The winter storms that have buffeted the nation throughout February have caused record low temperatures, widespread power failures, and untold property damage, claiming several lives. Satellite images recorded last week revealed that at one point, more than 73% of the United States’s landmass was covered in snow.
Arkansas, home to my alma mater and to me for nearly a decade, experienced something that hasn’t happened in over a century: the Arkansas River froze over. A tributary of the Mississippi, the Arkansas River flows east from Colorado into Kansas and then south into Oklahoma and Arkansas, stretching about 1,469 miles to its mouth in Napoleon, Arkansas. Last week, Arkansans in the state’s northwestern corner witnessed several junctions of the river freeze over completely, such as at Barling’s Lock and Dam No. 13.
The last time the Arkansas River froze in the state was 1918, which readers might remember was also the same year that the nation was ravaged by the Spanish flu. The H1N1 influenza-strain pandemic came in several successive waves, infecting some 500 million people worldwide and killing 50 million of them.
Centuries ago, we would’ve called such an eerie coincidence an “omen,” and millennia ago, we would’ve taken any omen involving major rivers very, very seriously. If you’ll remember from world history class, or from Sid Meier’s fantastic Civilization franchise, civilization quite literally grew on the backs — or banks, I should say — of rivers. The great cities of ancient Mesopotamia, the earliest known human civilization, arose because of the three great rivers that earned the so-called Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East its name. With the Nile River on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to the southwest and the Tigris River and Euphrates River intersecting its heart, the boomerang-shaped crescent was home to “unusually fertile soil and productive freshwater and brackish wetlands” that allowed for the cultivation of grains, freer movement of peoples, and necessary agricultural and technological experimentation necessary to move from hunter-gatherer tribes to settled societies.
Rivers were tremendously important to ancient societies, and to all societies, really, and this importance was reflected in religious and mythic practices. Sumerian mythology worshiped Enbilulu as the god of rivers, charged specifically with the care of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elis says that Enbilulu “knew the secrets of water” and “of the running of rivers below the earth.” One of the Egyptians’ most important gods was Hapi, god of the Nile, worshiped as “Lord of the Fish and Birds of the Marshes” and “Lord of the River Bringing Vegetation.” Hapi, depicted as a man with female breasts, was also an Egyptian symbol of fertility since it was said that his arrival caused the Nile to flood every year, which kept the soil fertile and productive.
The Greeks also had aquatic deities to whom they might pray to keep the rivers flowing (the Potamoi, as well as Poseidon), as did the Romans (Tiberinus, god of the Tiber River), the Norse (Rhenus Pater, god of the Rhine River, and Rura, goddess of the Rur), and so on. As for us, we have meteorology.
