The Meandering Mississippi

I used to think of state or province dimensions mostly in straight lines. This river, the boundary between Alabama on the East and Louisiana and Arkansas on the West is like a squiggly line and acts like a kid wandering home from school. It is the 2nd longest river the the U.S., starting in Lake Itasca in Minnesota. It takes far longer and travels much farther than needed to reach the Gulf on Mexico, going 2340 miles or 3766 kilometers. It has been constantly changing, wrecking havoc on bordering land. As it's shifted to find shorter routes, it has gnawed away plantation lands, shifted parts of one state to the other, left some high and dry or under threat of drowning. We crossed over it down by Baton Rouge. The Army Corps of Engineers started in 1940 to try and tame it as best anyone could with concrete mattes, jetties and a series of levies longer that the Great Wall of China. It ranges from broad expanses to having swamp areas in the south with it's 'Spanish Moss'.