The Old Canal

The water murmured, moving in an almost imperceptible flow. It trickled over the few rocks which sat in the canal bed, but otherwise seemed to stand still. Only a lack of algae and muck indicated that the water was anything other than stagnant.

During dry periods the old canal is of little use. The minimal amount of water coming down from the hills in feeder creeks would be better off staying in the hills, slaking the thirst of trees and woodland vegetation which ache for lack of rain. During heavy rains, of course, the canal does its best work, taking water away from the swollen creeks until its own banks threaten to burst, draining the excess away from the forests and sending it downstream to the Des Plaines River, from whence it continues onward to the Illinois, the Mississippi and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.

Sending Illinois woodland downpours into the municipal water supply of New Orleans has become the canal's sole remaining purpose. Its barges have been gone for a hundred years, having been rapidly eclipsed by the railroads fifty years before that, and it has been closed to pleasure craft since the Depression. Today it sits, barely noticed and completely unused, a drainage ditch glorified by its increasingly forgotten history. Many stretches have even been filled in for industrial sites, with this former artery of commerce now ignonimously being considered to be more useful as vacant land.

Times move on. The romance of the mule teams, the call of the tillerman, and the era's slow-paced serenity are now merely entries in a musty book of ancient history.