“Atchafalaya”, John McPhee1987-02-15 (tech)⁠:

[A study of the Mississippi River, its history, and efforts by the US Army Corps of Engineers to hold it in place.] It was published in February, 1987, and it’s about the Herculean effort of the US Army Corps of Engineers to control the flow of the Mississippi River, the fourth-longest river in the world. “Atchafalaya” is the name of the “distributary waterscape” that threatens to capture and redirect the flow of the Mississippi. If that happens, the cities and industrial centers of Southern Louisiana could find themselves sitting, uselessly, next to a “tidal creek”, and economic ruin would be the inevitable result.

To prevent that, the Corps of Engineers embarks on a vast project to artificially freeze the naturally shifting landscape. McPhee meets the engineers and explores the structures they’ve built to “preserve 1950…in perpetuity.”

Like the Mississippi, “Atchafalaya” is long—around 20-seven thousand words. But it’s all available online, and it gives you a real sense of what it’s like not just to live and work beside one of the world’s great rivers but actually to struggle with it.