Gayle Harper

Photographer ~ Author ~ Traveler

5 GOOD REASONS TO SEE THE MOVIE “MUD” THIS WEEK

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  1. Don’t miss it on the BIG screen. It’s filmed along the Mississippi River in a wild, swampy region of southern Arkansas where there are few roads anywhere near the big river. The photography at almost river level is so intimate with this massive force of nature that you can not just feel it but almost smell it.
  2. The casting is perfect and the acting is superb. Writer/Director Jeff Nichols wrote the role of the main character, Mud, with Matthew McConaughey in mind and it had to be him! His sexy mix of bad boy and innocence is irresistible, but there is much more to this role than that. He is at home in the wild, wily, resourceful and wise; he will tell you any version of the truth that serves the moment and yet you feel his innate integrity and genuineness. The fierce, blind love he feels for Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon, has not faltered since they were kids in spite of her fickle ways. Tye Sheridan gives a jaw-dropping performance as 14-year-old Ellis, one of the two river kids who discover Mud living on an island in the Mississippi and become his friends. The range of emotions behind his often stoic young face leaves you knowing how it feels to be raised in a barebones houseboat, to passionately want to believe in true love and to watch all that is familiar be dismantled board by board. Finally, Sam Shepard as Mud’s gritty, mysterious sharpshooter father figure is truly masterful.
  3. It is a visceral experience of a vanishing culture that most of us never knew existed. “River Rats,” as they often call themselves, live with the great river, sustained by its gifts and accepting it’s wild and constantly changing nature without reservation. Changes in laws, water quality and fish populations as well as drainage, industrial development and channelization are all bringing an end to this way of life. On my 90-day road trip alongside the full length of the Mississippi River, I met Tommy Groves, a river rat who grew up near Osceola, Arkansas, just 150 or so miles north of where Mud was filmed. Tommy grew up in a little cypress shotgun house on stilts where the Mississippi River came and went and the family survived on its bounty. Tommy’s a successful city dweller now, but he goes to the river every day and he knows he was blessed to grow up there. You can read the rest of his story on my blog post at http://bit.ly/harperriverrat if you like. Happily, the movie treated this ebbing river culture with respect, without even subtle hints at condescension.
  4. It’s 2 hours and 10 minutes of timelessness. The Mississippi River has been doing just what it does today since long before humans were around to notice. When Director Jeff Nichols wanted Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland, who plays Ellis’ best buddy, Neckbone, to feel the River’s timelessness, he handed them Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. “Just reading about the kids on the river in the late 1800s and then being able to go out and enjoy that same river, every day, was amazing,” said Sheridan according to Entertainment Weekly. As for McConaughey, he was quoted by contactmusic.com as saying, “The stage was the Mississippi river. To live there for a while, to camp out there, you quickly get the rhythm and the sense of smell and taste and humidity and weight, and how time trickles along like that river.” No matter how much agenda you walk in with, it is forgotten with the opening scene of Mud and swept away as absolutely as if you were sitting on the bank of the Mississippi.
  5. It’s about love – first love, idealized love, irredeemable love, unconditional love, unrequited love and fatherly love – without ever taking a step toward schmaltzy. And how can you not love that?

So – do yourself a favor, give yourself a break from all that’s going on and don’t miss this one! Here’s the trailer…

Movin’ On

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I’m a bit behind! Things have been happening so fast since I stepped off that barge, I’m running to keep up with myself, much less finding time to write and process images. But, I’ll try to catch us up this morning!

I spent two nights in the pretty little river town of Louisiana, MO, at the quiet, country home of John and Karen Stoeckly.  John is a talented artist who does beautifully detailed pen and ink drawings (click here if you’d like to see them).  Karen is an amazing gourmet cook and together they own The Eagles’ Nest Winery, Bistro and Bed and Breakfast in downtown Louisiana. (charming place, great food and the business is for sale if that catches your fancy!) 

With all they have going on, they still found time to share themselves and their home with me. I’ve been eating very well lately – the second night I was invited to the home of their friends, Dr. Ned Glenn, a retired physician, and his wife, the Reverend Patricia Glenn, an Episcopalian Priest,  along with their son, Wes, and lifelong friend Martha Sue Smith, who interviewed me for her radio show on WBBA. It was a night of lively conversation with bright, creative folks. Thanks to all of you!

Of course, I had to visit the place where the memory of Mark Twain lives on, perhaps more than anywhere else – Hannibal, MO.  His boyhood home, his father’s law office, Becky Thatcher’s home and the infamous Mark Twain cave are all there. If you’re a fan (and who isn’t to some degree?), don’t miss the Mark Twain Museum which includes the original Norman Rockwell paintings created as illustrations for Huckelberry Finn.  

Then I made fast tracks to Alton, Illinois, where my husband, Mike, joined me for the weekend. We had a great time in what I expected would be a quaint, quiet town. Not so! On a perfect, sunny fall weekend, it was a happening place! It’s a favorite spot for motorcyclists and I have honestly never seen so many big bikes in one place in my life.

In order to keep pace with our raindrop, I move on every two days. It’s the honest truth that every time I leave a community, there is the thought, “I could really enjoy spending more time here.” I could spend nine years on this journey and still not follow up on all the interesting stories and people I encounter. That was certainly true in Alton.

The world’s tallest man grew up (and up!) in Alton. Mike and I snuggled up to the life-sized statue of Robert Wadlow, all 8’11” of it! He was, by all accounts, a sweet, gentle man who lived in an era when there was no treatment for his overactive pituitary gland. Although he and his family did their best to keep life “normal”, there was no avoiding the notoriety that came, so his response seemed to be one of gentle good humor. Still, it must have been a very challenging life and Mike and I empathized with its daily details like having to walk sideways on stairs not made to accommodate his size 37 shoes.

There are a dozen stories that presented themselves in Alton that I would love to follow. In the tumultuous years of the Civil War, Alton was an important stop on the Underground Railroad.  The region of Missouri just across the river was known as “Little Dixie”, having been settled largely by slave-owning families from the South. Missouri was a slave state at the time and although Illinois was a free state, there was much pro-slavery sentiment in Alton. There are vivid tales of mob violence and stories of escaping slaves being secreted to freedom that either died with the people who lived them or have been kept quiet by the families involved. Judy Hoffman is an author and historian who spent 12 years researching and writing a book called God’s Portion: Godfrey, Illinois 1817-1865. She is the wife of the first mayor of Godfrey, an adjoining town incorporated in 1991, who now lives in a gorgeous loft in the heart of downtown Alton. She graciously invited Mike and I to visit and shared some of the intriguing stories she has uncovered, which gave us a unique look into this aspect of Alton’s past.

There is an amazing 33-mile stretch of road here known as the “Meeting of the Great Rivers Scenic Byway” which travels beside some magnificent river bluffs between the point where the Illinois River joins forces with the Mississippi to the point where the Missouri River does the same. At one end is the largest State Park in Illinois, Pere Marquette State Park, where we found a drop-dead gorgeous view with the first signs of fall color showing in the treetops below. 

At the other end is the Lewis and Clark Confluence Tower, honoring the point where that famous journey began up the Missouri River.  We let no moss grow on us this weekend!  At the National Great Rivers Museum, Mike tried being a barge pilot at the simulated exhibit. (It might not be his calling as he crashed into the wall three tries out of three!) We toured the Melvin Price Lock & Dam, one of the largest on the Mississippi and were able to be in the observation room as a towboat and barge passed just below us. It looks even bigger from that perspective than it did from the towboat!

We visited a flock of White Pelicans who just arrived last week for their annual visit to the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary.  We had some great food, including a lunch at the lively Grafton Winery, full of folks enjoying live music inside and views of the river and the parade of traffic passing by on the outside decks.  We also scoped out a few spots to hit on a return trip at some point, like the Tara Point B&B, where the view of the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi took our breath away.  

It was glorious to have Mike with me for the weekend. I’m thankful to him for coming and for his sweet, supportive, loving presence in my life. I am one lucky woman!      

Love,     Gayle

Cairo – A Different Perspective

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Cairo, IL – pronounced not like the city in Egypt but more like KAY-RO

It’s an area perched on the invisible boundary between North and South. The states of Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas are all within 100 miles of each other and the accents, foods and ways of the people are a rich stew of these varied influences. It’s also a transition from one climatic zone to another, so the plants and animals native to each intermingle here.

Here, also, the Ohio River surrenders its individual identity and becomes part of the Mississippi, creating the border between the Upper and Lower Mississippi. The Ohio is itself a river of consequence, as it has been gathering water from its own tributaries for nearly a thousand miles. Mark Twain had said the Ohio water resists mixing with the Mississippi as long as possible – that you could actually see the blue-greenish tinted Ohio water clinging to the bank and trying to hold itself apart from the muddier Mississippi for a good distance downriver. I was curious to see if this was still true, so I was searching for a vantage point.

The land is low and flat here, so there is no possibility of a bluff or high bank. There is a bridge across the Mississippi and one across the Ohio, but none near enough to the confluence. Fort Defiance State Park lies at the very tip of the peninsula jutting between the two rivers and I had been told the Boatmen’s Monument there had an elevated platform that might work, but the view was obstructed by trees. So, I needed to fly.

A kindly man named Ron answered the phone at the Cairo Airport, filling in for his niece, who is the airport manager. Ron had access to a small plane with a window that opened and loved to fly, so he agreed to take me up at sunrise. The sky was just beginning to show pink when we took off in the tiniest plane I had ever been in. Our two bodies and a camera case maxed out the available space inside. The steering mechanism was duplicated on my side and moved as Ron moved his, so I needed to stay clear of that. The window opened from the bottom out, only about four inches, which meant I would need to shoot down and at an angle. There was a wing strut just in front, so my field of clear view was pretty narrow. But, “Freedom is Flying” was painted in large red letters on the side of the plane and whatever happened would be perfect.

The window kept blowing shut at first, but Ron reached across and somehow fixed that. Later, though, the handle actually fell off and we watched in wide-eyed horror as it tumbled toward the ground. Fortunately, we were over an empty field, so no harm done. Between the noise of the engine and the wind, there was no chance of hearing each other, so we communicated by gestures. I would see something I liked and pantomime how I’d like to approach it and he would grin and put me there. The morning was glorious and we were both having great fun!

It turned out that it was indeed possible to see the different colors of the two rivers and the long, gradual blending of the waters. It was mid-April and the fields were that impossibly green shade of new growth and the first rays of morning sun were casting long, soft shadows from the trees. The two rivers arched into each other gracefully from this perspective in long, sinuous curves, like dancers striking a pose. When I saw a tug pushing its massive load of barges upriver and the water around it sparkling in the warm light, my heart raced and I gestured excitedly to Ron. He nodded and maneuvered us into position. I got the shot I wanted, thumped him on the back and gave him a big “thumbs up”.

On the way back to the tiny airport, there was a smile coming from my heart, not just because of the photography, but because of this shared, wordless experience of watching the sun awaken the earth from the vantage point of the sky. When I glanced at Ron, I saw the same little smile tweaking the corner of his mouth. Another day on the Great River Road….