Mississippi Dead Zones: Ghosts of the Anthropocene
Last winter, I got fed up. Minnesota winters are famously frigid, and there’s only so many wind-prickled tears that can half freeze on your face before you come to dread your walk to work. It’s a lose-lose game: the air stings your eyes into steadily weeping until you can’t see, and bulky winter boots turn the ice into a tightrope. The daily commute becomes a blindfolded acrobatic routine.
Last winter, moving timidly down my street with burning tears in streams down my face, I paused, breathing heavy, to wonder why walking was so hard. Boots and ice were not unfamiliar to me, growing up in New England. I remembered long, steep driveways in the mountains, and porch stairs covered in ice that looked like glass. I resumed walking, this time studying the porches I passed.
I sent a text to my roommate: hey did you salt your porch growing up?
He said: what?
I said: it just occurred to me that no one here has big gallon buckets full of blue salt on their porches.
He said: okay?
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Every summer, after the snow melts and the rain has begun again, 31 states and 2 Canadian provinces drain into the Mississippi River. Urban sewage and agricultural runoff flood into and down all 2,348 miles of the primary river of North America’s second largest drainage system. The runoff saturates the water with nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous, which becomes, upon reaching the Gulf of Mexico, a feast for the algae. As algae blooms and dies, the dissolved oxygen in the water is depleted faster than it can be replenished. (Soft Schools)
“In a natural system, these nutrients aren’t significant factors in algae growth because they are depleted in the soil by plants. However, with anthropogenically increased nitrogen and phosphorus input, algae growth is no longer limited.” (Carleton)
These areas of depleted oxygen are called hypoxic areas, or, more commonly, dead zones. Without the requisite amount of oxygen, fish and other aquatic creatures are at risk of suffocation. Those that can swim further out from shore, and those that can’t die. Algae is only one of the many simple lifeforms that thrive with the ocean conditions becoming more and more prevalent: hot, loaded with nutrients, and underpopulated with predators. As populations of fish and other more complex creatures die out, jellyfish and slimy ancient bacteria haunt the waters again. (Science Daily, Scientific American)
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“The large number of ghost stories associated with the Mississippi River begs the question, ‘Is there a connection between the river and the paranormal?’ An examination of haunted places throughout the world reveals that water figures prominently into a large number of these tales. In Greek mythology, the River Styx transports spirits to the Underworld…Alcatraz, the most haunted prison in the United States, was built on an island in San Francisco Bay…
…Working on the assumption that entities must draw energy from an external source in order to manifest… Dr. Tony Ambler of the University of Texas… said that the large numbers of impurities in the Mississippi River are excellent conductors of electricity.” (Brown, Alan)
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Less than a mile east of the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis is renowned club and concert venue First Avenue. Before the club hosted famous musicians, it was built as a state of the art Greyhound bus depot, and before that, it was a slaughterhouse. Aside from its legendary history, First Ave is regarded as one of the most haunted places in the Twin Cities.
Alan Brown, in his book Ghosts along the Mississippi River, posits that “paranormal activity inside the First Avenue Club could be generated by the deaths of several homeless people inside the old depot.” People also report hearing cattle noises from the basement. However, the most well known ghost associated with First Avenue is that of a blond, teenage girl who is rumored to have hung herself in the bathroom. Employees and musicians at First Ave have reported seeing people in the crowd dancing with no legs, hearing strange sounds and voices over headsets, finding musical equipment that has been inexplicably moved, and hearing screaming or voices from the women’s restroom.
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The Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico in a jagged chalk outline of the annual dead zone. This line, colloquially referred to as the “Rip in the Flesh,” is, like a knife wound, sharp, staggered, and imperceptibly deep.
For obvious reason, given their miraculous appearance, images like the one below circulate the web as clear and tangible evidence of the divine.
“The Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. The two bodies of water never mix with each other; allowing the Gulf of Mexico to retain its clear, blue color. Simply amazing!
That just proves that their is a GOD!!!! Who else can let WATER meet and touch but NEVER mix together???? #illwait” (Snopes)
A miracle of God allowing the Gulf to retain its clear blue, Allah’s forbidding partition to maintain two kinds of water. The Gulf’s dead zone was first observed in 1950 and first measured in 1985. At roughly the size of New Jersey, the dead zone was its largest ever in 2017.
Religion or research, fisherman will tell you that the fish are disappearing.
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In 1835, 6 year old Jane DeBow disappeared, having been kidnapped by a missionary family and brought from her home in New York to Minnesota. Her mother had fallen ill, forcing her father to scatter their children amongst neighbors and family members so he could dedicate his time to caring for his ailing wife. Jane was sent to stay with nearby neighbors. During her stay, the neighbors were visited by J.D. and Julia Stevens who were on their way to Minnesota for J.D. to begin his missionary work. The Stevenses had just lost a young daughter and convinced the family Jane was staying with to let them take her. For some reason, they agreed.
Jane is known for the relationships with the Dakota children she formed as a child growing up around Fort Snelling in the mid-19th century. According to a Spring 1996 issue of Ramsey County History, “the Dakota children were fascinated by her story of how she came to Minnesota, and gave her a Dakota name, ‘Little Bird that Was Caught’” (Weber, Deanne Zibell).
Eventually, her “adopted” family moved to Illinois, where, as a young woman, she met her husband, Heman Gibbs. The couple moved back to Minnesota, where they built themselves a farm, and Jane was reunited with her childhood Dakota friends.
Today, the Gibbs Farm is a museum that allows visitors “to explore the traditional life-ways of the Dakota,” as well as “stroll through [the] native prairie, medicine garden, and traditional Dakota and pioneer crop gardens” (RCHS). In the “11 Most Haunted Places in Minnesota,” the Gibbs Farmhouse is listed as #5, purportedly haunted by one of Jane’s children.
Willie Gibbs, 9 years old, died of smoke inhalation after a prairie fire. Today he is said to “remove toys from locked display cabinets and leaves them scattered across the floor for staff to tidy away,” “open and close cabinet doors,” and “making quite a noise rocking back and forth in a rocking chair upstairs.” Sometimes, he is said to be seen from windows of the house as people walk by. (Haunted Rooms)
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“Ghost stories should be enjoyed, and valued, because they preserve the history and values of the people who pass them along. The ghost stories of the Mississippi River are so compelling that they, like the river itself, are likely to ‘just keep rollin’ along.’” (Brown, Alan)
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The idea of the anthropocene asks us to look at the planet and see what it is as something we have done. It’s an inherently haunted task. To look around and understand our surroundings as changed is to allow the ghosts of what was to whisper in our ears.