barge pilot and the engineer are the yin and yang of river-tamers,
conflicting in complete harmony. Both must possess intimate, detailed
knowledge of the river. But where the engineer works the river's hard
edges to neutralize it, the pilot yields to its power and follows
its turbulent middle. "It's a wild untamed world," Chuck
told me. "The Mississippi River is like a woman. She's steady-moving,
always changing, never the same."
When the first railroad bridge was built across the Mississippi River,
in 1857, and the first steamboat hit that first bridge, the boat went
up in flames, and a legal battle ensued. The steamboat operator, supported
by river interests, sued the Rock Island Bridge Company, supported
by the railroad interests, claiming that the bridge was a dangerous
impediment to the rightful navigation of the river. A brilliant attorney
from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln—a former river pilot—argued
the case for the railroad. Not only was the accident the boat pilot's
fault, Lincoln maintained, but the court must recognize that the railroad
had as much right to be there as the river. Lincoln's case for economic
development and westward expansion won, and not long after, as President,
he would call for construction of a transcontinental railroad.
A lot of people—engineers, politicians, environmentalists, consultants—have
had a say in where exactly the Great River Bridge should go, and that
decision changed a half-dozen times. Chuck, for his part, wished his
father had put it in a straightaway. "You don't put it where
you've just come out of a bend," he said. "Like the Greenville
Bridge. You come steering around a hard, left-hand turn and then you're
looking at the bridge. And that's why people hit it all the time."
To get his first-class pilot's license, Chuck took a test where he
had to "draw the river—meaning you draw all the lights, the dykes,
the revetment, everything in that area. They give you the edge of
the river and you fill in everything else—the sailing lines,
the banks, the buoys, the lights." Chuck has drawn the river
from Vicksburg up to Memphis, the route of the old Kate Adams. He's
driven all the way up to St. Paul and all the way down to New Orleans.
It never gets boring, or easy. "Even the best of the best get
stumped. I've seen pilots that I've been with for twenty-seven years
all of a sudden hit a bridge. And it's because they just take their
eyes off—they lose concentration or lose focus."
In the old days, the '70s, before cellphones, Chuck would go out for
thirty days at a time. It was like being out at sea. The river gets
in your blood, he said. You think every trip will be your last, but
you always keep going back.
After following his work to Kentucky and Florida, Chuck quit the river
a few years ago to spend more time with his wife and seven children.
When his father died, Chuck moved with his family back to Cleveland,
to help take care of his mother, Martha, and to be closer to his two
sisters, Tommicile and Debbie. The ghost of his father is never far
away. "Everybody I ever talked to always says that he was like
Moses. That's what they referred to him as around here. That was his
legacy." As father figure for a whole community, Charles Dean
was always deeply concerned by the constant exodus of bright young
people from Cleveland, Chuck says, and was always trying to build
reasons for them to stay.
"The older I've gotten, the more I see what my Dad's dream was,"
Chuck told me. "Being back, I look around Cleveland and I see
a lot of things that my father did just to make this a better place
to live. I look at the walking park in the middle of town," he
said, referring to the renovation of an abandoned railroad line in
Cleveland's old downtown, which has kept the small Main Street businesses
alive. "Back then I would have told you that's not something
anyone cares about. But he could visualize things that other people
just couldn't imagine. Now I look at it and I say, 'This is something
everyone can use—the blacks, the whites. There's nothing separating
us. It's for everybody.'"
The sole black member of the Great River Bridge
Committee and the sole black member of the National I-69 Coalition,
the Reverend Dr. Juniper Yates Trice, has lived in Rosedale, Mississippi,
for thirty-five years, but he grew up clear across the state in Verona,
Mississippi, a small town you've never heard of that sits just a few
miles away from Tupelo, a town you probably have. Tupelo is where
a truck driver named Vernon Presley had a son named Elvis in 1935,
when J.Y. Trice was fifteen. "Now, Verona is a little older than
Tupelo," he explained. "The Ohio Railroad Company went through
Tupelo and Verona. Had a stop in both towns. But just a little later,
the San Francisco Railroad came, out of Kansas City to Atlanta, through
Birmingham. Tupelo was where the two railroad lines crossed. The Bank
of Verona moved to Tupelo. It became the Bank of Tupelo. And after
that everything started fluxing on Tupelo."
At the end of the Second World War, after some years as a small-town
preacher, Trice went for his masters in education. When the Supreme
Court ordered an end to segre-gation a decade later, Trice was the
principal of the black school in Itawamba County, Mississippi, on
the border of Alabama. They absorbed his students into the three white
schools in the county and closed his school. So Trice became assistant
county superintendent and helped manage the transition. He earned
a reputation as a great integrator, and in 1968 he was recruited to
Rosedale, a poor Delta community where the mandated changes were causing,
as Trice delicately puts it, "some confusion." In fact,
the confusion was so great that Bolivar County had closed down its
schools, and the community was divided in a heated struggle.
In the turbulent late '60s, while Chuck Dean turned down college to
work the river, Trice arrived in Rosedale to find many young blacks
malnourished, some living with huge families in small shacks without
plumbing. Some lived outside. Trice applied for emergency federal
funding, and got some ten million dollars for a new water pump, basic
plumbing services, and a start on public housing. By the time he retired
from education in 1985, at the age of sixty-five, he was credited
for turning the school system, and indeed the community of Rosedale,
around. The people of Rosedale promptly elected Trice as their mayor.
He served four terms, and retired again in 2001. Today, at eighty-four,
Trice serves as the executive director of the Bolivar County Council
on Aging, a group that provides services for the disadvantaged of
Trice's generation, one of the more important of which is everyday
transportation. Through the council, Trice bought a fleet of vans
for younger volunteers to use to drive older people to the store,
to church, to the bank.
I gave Trice a ride home from work one afternoon in April so he could
show me some of his accomplishments. We drove to the port of Rosedale,
which he worked on with Dean and Cox, and Trice counted all the things
that might not have been were it not for their efforts: grain elevators,
truck scales, industrial park, barge shop, steel business, lubrication
plant, fertilizer company, and a flock of birds eating spilt seeds
off the dusty road. We drove through the Great River Road State Park,
which Trice named, which Charles Dean helped him get for Rosedale.
He showed me the campgrounds with water and sewer hook-ups for recreational
vehicles, which are better than tents, he says, because mosquitoes
are a problem by the river, not to mention the occasional wild boar
or brown bear.
We drove past a federal housing project he built as mayor, a semi-gated
cul-de-sac with a dozen small brick dwellings. He asked me to read
aloud the sign at the entrance: THE J.Y TRICE APARTMENTS. A slice
of immortality for the Reverend Doctor Mayor, and a decent place to
live, it seemed. A few bushes were clearly missing, and no one had
done much to spruce up his facade, but still. Trice is in the process
of buying the apartments from the government, at which point he will
become the landlord and the name won't just be honorary.
The population of Rosedale, which is heavily black, has come a long
way, Trice says, but there are still traces of what he calls "plantation
syndrome." "The black people here don't have enough involvement
to be as enthusiastic as they should about the bridge and I-69,"
he explained. "What's making the white people so enthusiastic
about the project is they've either got land that's gonna be bought
by the project, or they see the possibility of putting a business
by the project. So economics is the whole crest of the situation.
And that's what this highway is, an economic highway."
Many of the Delta towns up toward Memphis have made a concerted effort
in the last ten years to attract tourists and their money to the Delta.
In Tunica, they've built casinos, the tax revenues from which have
turned what was once the poorest county in the country into a paradise
for development. An hour south, in Clarksdale, they're doing their
best to market the town's blues heritage, while glossing over the
oppression and poverty from which the blues were born. Perhaps this
is because, as Trice points out, most of the entrepreneurs—with
the exception of the actor Morgan Freeman, who co-owns the biggest
club and the nicest restaurant in Clarksdale—are white.
"The people in the Delta are getting excited about I-69 because
they see it's a new way to make new money," Trice said. "That's
the bottom line. The black people haven't learned to appreciate that.
It's gonna be some easy money in this for the whites who are really
excited about it. So when we have our public hearings, it's mostly
whites are the ones that come out." Trice sits on the board of
the First National Bank of Rosedale, which would stand to gain from
any economic development in the region. But at eighty-four, it seems
unlikely that Trice is motivated by greed. He's gone to all the public
meetings about the port, the bridge, and the highway, and has taken
the trips with Charles Dean and Ancil Cox and Charlotte Schexnayder
to Memphis and Washington. Like the rest of them, he wants progress;
and like them, he believes that progress can be built,
no matter who profits first.
As we neared his house, Trice began rattling off for me the races
of the people in the homes we passed, emphasizing, I think, that one
can't always tell from the outside: "Those apartment buildings
you see over there, we just put them in three years ago. Black folk
live in those houses. That's the last thing I built. We call these
self-help projects. Turn here. This is where most of the whites lived.
Now a Chinaman lives in that house. And a black boy lives in this
house. That house sits back yonder, set back, that's what the farmers
were living in. White folk were living in all these houses here. Black
living in them now. White folk live in these houses. White lived in
these houses but black live in these houses now. Black live in this
house. The other two here, white live in. Now, this is my house. Pull
in here. At one time this was a doctor's house. A white doctor's house."
Charlotte Schexnayder is an activist, a doer,
an optimist, and after fifty years of living in Desha County, through
times of great transition and decline, she can tell you for certain
why her town of Dumas is still on its feet. "We had a vision
that we were gonna be beyond the other small towns. We were gonna
have a nice little industrial district," she said in her unwavering
alto. We sat in her living room, the walls of which were covered with
certificates and honors and photos. Just above the couch, Schexnayder
had hung a framed needlepoint sampler: do not follow where the path
may lead. go where there is no path, and leave a trail! "When
the town needed $140,000 to buy an industrial park in the early 1960s,
people went door-to-door. And if you didn't have the money to pledge,
you borrowed the money and pledged it. It took Melvin and me three
years to pay back $3,000. And we can laugh about it now. But that's
the kind of thing. We had a barber here who had $400 in his checking
account, and he gave $200. The people are the reason places grow.
The people, and their determination."
In 1984, Schexnayder was the longtime editor of the Dumas Clarion
and had just been elected State Representative in the spring primary
(she was a Democrat, and therefore unopposed in the general election)
when she received a letter from the Dumas County Chamber of Commerce
asking if she would be interested in meeting with an engineer from
across the river regarding a possible bridge connecting his impoverished
county to hers. She was, in fact, tremendously interested, and in
a matter of days, Charles Dean and Ancil Cox and J.Y. Trice showed
up in nearby McGehee to meet Schexnayder and her Arkansas colleagues.
Dean brought big maps, and all parties could see from those maps exactly
how close they all lived to one another, and yet how far they'd had
to travel to meet. After the meeting, they drove out and looked at
the river together and agreed that they had a big wall between them,
and that a bridge would be a very big deal indeed.
From the trophy case in her living room, Schexnayder pulled out a
frame, mounted in which was a big, shiny blue fountain pen—the
very instrument that Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton used in 1985 to
sign the bill that officially initiated the Great River Bridge Project
with Mississippi. In the black-and-white photograph framed with the
pen, Schexnayder stands confidently beside the impish Clinton, who
is seated at his desk, smiling at the camera and signing the papers
that Schexnayder needs signed.
The bridge group started making annual trips to Washington, at everyone's
own expense, to lobby their congressmen for support and funding. Money
for studies trickled in here and there, but nothing significant. Then,
in 1992, Charlotte was summoned to yet another meeting, this one called
by Arkansas Senator David Pryor. The senator told the bridge group
about the plans for I-69, which, grasping for adequate superlatives,
he said was the most significant project he'd been associated with
in his thirty-year political career. "And it was like the blinds
opened up. The door opened," Schexnayder recalled. "Suddenly
we had an immense opportunity where we'd had small opportunity before.
I-69 was a godsend for us to get this bridge."
"You ever been to Washington searching
for money or anything?" Ancil Cox asked me. "You just can't
believe the people that are there every day walking the streets around
the Capitol. And, of course, they got the Senate office building on
one side and the House office building on the other side. And you
have to take appointments when they give them to you. And sometimes
you can have an appointment with a Senator over here and an hour later
you've got one with a Representative over here. And it's a pretty
good walk all the way around the Capitol. You nearly walk your legs
off. And the crowds of people are there from all over the United States.
Every week. The sidewalks are full of people, bustling from one side
to the other, constantly doing the same thing.
"You go in one of the other Senate or House buildings, it doesn't
matter which one, and there'll be people walking the halls. And they're
tremendous buildings. And they got maps up there saying, 'You are
here,' and you might have to walk around about three miles, it seems
like sometimes. And you go in and normally you need to make appointments
ahead of time. And sometimes you end up with just one of their representatives,
young people that work for them. But they'll usually have a conference
room arranged across the hall or something where everyone can go in
and sit down, and you can sit there and tell them how far you've gotten
on the project and how much you need for the next stage, and tell
them, 'We've talked to Senator so-and-so and his folks are working
on it.' I mean, they don't have sole control, and they know it. And
we know it.
"I don't see how those people ever get anything done with the
people that are there worrying them every day."
In an early interview about the bridge, in
November, 1984, Charles Dean warned a reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
that it might be quite some time before actual construction of the
bridge would begin, possibly even as long as eight to ten years, "depending
on funding." Had even his pessimistic estimate come true, Charles
Dean would have lived to see his vision completed.
"You get into a project like this, and of course you're not gonna
live long enough to see it," Schexnayder said to me. "But
it's like the story of the old man planting trees. And somebody asks
him why. 'You're not gonna be around to see it grow.' And he says,
'It's for those who come after me. I'm the only one who can give them
the fruit, and the shade.'" She winked. "That's philosophy."
One afternoon this June, almost twenty years after putting that shiny
blue pen to use on Schexnayder's bill, former President Bill Clinton
was in Manhattan autographing copies of his Presidential memoir while
Schexnayder was back in Arkansas with her fellow bridge boosters signing
the Record of Decision for the Great River Bridge. The Federal Highway
Administration Record of Decision officially approves the site for
the project, and deems it the Mississippi River crossing for the future
Interstate 69. The document is considered a formality only, and nearly
came without fanfare. "They were just gonna sign it and mail
it to us," Schexnayder said. "And we said, 'No! We worked
twenty years on this, and we're gonna have a ceremony!'"
The federal transportation funding bill that Congress passes every
six years is fifteen months late, and money is tight. So the Record
of Decision was just a promise on a piece of paper, not a bridge at
all. But a hundred and thirty people came out to the courthouse in
Arkansas City to celebrate anyway. The town was soggy from twenty-two
days of rain. Judge McElroy was there, with Schexnayder, Cox, and
Trice. Martha Dean came with her three children and ten of her thirteen
grandchildren. It was her first time in Arkansas City, the first time
she'd seen what would be the other side of her husband's bridge. Chuck
had started piloting again on weekends in Tunica, driving dinner tours
on a family paddleboat pleasure cruiser called the Tunica Queen. He
does it partly for fun—he loves the river—but really, he
said, he does it to keep his license current. "I want to be the
first person to go under my father's bridge."
Everyone took turns signing the Record of Decision document that afternoon
at the courthouse. Speeches were made. Ancil Cox presented red roses
to Schexnayder and Martha Dean. Just as people were about to board
vans to visit the site on the river, the Rev. J.Y. Trice cleared his
throat. He had a few words, he said. He praised Charles Dean highly,
said a prayer for everyone, and said a prayer for the bridge. It seemed
a good moment, between thanking God and thanking Charles Dean, to
reflect on pitiful old Arkansas City, a town made by the river and
the railroads, then forgotten by both, now desperate for a highway
bridge. A good time to reflect on how interchangeable, in these affairs,
the acts of God and man can be: a river runs through here, they build
a railroad there, the highway crosses here, a flood hits, a bridge
gets built—and the whole place changes forever. *
©
Matt Dellinger. All Rights Reserved.
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