This is a spring head in Forrest County. I drank free range water last week-the first time since I was a kid and it tasted completely pure-no taste at all. We were visiting an archaeological site on the ridge adjacent to the spring and I had to go take a look. Usually what we see of the past is out-of-context and hard to visualize. The Mississippi Delta is a good example-throughout prehistory there was an canopy of cypress and bottomland hardwoods covering the entire delta. It was unbroken except for streams and rivers. The muddy ditches that you see now in no way resemble what they once were. The water was once clear, probably a little amber-colored from dead leaves and the rivers flowed year round, not just after a rain. We’ve spent the last 200 years reshaping the mouths of the rivers and dredging gravel causing massive headcutting and incision; they’ll never be the same again. Pretty much every stream in the state has been damaged in the same way. So when you see a mound site in the delta, it’s almost impossible to visualize what the world was like for the people who once lived there. Last Monday was different. There has been almost no development around this site and the vegetation is probably pretty close to what’s been there for the past few thousand years. The spring still flows and is unpolluted. Places like this should be more revered than any church or monument and there certainly are fewer of them in the world now.
