FOR ME, THIS IS A SUBVERSIVE, if not suicidal, idea. I was born less than a mile from its banks, but until today my associations with the mighty Mississippi have always been bad. Growing up in Memphis, I was told it was sure death to go in that nasty, stinkin' river. It was a big drainage ditch swirling with the country's foulest waste—Our National Colon. Every category of danger lurked in there: snags, whirlpools, menacing big-ass catfish, industrial sludge, burning chemicals, snarled trotlines, and cottonmouths, not to mention a wicked current intent on sweeping away everything in its path.

The riverfront, I grew up believing, was a god-awful unsavory place—full of chiggers and poison oak and rabid dogs and rusty objects sure to give you tetanus. Its only true denizens were drunks and hoboes. Historically, the Mississippi had always brought bad tidings to Memphis—yellow fever epidemics, another boll weevil blight, news of the latest stock-market crash, or the twin pestilences of Sherman and Grant. Surely it was the height of idiocy to mess with such a groove-worn fate.

One day during the 1930s, my grandfather took my mom, who was seven at the time, out on the Mississippi in a little fishing boat. Something went wrong with the propeller. The engine quit. They drifted for miles and miles, without a paddle or life preservers. The boat spun like a waterbug on the currents, until my grandfather rather ingeniously jury-rigged a new cotter pin from a coat hanger. They made it safely back, but my mom never forgot the feeling of helplessness the Mississippi inspires.

"It'll up and kill ya," she'd tell me. "And I mean right quick."

And so the Mississippi became for me something mythological and willful, like Charybdis. The more-or-less-predictable laws of hydraulics didn't seem to apply to this crafty torrent of gravy. Without warning, I was told, it will suck you down, swallow you up, smother you in its miasmal embrace. It is less a river than a conveyor belt of quicksand.

This belief in its fundamental otherness goes way back. As early as 1837, an English captain wrote of the Mississippi that "few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again." In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes a kid named Lem Hackett, who drowned one Sunday while playing in an empty flatboat. "Being loaded with sin," Twain writes, "he went to the bottom like an anvil."

Over the years, the Mississippi River really has seemed determined to kill people. The examples abound.

Take the tragic case of Jeff Buckley, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter sensation who drowned one night in 1997, in plain view of the Memphis skyline. Buckley went for a quick dip in the river while a friend stayed on shore. Suddenly, Buckley disappeared ... and that was it. A few days later, a tourist aboard the American Queen spotted his body bobbing in the river. The autopsy revealed nothing unusual—no drugs, no sign of struggle, no hint of suicide. One minute he was fine; the next he was gone. The river just took him.

And then there's the story of the sinking of the Sultana, the worst nautical disaster in American history. The doomed steamship passed Memphis early on the morning of April 27, 1865, with nearly 2,500 passengers, many of whom were Union troops newly freed from various Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. A few miles upstream, at around 2 A.M., the Sultana's boilers exploded. Hundreds were instantly scalded to death. Passengers jumped into the cold Mississippi, but many of the soldiers were too weak and emaciated to swim.

In the end, an estimated 1,700 people burned or drowned that night, more than on the Titanic.

While I was growing up, I remember a steady drumbeat of lesser tragedy along the river, melancholy flickerings on the local evening news—suicidal souls jumping off the Hernando de Soto Bridge, cane-pole fishermen losing their footing and slipping in, hapless adventurers whose boats swamped in the violent wake of a tugboat.

But I guess the final straw for me was this bit of silliness: Sometime when I was a teenager, I learned that a terrible creature lives down in the Mississippi murk. I'm not talking about snapping turtles or water moccasins; I'm speaking of the alligator gar, Atractosteus spatula, a primeval fish with a long snout and iron-hard scales and evil-looking teeth. Gator gars are slithering, dragonlike carnivores that grow to beastly sizes in the shoals of the river.

I once saw an extraordinary photograph of one of these monsters, taken in 1910. The fish had been caught south of Memphis, in an oxbow somewhere near Tunica, Mississippi; in the photograph, a bemused-looking man sits behind the spiny leviathan, and he is dwarfed by it. The creature was reportedly ten feet long, and must have weighed 500 pounds. Gator gars are not particularly known for dining on humans, but a certain gothic mythology has welled up around them; something about this weird fish creeped me out from an early age—and sealed my convictions about the irredeemable atrociousness of the Mississippi.