End of the MV Sunflower

     For her long, varied and mostly unremarkable service, it was fitting that motor vessel Sunflower came to her final resting place in a field of sunflowers.  She had been launched, some said (her builder's certificate long lost), in the early 1880's, as a general purpose workhorse on the lower Mississippi.  During a war panic, she'd been implausibly requisitioned by the Navy, fitted with a deck gun and sent into the Gulf Coast to watch for the Spanish fleet then decommissioned and returned to service as an inshore trawler for new owners.  Later she'd been recommissioned again and sent to picket the Gulf, on the lookout for potentially marauding Imperial German battle cruisers then finally returned and sold to another set of owners for more hard service on the Mississippi.  

      At the end she served a short line railroad, hauling mostly cotton from a rickety wharf on a wide meander of a Mississippi tributary.  After the Flood of '20 turned  the river meander into an oxbow lake, that was that.  After some 40 years, now trapped in a shrinking lake, rust streaked and engines played out, tackle broken down, abandoned by her last owners as not worth even salvage value, she avoided the breakers and followed her own peculiar destiny.  

     In time the Sunflower's plates sprung and she settled at her moorings, water sloshing over her deck.  By the time the lake silted in the main channel of the river was a mile away.  

      I know this footnote to history is true, I heard it in the '50s in a small jazz club in Las Vegas, told to me between sets by the old bluesman Jailhouse Lemon Lee.  He tramped all over the South and claimed he'd spent a summer in the Sunflower's deck house back in 1927, surrounded by thousands of sunflowers by day, millions of fireflies by night.  

      Or so he said, as he slacked his guitar strings and noodled  Busted Flush, pure delta blues on a hot desert night.