by Lynne Diebel
At about the same time we spot Barn Bluff looming further downstream, hunger makes us pull into the first landing we find, Ole Miss Marina, and unpack lunch supplies.
“I’ll have the usual,” Bob says dryly. That would be gouda cheese, which travels wrapped in a red wax jacket, a crispbread called Wasabrod, oranges, and dried apricots. Bob adds a handful of trail mix laced with M&Ms because he’s hungrier than usual. From the picnic table, we watch the river traffic, but no canoes pass.
Some local people say they are afraid of the river—the muddy water, the currents, the pollution, the barges. Others embrace it. I talked with kayaker Jim Patterson, who lives in Red Wing close enough to the Mississippi to see it out his front window and likes paddling the stretch between Baypoint Park and Colvill Park, a short trip just right for a Saturday afternoon.
“Just past the bridge, there’s a cut into the back channel, and then you’re in no man’s land,” he said, “and you can immerse yourself in nature in just a short time.”
Though he finds the Mississippi a convenient paddling destination, Patterson prefers smaller rivers, like the lower Cannon, where he often spots groups of eagles, and the Rush River that flows into the Mississippi at Maiden Rock, Wisconsin. “On a summer day, it’s cool there under the overhanging trees, paddling the clear shallow water. Lots of down trees to walk around, you have to be experienced to get down the Rush,” Patterson said. “I don’t see many other paddlers on any of the rivers. From time to time we do see people on makeshift rafts— college-age kids, usually. They strap together barrels, add a wood platform, build a little house on top, and float down the river. One pair had a chair on top of their house and they rowed from up there, using super long oars.”
For several years, he and his wife have been paddling segments of the river route from their cabin in Cable, Wisconsin, back to their home in Red Wing. The route is down the Namekagon, down the St. Croix, down the Mississippi. Bit by bit. So far, they’ve made it as far as the end of the Namekagon. Someday they’ll finish, just not right away. “It weaves a nice tale. It’s anti-epic,” he said with a chuckle.
And through Patterson I learned about Bruce Ause, longtime director of the Red Wing Environmental Learning Center, now retired, who for years led groups of area kids on all sorts of canoeing adventures. The kids canoed the Cannon all the way from Waterville, which is upstream of Faribault, down to Red Wing. They canoed and kayaked on Lake Pepin and down the St. Croix. And they canoed the Mississippi Headwaters, all the way from Lake Itasca to Red Wing, a 527-mile journey that they broke into five segments, one each year, an amazing adventure for young canoeists. “The big thing for me,” said Ause, “was that Red Wing Shoe has been driving this program, for forty-three years now. They’re very modest about it, but the thing is that kids just couldn’t afford these programs otherwise. It’s a wonderful chance to instill love and respect for the environment.” Ause said he still paddles the Mississippi backwaters a lot, in his Folbot kayak or Old Town canoe, always with the double-bladed paddle that he prefers. “In the spring, at high water,” he said, “you can get anywhere you want to in the backwaters around Red Wing.” And Ause still hears from the grownup kids who he taught to canoe on the big river, thirty years ago.
Still trying to replace the defunct camera, I dial niece Julie, who lives and works in Red Wing. Using a cell phone in a canoe amuses me; it’s a concession to our thoroughly modern natures. Though I know we don’t need a phone, it’s an undeniably comforting connection to the way we’re accustomed to being. But Julie doesn’t answer.
Leaving the marina, we pass three young men milling about on a pier.
“Need any gas?” calls one.
We just smile.
“Ice and a coke?”
“How about a cold beer?” Bob replies.
“Now you’re talking!” he cheers.
Along the riverfront downstream, Barn Bluff stands alone, a ponderous presence lording it over the town. In the distant geologic past, the mountain-like rise was an island in Glacial River Warren, cut off from surrounding uplands by an earlier course of the river, and the pavement of Highway 61 now covers the old riverbed where that version of the river once flowed. At the base of the bluff, barges are moored along the levee, and on shore, the railroad line and Levee Road run past worn-out industrial buildings. Past the bluff, as we draw closer to Lake Pepin, we pass a scattering of little riverside cabins.
A low rumble makes me look back: a barge tow is following us, slowly. It’ll be a while before it overtakes us. There’s a no-wake zone in Red Wing, and we’re happy that the cruisers have to move slowly here too. Wakes are a problem for canoeists, but they cause trouble in another way, far more insidious and lasting. According to research done by Scott Johnson of the Minnesota DNR, high-energy wakes from motorboats can greatly accelerate natural erosion, eroding the banks by as much as two feet per year on the inside of a river bend and up to fourteen feet on the outside of the river bend over a three-year period, destroying shore-land and washing more sediment in the river. The study, conducted here in the Red Wing area, considered only the specific effects of recreational boating, not commercial barge traffic, and Johnson found that erosion was most common when the river was at least three feet above normal low water level. “In concert with the higher water levels from impoundment, and land use that makes shorelines more vulnerable, wakes are capable of accelerating erosion,” said Matt Diebel of the Wisconsin DNR. Ironically, too much sediment renders the river less attractive to those who enjoy using it for recreation, some of whom are driving the wake-generating boats. It’s a cycle that affects more than weekend boaters. The increased sediment also damages fish and wildlife habitat and increases the need for channel dredging, which is funded by taxpayer dollars.
Barn Bluff
From a pier, a uniformed sheriff’s deputy waves us over.
“Hi there. Where are you headed?”
“Hok-Si-La Park, down by Lake City.”
“You better be off the lake by tomorrow. The wind’s coming up.”
“What’s the forecast?”
“Twenty to thirty miles per hour, for four days or more.”
Worse than we had thought. Paddling through the delta toward the lake, we can already feel the tailwind pushing hard. We have over twenty miles of wide-open lake to paddle, and with all that open water the wind will quickly pick up speed and build big breakers soon after we’re past the lee of the delta. Our open canoe doesn’t have the freeboard (or hull height above water) to ride waves like that without swamping. Skimming close to the land would feel safer but take considerably longer, and as the sheriff said, we need to be off the lake soon. We won’t make it to Hok-Si-La.
Quickly, we resolve to take a straight course instead, crossing the series of shallow open bays from point to point—Presbyterian Point, Friedrich Point, Greene Point—hoping to round the final curve of Point No-Point, the massive three-mile-long bluff of Minnesota’s Frontenac State Park that creates the optical illusion of a point, before the wind rises further. We aim for distant Frontenac and paddle hard. No more sightseeing.
Lake Pepin is a naturally wide reach of the Mississippi, twenty-one miles long and, in places, three miles wide. After the last ice age, Wisconsin’s Chippewa River, flowing with a torrent of sediment-laden meltwater from the Laurentide ice sheet, deposited its load at its confluence with the Mississippi, which couldn’t carry the sediment away as fast as the Chippewa delivered it. The sand and gravel settled in a broad alluvial fan that extended far into the Mississippi, forming a natural dam on the big river that partially blocked its channel just upstream of the Minnesota town of Wabasha, well known as the setting of the movie Grumpy Old Men. (Remember the backwater scenes? They were actually filmed on Lake Rebecca, northwest of the Twin Cities, not in Wabasha.)
Pepin wasn’t always the lake that it is now. According to research by geologist Dylan J. Blumentritt, sediment cores reveal that when the lake first began forming over ten thousand
years ago, it went through various permutations. In addition to the large Chippewa fan, there were two smaller tributary fans, at the mouths of the Cannon River and its nearby upstream neighbor the Vermillion. These three natural dams divided the flow in the big river channel into a chain of riverine lakes. Because the Chippewa fan grew faster than the others, the water level gradually rose and submerged the other fans, and Lake Pepin became one body of water, extending all the way upriver to where St. Paul is now. Until settlers began farming the Minnesota River valley, the Mississippi delta grew at a moderate pace, slowly filling in the upper end of Lake Pepin.
The lake is now shrinking at a rate ten times that of presettlement times, and the upper end of Pepin has moved sixty miles downstream of St. Paul.
The biggest villain in this very modern story is intensive agriculture along the Minnesota River, where fields are extensively tile-drained. Water that falls onto a tiled field quickly drains into a network of drainage ditches that empty into tributaries of the Minnesota, taking a swath of topsoil along with it. Overloaded with water that once infiltrated the land gradually but now pours into their channels, the rivers rise precipitously after a rainfall and erode their own banks as well, increasing the sediment load of the Minnesota even more. Runoff from the Minnesota fills Lake Pepin with sediment, shrouding the lake’s ecosystem.
When we paddled tributaries of the Upper Minnesota River—like the Blue Earth, the Le Sueur, the Cottonwood, and the Chippewa—in the spring or after a rain, the water was often a sediment soup. What happens in the Minnesota River doesn’t stay in the Minnesota River; eventually it ends up in Lake Pepin: all that wasted prairie dirt.
Runoff was already a major problem when the federal government mandated that gasoline contain at least 10 percent ethanol. Now data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service show that farmers responded by planting even more acres of corn on land they had previously left fallow to help the environment. When corn prices soared, Dan Charles of National Public Radio reported that the federal Conservation Reserve Program had removed 1.6 million acres of land from the program nationwide, acres that were then planted in corn instead of grasses, in part because the federal government reduced the Conservation Reserve Program, in part because ethanol production had driven up the price of corn. Soil from fields where row crops like corn are planted erodes at rates far greater than from fallow fields, chemical runoff adds insult to injury, and the resulting nasty effect on the river environment is predictable. Production of the biofuel that was supposed to save the environment is instead furthering its destruction. That’s a sad irony, the effects of which may never be addressed, given the persistent nature of federal laws and unsustainable farm policies.
But out past the shallows of the delta, we’re not thinking about erosion. Or the scenery, though the view from the upper end of Lake Pepin is nothing less than spectacular. Five-hundred-foot-high forested bluffs march along both sides of the river’s vast valley, the line of their ridges defining an undulating boundary between midsummer green and deep blue sky. Distant sailboats move swiftly and soundlessly through the tableau.
For over all this beauty, the wind roars, drowning out our voices and almost every other sound, and the waves grow. We surf each following wave and rock in the crisscross chop from powerboat wakes as we head down the shallow bay. My knuckles are white on the paddle grip. We really don’t want to swamp out here.
Over the din of the wind, Bob yells, “Just stay on the right; don’t switch sides.” I nod my assent without turning around. The waves come in groups, three or four average-sized ones followed by a big surge. With little adjustments in speed, we find we’re able to ride the crests. When I turn my head, cautiously, after one set of three, looking to see whether the big one will soon follow, I notice that the barge tow has crept closer.
Though we haven’t taken on much water yet, the wind is rising steadily. We resist the growing urge to paddle harder, which only sends our bow diving into the troughs of the waves, and try to stay with the rhythm of the waves. But we angle instead a little closer to shore. It feels safer there.
Three miles down the lake, the barge tow pulls even with us. We’re far enough off his starboard bow that his wake doesn’t cause us any trouble, though I suspect that the tugboat captain thinks we are fools to be out here. We’ve passed the third point of land and left the tempting safety of the sandy beaches behind us. To our right, the enormous wooded limestone-capped bluff of Frontenac, three miles long and 430 feet high, rises straight up from a narrow pebble beach. It looks like a medieval fortress. We’re hoping to reach the sandy landing at Old Frontenac, a least a mile further beyond this forbidding cliff. I’m still tense but not terrified. The water’s warm, we’re strong swimmers, and we’re not far from shore, such as it is.
A sudden shove from one of those big waves and we take on more water. And we edge even closer to shore. Bad idea. A breaking wave catches us and in a flash we are over, struggling to right the boat in the shallows. Paddles in hand, we wade through the breakers, muscling the thrashing canoe onto shore.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. You?”
“Just wet.”
Our waterproof packs are still safely lashed in the canoe, and the brief dramatic interlude concludes with a comic denouement: a red-coated gouda cheese, small escapee from the cooler, floats away.
We stand side by side on the wet pebbles, staring out at the lake, uncertain at first what to do next, as though there must always be something to do next. The waves are pounding hard on the shore, too rough to launch again. On this narrow stony beach, there is just enough room to stay out of the water. The bluff is too high and too steep to climb.
“We just have to wait for the wind to die,” says Bob after a pause.
The unfettered wind on big Pepin often holds paddlers captive on shore, and the wise traveler waits it out rather than risk a deep-water capsize. Windbound on Pepin is a familiar tale in the annals of Mississippi River paddling. Referencing an 1830s canoe journey with his friend Robert Serril Wood, George Catlin, the artist of Indian life, wrote in Letters and Notes, “We were stranded upon the Eastern shore of Lake Pepin, where head-winds held us three days; and, like solitary Malays or Zealand penguins, we stalked along and about its pebbly shores til we were tired, before we could, with security, lay our little trough upon its troubled surface.”
In solidarity with these long-ago castaways, we secure our canoe and stalk our own pebbly shore, following the undulating foot of the bluff to find if we can spot Old Frontenac, talking about how perhaps we could tow our canoe along the shallows to that friendly landing. And though we walk a quarter mile, Old Frontenac is still out of sight, and we return upwind to the canoe to wait out the blow. There’s still nothing to do, so I walk the shore again, looking for shells and shiny stones.
There was a time when mussel shells would have littered this shore. Until the late nineteenth century, vast numbers and varieties of mussels lived in the Mississippi, along the entire length of the river, filtering the water and feeding mussel eaters like raccoons, muskrats, otters, and people. After a raccoon had finished his mussel meal and departed, a midden of empty shells on the shore would tell the tale.
Then mussel shells became the raw material of the button industry. A century ago, clammers, not raccoons, would have been hard at work along this very shore, harvesting mussels with crowfoot bars, forks, rakes, diggers, scoops, basket rakes, tongs, and by hand while wading the shallows. The Annual Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries to the Secretary of Commerce for the Fiscal Year 1916 documents the Mississippi mussel’s economic lure to those living on Lake Pepin: “Probably the most productive portion of the river in 1914 was in the vicinity of Frontenac, Minnesota, where, within a few miles, the 45 men engaged caught 645 tons of shells, valued at $10,570 and $2,100 worth of pearls and slugs. Lake Pepin as a whole produced 1,932 tons of shells, valued at $31,486 and $11,820 worth of pearls.” Across Lake Pepin in Mai
den Rock, Wisconsin, the commissioner reported that crews harvested 390 tons. In today’s dollars, those are tidy sums. By 1914, the pearl button industry was still profitable and the river was still rich with mussels, but the harvest was only half of what it had been in 1911. By 1929, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), “the mussel beds were literally wiped out.”
As it was with the vast herds of buffalo up the Cannon River on the plains, and as it was with the endless stands of white pine up the Chippewa River in Wisconsin’s north woods pineries, after twenty-five years of relentless harvest by newcomers, the seemingly limitless supply of mussels, a supply that formerly sustained both humans and animals on the Mississippi River, disappeared. A mussel bed still exists back at Friedrich Point, and another at Maiden Rock. But as I walk the shore today, only pebbles and cobbles pave the place where clammers once shoveled up 645 tons of mussels. Not even an empty shell.
It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, though, and the powerboats are still out on the water, roaring up and down the lake. One smallish boat passes close to shore, headed upstream and upwind. As the broad prow of the boat slams each oncoming wave, the water’s force pushes the hull up to about forty-five degrees. Then the boat drops precipitously into the trough, slamming the water’s surface. I can’t see the faces of the driver and his passenger—invisible behind the curved windshield—but I’m willing to bet they love this struggle against the power of wind and wave, or they wouldn’t be out there.
It’s clear that we are stuck on our stony beach until the wind lets up, at least a bit. We cook up some dinner—fried spam, onions, green peppers, garlic and mushrooms over rice, and an orange apiece for dessert—and we wait, restlessly. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, and across the lake the Wisconsin bluffs shimmer green in the late afternoon sun. Our water bottles are almost empty. And we’re windbound.