Tempting fate

New Madrid, MO

Yesterday, I tempted fate and threw caution into the wind.  You see, I made some some vows when I was in high school and then college.  This has nothing to do with a bucket list, in fact, it was sort of a "anti' bucket list."

These included mundane items like never eating Doritos again (they affected my system negatively) and never buying a Chrysler product.  In medical school I vowed never to do OB again and never work for anybody else.

One of these items I have never broken was to never spend a night with in 100 miles of a New Madrid, MO  and especially, Memphis.....never.  In fact, I would try to avoid even visiting the area.

The reason? 

IMHO it would not Climate change, a hurricane, nor a tornado  that would be the greatest natural disaster to destroy life in this country in my lifetime it would be an earthquake, and not an earthquake in California or Alaska. It would be an earthquake here....in and around New Madrid, MO.   When the next big one occurred, it will kill thousands if not more.

Why?   On Dec 16th, 207 years ago, a series of 4-7.4 magnitude or better earthquakes (two occured on December 16th alone) rocked the area, with the last and biggest occurring on Feb 7, 1812, centered beneath where I stand in the picture above  by the comical sign.  It  eclipsed 8 on the Richter scale, more powerful than the great San Francisco earthquake and greater than anything outside of Alaska in the USA in human history.  These numbers are based on deep movement and due to the nature of the soil, the surface has magnitudes higher which would put three of the events over 8, even higher.

What did it cause?  It formed a large waterfall here.

Which took the river many months to fully erode the uplift of the river bottom causing the falls.  The process formed a tidal wave that went up the river to St. Louis.  It formed a lake, and famously made the river flow backwards for a while as the water needed to reequilibrate.  It rang church bells in Boston, cracked buildings in Ohio and killed many of the few settlers in Missouri at that time.  Then after the fourth quake, the ground went silent.....or did it....

You may say that was over 200 years ago....it was an isolated event but on October 31, 1895 just a little ways from New Madrid, the fault moved again, the Charleston Missouri Earthquake of 1895 was a 6.7 tremblor.  The largest since.  It is now building pressures, pressures that will again release.

These have caused sand blows for hundreds of miles.   What are sand blows?

liquefaction occurs during ground shaking and builds up pressure below the clay.  Eventually this pressure is released through fissures, sometimes a long time after the earthquake and sand volcanoes occur.  Ones in Missouri have been estimated to reach tens of meters high and have deposited sand up to 2-3 meters thick.

Oddly, I have sand blows on my property in South Dakota presumably from the 1812 earthquake at New Madrid or the one estimated in 1460 or ones earlier, and this was nearly 700 miles away.  Beach heather, a rare wildflower has colonized some of these sand blowouts in Minnesota.  So something thrives from these events.

So when this fault goes again....what will happen?  I surely won't be standing in the Bass Pro Pyramid in downtown Memphis.  Sitting on a silt island, that monstrosity will be the doom of all in it.  It will be the most terrible thing to ever befall the country, and yet....people laugh it off.  Earthquake construction in Memphis or Jonesboro, Arkansas?  Not a chance.....history repeats itself, and well...as I said, I won't be there I hope to see it because, I made a vow not to.

Why did we even go here this time?

I dropped our RV off at the factory in Red Bay, Alabama to get fixed

The direct line home was to New Madrid and I felt like living on the edge.  Above is the line up of motor homes waiting in the RV park next to the factory getting something fixed.  Not the place I dreamed about hanging around near Christmas.  We drove home from there, I'll pick up the rig later.  So being here, I wanted to see the sights.....having given the area such a wide berth, I have missed many counties which I now can say I've been in.

So what else happened in and around New Madrid?

A large key battle of the Civil War occurred here.  "The Battle of Island Number 10"  Which in the spring of 1862, probably doomed the Confederacy.   An error to not relieve the besieged forces on the citadel across the river in the "Kentucky Bend" of the river nor protect the troops at New Madrid allowed Grant's assault on Shiloh and Vicksburg.  How this critical location was lost is almost comical.  Generals Johnston and Polk never understood the importance of the place and it was very important and immediately General Beauregard realized building up the defenses of this loop of the river was priority one, but he fell ill, no one else was in charge.  The fort and the area never got fully ready for the assault that was to come and those left were too timid to do what was necessary.

It is my opinion that if the Confederacy would have held this location at all costs, we would be living in a split nation.  The long bloody road to Vicksburg would have been delayed and after the debacles of the Union army in Virginia in 1862 and 1863 would have caused a loss of appetite for the war and the Union would have sued for peace.  The northern border of Tennessee would have been extended westward and quite possibly moved north and I would be standing in a different country in New Madrid in 2018......oh what could have been....I guess it was good the Confederates had such bad leadership outside of Virginia.   Maybe WWI would have played out different and well, WWII would have never happened either, who knows, but for the unfortunate timing of a sick general.

There are some things I would have missed from the south....The South gave us Elvis, Coca-Cola and...Waffle House.  .The greatest loss for me would be the Waffle House.

I love Waffle House....I believe Waffle House IS America.....My favorite movie with a Waffle House is Tin Cup.  There is an urban legend that since Waffle Houses are always open, they do not have locks on their doors.  The one above in Columbia, MO has a lock.  I was in one in North Carolina that didn't.

I could say I missed Jax beer too, but I never got to taste it.  I became legal to drink in 1984 the time when Pearl brewing stopped making it.  Jax brewery in New Orleans closed in 1974.

oh well...I still got Waffle House
For birders

I got my lifer Missouri Mockingbird, LOL.

They had cool mansions.....

New Madrid was founded as a seat of Spanish power so the Spanish Military road ended there

It was traded to France in the late 18th Century and sold to us as part of Louisiana

The craziest thing that happened here was the feud, which took place across the river., Which here is south.

The earthquake (or the previous one) created a huge meander in the river which when surveyed left an isolated loop across the river from New Madrid which was part of Kentucky, called "the Bend" Tennessee even claimed it for 40 years but gave up.

Life on the Bend wasn’t always so dull. For sixty years, a violent feud – sparked by an argument over a horse, or maybe a cow – raged between the Darnell and Watson families. Mark Twain wrote about the feud in Life on the Mississippi, saying “in no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region…Every year or so, somebody was shot, on one side or the other, and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept it a-going.”

The feud ended in the late 1800s when the last of the Darnells, an elderly father and his two sons, decided to flee the Bend by steamboat. The Watsons were told of the escape plans (word travels fast when there’s only 300 people) and showed up just as the Darnells were about to leave. They opened fire from the riverbank, killing the younger Darnells and snuffing out the family line.  Being in a county not connected with the rest of the county and forty miles away, there was no law.

Talk about holding a grudge.....forgiveness....forgetting?  Not a chance.

The other good thing about this visit is...I survived!  I went to New Madrid, tempted fate and I live on.....I may have to go through again to go get the rig.  Can I play New Madrid Roulette a second time?

At least I didn't get anyone local mad at me....those crazy southern feuds

Olaf

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