Hernando de Soto hated it here. It wasn’t the heat, the humidity, or even the incessant buzzing of the mosquitoes in his ears.

It was the embarrassment this place ceaselessly heaped upon him.

Against the Incas far to the south, he’d acquitted himself like a proper conquistador, earning the glory to launch this expedition into the northern continent.

But these wilds were nothing like the south. The vicious natives attacked his host at every turn, tearing into its sides, stripping away more with each successive raid.

After that last battle, that holocaust, had taken over a third of his men and left sixty score natives dead at their feet, he feared returning to his ships on the coast without the gold he’d set out to find.

Now the greatest embarrassment of all stretched out before him. A churning river more a mile wide, mocking de Soto with every eddy and piece of flotsam that floated past.

Each day, as his men worked to build rafts for the crossing, all he could do was watch the sun climb and fall, turning the sky purple before disappearing below.

Then wait for the vibration of the hostile drums that would last the night.

Memphis Note
The place where Hernando de Soto crossed the Mississippi River was the fourth bluff, where Memphis would later be founded. Sadly, de Soto never found his gold. He died of a fever on the opposite side of the Mississippi a just over a year after crossing, never making it out of Arkansas.

Above, the sky was a perfect, still blue. Below, the brown water churned endlessly.

Suspended several hundred feet in the air, with a live acetylene torch in his hand, these are the sort of things that Clarence can be forgiven for failing to appreciate. He was more focused on getting his welds just right, and ignoring the incessant babbling of his invidious crew mate, Philip.

“Wonder if those boys workin’ on the Arkansas side of this thing are nice.”

Clarence dismissed the statement at first, but it started echoing around his head. He flipped his mask back and looked over.

“Do what now?” Clarence asked.

“We’re buildin’ the bridge toward each other. Them toward us, us toward them. Like the railroads did.”

“So?”

“So, at some point we’ll meet up, and I wonder if they’re nice.”

Clarence’s response was a blank stare, then, “I’m sure I have no idea, Philip.”

With that, he slapped his mask down and went back to work, but not before Philip got one more thought out.

“When we’re done, they say this’ll be the biggest letter in the world.”

And Clarence knew it was only a matter of time until he stupidly asked Philip about that, too.

Memphis Note
Upon its completion in 1972, the Hernando de Soto bridge was confirmed as the largest free-standing letter in the world. It boggles my mind to think about how much that bridge changed the nature of downtown and West Memphis. There was nothing along that run in Arkansas until the bridge was there.