Newsletter

Three Mississippi

Several Seconds in Mississippi

Michael Webster

03 Dec 2023 • 4 min read

For this installment, I’m going to shift gears and put it in reverse.

I came to Mississippi with few, if any expectations. After all these years traveling to distant lands and examining exotic cultures, I’ve more or less developed a template for checking out new places. Mostly I just walk or ride around randomly and see what I see. But I also go to the history museum to learn what kind of distortions they teach their children. I try to find restaurants that have been there a long time and have become some kind of community institution and try out their specialty. I check out the Atlas Obscura website to see what kind of weird attractions I might encounter. I’ll go to a cemetery if it is somehow different than the norm. I go to natural history museums and botanical gardens to learn about the local nature and wildlife.

The land and the wildlife have rich histories all their own, separate from humans, until they are not.

Trees are of particular interest. The oldest have experienced a lot during their long lives.

Take a longer look at this photo of the civil war battlefield at Vicksburg. Hills ripple down from the city on all sides. Traitors fighting for slavery lined every crest firing down into waves of Union soldiers senselessly trying to swim upstream into barrage after barrage of flying lead, stumbling over mounds of dead bodies to their own grisly deaths becoming bloody stair steps for the poor souls coming up behind them. It was slaughter. The ground became sodden with blood. It was neither the first, not the last time something like that would occur.

The ground in Mississippi has soaked up a lot of blood. When the European invaders arrived, Mississippi was populated with sophisticated cultures with at least 10,000 years of history, the great majority of it peaceful as far as we can tell. They were murdered and robbed and forced on a death march to a barren hellhole. Four hundred years of brutal slavery followed by another 200 or so of grave injustices. Those are important facts about this land. Try as some locals might, these facts cannot be buried, covered up, or escaped. Notes have been taken.

Take another look at this nearby tree.

Scientists now know that trees are intelligent creatures, likely much more intelligent than humans. They nurture their young, they help their neighbors, they communicate with each other through underground fungal networks, the old teach the young the history of their kind, they are natural storytellers, they are artistic. The great majority of their art is underground, but some express themselves above ground through their bark and their limbs, or if they have them, through their knees.

At first I thought this tree was evil and I was afraid of it. But I sat by it for a long time and did not get any bad feelings. Again I had my doubts when I was processing the photos, but I realize that just shows the limits of photography as art. A photograph can only communicate the visual. A good one will invoke feelings, but they are not the same as being physically present. That is outside the realm of photography. The art of trees is much more powerful.

Although we may have some sense of how plants and trees absorb and depict the atrocities humans, and perhaps other creatures, inflict on themselves, neither scientists nor art historians have yet been able to discern how they externalize the many atrocities humans inflict on plant life. But we do have plenty of reason to believe a reckoning is coming. Just like our animal bodies are made up of billions upon billions of other life forms that come together to make a human. The same is true of our planet. Humans, trees, insects, bacteria, whatever, are all a part of the larger organism we call earth. And just like our immune system goes into action when some life form within us goes bad and threatens the whole, the earth’s immune system will react against all the harm humans are causing in due time.