Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  Our modern Cannon flows alongside tall bluffs, layer cakes of St. Peter sandstone spread with a hint of Glenwood shale and capped off with a frosting of hard Platteville limestone, all weathered smooth and stained by organic compounds in the spring water that weeps and drizzles down the bluff face. Over millennia, the river has dug itself deep into the surrounding landscape, exposing the land’s geologic history to river travelers. If it were spring, the softness of wildflowers—hepatica, blood-root, wild ginger, dwarf trout lily—would carpet its forested banks. In the stream, shadows of fish dart away from our boat, too quickly for us to learn their names, and the water exudes its indefinable and irresistible river aroma. The wooded corridor is a soothing green refuge from the modern world.

  The river chatters over gravel bars and occasionally we feel our Kevlar hull graze a shallow spot. Ouch. Three waterproof portage packs and a beat-up Coleman cooler fill the center of the boat to capacity. On top of the load, held tight by the tie-down straps, ride an extra paddle and the portage wheels. Our canoe’s hull—long and narrow with no rocker, or curvature, from bow to stern—is designed to go straight and fast. This shape makes it difficult to maneuver around trees that have fallen into the channel, midstream boulders, gravel bars, and river bends; the weight of our gear renders it even less cooperative.

  River scientists call the continuous line of the deepest part of the river the thalweg. I suppose I could just call it the channel, but I like the word thalweg, its Germanic sound and its meaning, denoting the downhill force of the water and the deepest depths of the river, the river doing what it is meant to do. Following the thalweg grants us enough forward momentum and water depth to outfox our canoe, which stubbornly insists on going straight ahead rather than pivoting agilely around obstacles. We chose this boat for the trip because it will be easier to paddle up the Wisconsin River than our highly maneuverable, but tubbier, river canoe. We won’t know if it’s a good tradeoff until the trip is over. Meanwhile, we’re just happy to be on the water.

  Cannon River

  As the heat of the day intensifies, we’re grateful for the dappled shade of riverside trees. Through the leafy veil, I spot what I’ve been watching for, a bas-relief carving on a bluff face. Sculpted into the sandstone, the improbable image of Shiva—Hindu god of destruction and creation—has watched the Cannon rush by since 1986: not exactly what one would expect to see on a midwestern river. It’s at the former site of Scott’s Mill where the remains of dry-laid limestone dam abutments along the banks are all that’s left of that old structure. Shiva was carved by Jim Langford, a student at St. Olaf College in Northfield who designed a decidedly offbeat senior project merging Eastern religion and art and chose this remote Cannon River cliff to execute his sculpture. He reportedly worked on it for months, with help from his friend Paul Monson, completing just in time to graduate. Ever since, Shiva has been a source of amusement for paddlers and defacement opportunities for kids.

  Quite soon, it seems, we float into the Cannon River Wilderness Area, five miles of river bisecting over 850 acres of land, most of which was purchased some years ago by Rice County. The county acquired the property from thirteen landowners, including a hermit named Henry Fisk, who lived for thirty years in a shack in the woods, next to a bubbling cold-water spring. When Henry grew too feeble for life in a shack and went to live in a nursing home, the county decided that the value of his land should pay for his nursing care.

  It may be a stretch to call the park through which we travel a wilderness, as the land was logged over at least twice. More accurately, perhaps, it is an important restoration of a remnant of the historic ecosystem called the Big Woods, once a vast dense sugar maple and basswood forest with oak savanna openings, and the remnant is a quiet retreat for hikers and paddlers. CRWP plans to set aside even more land between Faribault and Cannon Falls along this reach of the river known as the Middle Cannon. Their vision of a Middle Cannon River Green Corridor promises benefits beyond the aesthetic. We paddle past third-growth descendants of the forest that help absorb floodwaters and buffer the river from farmland runoff and the paddler from the sun. The return of the forest understory and the regrowth of vegetation on the banks has healed gullies and slowed erosion. Home to rare plants like dwarf trout lily and other relict species, as well as over fifty species of nesting birds, the area is also an important stopover for many migratory birds, some of them neo-tropical visitors.

  As we tie up our canoe at the footbridge, the clear call of a white-throated sparrow floats out of the woods. A kingfisher rushes past, noisily objecting to our intrusion into his territory. We climb the bank and from the bridge we spot a great blue heron fishing downstream.

  Herons are a constant on our river journeys. The heron fishes the shallows alone, standing on one leg, one eye alert to intruders like us and the other eye on the fish he hopes to eat. As we approach from upstream, the heron waits silent and motionless. When we reach a point that only the heron can define, he abruptly raises his broad wings and lifts off, flapping slowly downstream, legs trailing, toes pointed, neck folded back in a tight S, and disappears around the next river bend. When we round that bend, he is there in the shallows, fishing and watching as before. It must irritate the heron no end to have his solitary fishing expeditions interrupted so often.

  It is the same with eagles, though the eagle perches in a tree to fish rather than standing in the shallows. The same ritual: the silent watching, the waiting, the flight around the next bend, and so on down the river. When I was growing up in southeastern Minnesota in the 1950s and ’60s, bald eagle sightings were so rare that they made the news and people exclaimed over the event. I never did see an eagle during those years and saw none at all until I had lived in Wisconsin for many years. The eagles are back now. On nearly all of the many rivers we have paddled in Minnesota, we met at least one eagle, often several, some immature. Occasionally we spotted a huge and absurdly messy nest high in a white pine. We watched eagles soar over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis.

  At Dundas, the current is still brisk as we slip past the limestone building that once was the Archibald Mill. Father Denny Dempsey of St. Dominic’s parish in Northfield, an experienced paddler, often kayaks to the ruins of old gristmills along the Cannon and has photographed this mill and the remains of others, including the Cannon River Grange Mill at Waterford and the Randolph Mill, both further downstream. He likes the connection to history and nature that he feels on the river and enjoys imagining what the Cannon was like for the Indians and the settlers.

  We almost miss the confluence with Spring Brook Creek. A sandy micro-delta on the left bank is the only sign of the creek’s entry. Known formally and on maps as Rice Creek, it is Spring Brook Creek to locals. The creek is Rice County’s only trout stream and, most notably, one that supports naturally reproducing native brook trout. Kathleen Doran-Norton, Bridgewater Township supervisor and volunteer for the award-winning Rice Creek Concerned Citizens Group, said that there are more trout in that creek—population 2,000—than there are people in Dundas—population 1,367. Preparing for their first fish count, the group had estimated that two hundred radio frequency identification microchips would be enough to tag all the trout in less than two miles of stream. A little ways into the count they went back for three hundred more and still didn’t have enough for all the brookies they found hiding in the little creek—the secret lives of trout.

  Because development could change that fish-to-people demographic ratio, the group hopes to establish protective stream buffers. “To drastically change the land use in this watershed would be the death of this creek,” said Doran-Norton. The Middle Cannon is designated as a Wild and Scenic River by the state of Minnesota, which gives the township some tools in the form of zoning regulations governing setbacks and subdividing. CRWP works with farmers to reduce nitrate and E. coli-laden runoff through a program called Farmwise, which promotes voluntary conservation but has had only a lukewarm reception in the farming community.

>   Soon the river slows, like a train coming into the station. This is Northfield, our first portage. We take out at Riverside Park, just upstream of the Malt-O-Meal dam, where the Cannon drops ten feet over the concrete structure that once diverted the river’s flow into the adjoining historic Ames Mill. Happily, the Friday morning farmers’ market is in full swing in the park. We strap the canoe onto its slightly wobbly wheels and wade into the crowd in search of food. As we nibble gratefully on mini spinach quiches and grapes, two genial drunks approach.

  “Oh, grapes!” says the taller one. “I’m from Alaska and haven’t had grapes in years. Where are you going with that canoe?”

  We share our grapes and our story with the inebriated Alaskans and listen to their opinions about canoeing and about the dam. Northfield citizens have argued politely for years about the Malt-O-Meal dam. Traditionalists hold that it is a symbol of Northfield’s historic and present identity as a mill town—MOM Brands still produces Malt-O-Meal cereal in Northfield—and thus deserves to stay forever. Others want the river to run freely. Kayakers suggest replacing it with a whitewater racecourse. Biologists have worried that if the dam were not removed properly, downstream mussel populations would be buried and extinguished by the released sediment. Every year, students at Carleton and St. Olaf colleges in Northfield study the dam issue and write research papers about it. In recent years, as the dam structure deteriorates, the Minnesota DNR has had its say as well. In the end, though, the dam’s fate belongs to its owner, MOM Brands. According to CRWP, MOM Brands has a plan, tentatively approved by the DNR, to replace the dam with a series of rocky drops. But MOM Brands told CRWP that because the DNR isn’t pressuring them, they wouldn’t implement the plan until they have to. That’s a lot of acronyms but not much action. Some dams are tenacious indeed.

  Northfield, Minnesota

  When a community owns the dam, citizens do make the decisions, and the way a city treats its river shows how it feels about its river. Architect Witold Rybczynski writes that a “city with an attractive river … not too large and not too small—gains not only river walks. Crossing a bridge in a city feels like a temporary natural reprieve. That’s why lovers meet on bridges … the cities with beautiful natural settings will always have a leg up.” A lovely tribute to the successful intersection of cultural and natural landscapes, this assessment also raises a question: What is an attractive river? Even as the world increasingly understands that the best river is a healthy free-flowing river, river health is rarely the highest goal of city planners. Communities with historic dams that no longer serve their original purpose sometimes cling to their identity as a dam town. Dam preservationists often feel that an undammed river is somehow a lesser river and describe their vision of a post-dam river as “shrinking to a trickle.” Some anglers argue to keep a dam because they find the best fishing just downstream of a dam, even though it is known that fish populations grow in number and diversity throughout the river reach when a dam is removed. A free-flowing river is dynamic. Though a dam may satisfy the human desire for control of nature, as conservationist Wendell Berry wrote in The Unforeseen Wilderness, “Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.”

  We may accept the degradation that a dam inflicts on our river, but when the water we drink is threatened, we take action. Northfield’s drinking water comes from deep aquifer wells, safe from the pollution problems that plague surface water such as rivers. But because karst topography—limestone bedrock riddled with horizontal and vertical fractures and fissures, caves and sinkholes, where groundwater can move rapidly—is common throughout southeastern Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin, a water supply in karst territory is never completely safe. Though the existence of karst underpinnings in the Northfield area is speculative and probably not severe, the problems karst has caused in other areas are well documented. Northwest of Welch, a tiny community along the lower Cannon, karst is common and aquifers there are extremely high in nitrogen that percolates down into the karst from agricultural fields and reemerges in well water. Three different municipal sewage lagoons in southeastern Minnesota have collapsed into the bedrock since 1976, and each time, millions of gallons of sewage drained into the underground drinking water aquifer. Manure ponds can do the same. Understanding, mapping, and respecting the ways of karst aquifers is essential in order to preempt such catastrophes.

  In Minneapolis and other cities on the Upper Mississippi, where the river itself is the city’s sole source of drinking water, ensuring the best possible water quality becomes the goal of urban riverbank planning and storm water management. But this task is complicated by the fact that most cities on a river discharge their treated wastewater and untreated nutrient-laden storm water into the river, where it flows downstream to the next city. Of the six counties in the Cannon watershed, only the Dakota County Soil and Water Conservation District publicly states that water quality is a top priority, according to Beth Kallestad. It’s all about priorities, and somebody is always downstream.

  We head downstream as well, following three young women in kayaks. They paddle hard and quickly leave us in their wakes. The riparian buffer shrinks to a narrow margin of trees between the river and the surrounding agricultural monoculture and the Cannon flows more slowly. As does the time.

  Approaching the old Waterford Iron Bridge, we perk up at the sight of several official-looking men in waders, up to their chests in the current.

  “Hey, I bet you brought lunch!” calls one as we draw near. We all laugh.

  “Is that a metal detector?” asks Bob, pointing to equipment the other men are operating. He doesn’t answer.

  “There’s a scuba diver down there,” he says solemnly, and we’re instantly curious. They look like law enforcement, not DNR.

  “What are you looking for?”

  But they won’t say any more and return to their serious work. For several miles we concoct stories: they can’t tell us anything because they’re federal agents and a murderer threw his gun in the river, or there’s a gun and a body down there, or maybe a gun, a body, and a metal box full of cash. I make a mental note to ferret out the rest of the story. But everyone knows that rivers keep their secrets, and I never will find the truth.

  Voices and laughter ahead interrupt our conspiracy theorizing. Around the next bend, two middle-aged women float downstream in large inner tubes, their cooler bobbing along behind in its own inner tube, tethered to them by a nylon rope which one woman is drawing toward her. “We do this every Friday, but only for three hours,” laughs one, “and only if it’s not raining.”

  By the time we near Lake Byllesby, the pleasant effect of their contagious good humor has dissipated and we’re tired. It’s time for a shore break at the confluence with Chub Creek, next to the State Highway 56 bridge. In mid-September of 1838, on his way overland to explore the Minnesota River valley, Joseph Nicollet and his team camped along the Cannon. On his sketch map, he marked the campsite as just upstream of this confluence. After the group forded, his companion, biologist Charles Geyer, wrote in his botany journal, “the river is about 60 yards wide, 3 feet water & has a very Swift current.”

  The river is still about sixty yards wide and three feet deep, but because the river is impounded downstream of here in order to generate hydropower, there is very little current now. In the next 4.6 river miles, the Cannon riverbed drops sixty feet, the height of the dam that we will portage in a few hours, but the river itself is a flat lake. Which means the gradient is just over thirteen feet per mile, an impressive drop. It’s intriguing to think about what the river with the “Swift current” looked like when Nicollet was here, and how beautiful the series of rocky drops and falls must have been, no doubt even lovelier than Little Cannon Falls on the tributary that joins the Cannon downstream of the
dam. But we will never see it. This dam isn’t leaving.

  Under the intense midday sun, the three-mile slog across Lake Byllesby feels endless, especially at the beginning. If we could fly over Byllesby, we would see that the upper end of the impoundment is a delta, a broad fan of former topsoil washed down from tiled farm fields and eroded gullies along upstream tributaries. But we don’t need to fly to know that it’s shallow here, and our canoe, like us, drags its tail. At the end of the slog, the second and hardest portage of the day awaits.

  At the downstream end of Byllesby, we float quietly for a moment to watch laughing, shouting teenagers jump from a bluff into the water far below, and then we land to portage. Once again, the canoe makes the overland journey on its wheels, which wobble ominously across the parking lot and stubbornly refuse to roll when we reach the grass.

  A few years ago, Bob tried to sell these portage wheels on Craigs-list. He was asking fifteen dollars. A young man drove twenty-five miles to look at them and offered ten dollars. Bob was adamant about his price. The young man wouldn’t budge either, and he drove away without buying. Which is why we don’t have a better set of portage wheels today.