The Mississippi River is a magnificent existent ecosystem. She is “a strong brown god,” as T. S. Eliot wrote, that offers water and gives land to the North American Continent. As she saunters from her headwaters in Minnesota to her mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, she gathers strength, growing in  magnitude from water and sediment, she also accumulates fertilizers and hydrocarbons. Along her route, she is “straightened and shackled,” as the US Army Corps of Engineers once boasted, by engineered impediments. By the time she reaches New Orleans, my hometown, the river has become brutalized, toxified, and enraged. Prevented from offering fresh sediment to her wetlands, she instead spews forth a 7,000-square mile hypoxic dead zone into the Gulf. By traveling from the river’s mouth to her head, I am going back in time to meet a younger, fresher, freer river. As the Army Corps of Engineers plans to release the river from some of her dams, I will record impressions, images, and stories of a river I’ve never had the honor to meet, though she is the same river I’ve always known.