April Showers...

François Steichen
Apr 25
3 min read

April showers bring May flowers, as the saying goes, but why get ahead of ourselves? Let’s talk about water, and leave the flowers for next month.

My intention this month was to talk about water in the State of Connecticut: the Connecticut River, the Housatonic, the Farmington, Long Island Sound, among others. Towns and cities tend to grow up around rivers, lakes and oceans. Nowhere is this more true than in Connecticut.

Fields are rained on and irrigated by water, and that leads us naturally to beer, since Barley and Hops cannot grow without that water. Indeed, beer is 95% water, so it would not exist without water.

Alas, water tends to be diverted. So was I. A brief weekend trip to St. Louis became an excuse to take a three-week driving tour of the lower Midwest and the Deep South. I’ve come to think of the trip as a series of “Guest States” for the purposes of Nutmeg with my Beer. Not exactly Connecticut-centered, but I hope the focus on beer will meet with your indulgence.

I left Connecticut very early on April 1, under misty weather, crossed over the Hudson, and then through the Delaware Water Gap. On to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the home of Little League Baseball, but also famous for the “Wood Hick (Lumberjack)” and for being the biggest logging center in the world in the late 19th century, with “booms,” or log pens, along the West Branch of the Schyulkill River . I continued through the Allegheny National Forest, where the Allegheny River has its source, and on to Lake Erie and the Johnson Estate Winery, before turning south to Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny meets the Monongahela to form the Ohio River.

Then on to Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, and Cincinnati, with dinner at the “Over the Rhine” neighborhood, before leaving the next day for the Clayborne Farm, near Lexington, KY, ahead of an unremitting deluge all the way to St. Louis that made me truly grateful to arrive there in the evening.

After St. Louis, my next stop was Ste. Geneviève, MO, and then Cairo, IL, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi. A nice book-end of the Ohio, after seeing it formed in Pittsburgh. Continuing down I-55, where levees do not seem to exist and farm fields in Spring look like Vietnamese rice paddies, I visited Johnny Cash’s boyhood home, in a swamp called Dyess, Ark.

And on to Memphis, which I used as a hub to see the Mississippi Delta, another area that overcame its swamp geography to create the Blues.

I continued to Vicksburg, where Grant was able to create the conditions for victory by clever use of steamships to run past the Confederate artillery on the city’s heights. From there to Selma, via Philadelphia and Meridien, Mississippi, and on to Montgomery. This also meant crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge, of course.

My trip finished up through Birmingham, a fascinating, up-and-coming city, then via Muscle Shoals and the Natchez Trace to Nashville. Muscle Shoals and the Trace let me see the Tennessee River - another big feeder of the Mississippi - in all its dimensions.