by Lynne Diebel
A short paddle brings us to the town of Wabasha, where we float under the bridge, admiring the elegant steel truss structure built in 1988, replacing one that had been there since the 1930s. This bridge is the first crossing since we left Red Wing. Which, of course, is why the grumpy father of the swimmer with whom we talked in Lake City had to drive so far to retrieve those adventurous and headstrong boys.
When the previous bridge was built, people apparently didn’t think much of the river, or at least the way in which it carried the highway into Wabasha’s riverfront reflected a certain disdain. As the old bridge reached the Wabasha shoreline, the elevated descent ramp made a right turn and traveled for some distance along a shabby riverfront, effectively blocking the view of the river. Wabasha no longer turns its back on the water: the 1988 bridge has a straight approach road, and the town, which has remodeled and landscaped the riverfront, seems now to have made friends with the Mississippi.
Just behind the fountain, the terraces, the trees, and the statues that line the riverfront, a big new building houses the National Eagle Center. Here you can learn about the lives of eagles, attend programs starring live eagles, and generally celebrate the robust resurgence of our national bird in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, where hundreds of the birds now fish, nest, and thrive. In 1972, there was only one eagle’s nest in the Refuge; now the Fish and Wildlife Service reports well over three hundred active nests.
What brought about this remarkable change? According to a recent FWS study, the eagles are successfully nesting here in part because of dramatically improved water quality: since the late 1980s, concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and mercury have dropped 60 percent and levels of other contaminants have been reduced as well. But there’s more to the eagle saga than PCBs and mercury.
From 1782, the year that Congress named the eagle our national bird, until the passage of the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940, the eagle was persecuted almost to the point of extinction, with impunity. Benjamin Franklin maligned the eagle by calling it “a bird of low moral character … and a rank coward.” Hunters, ranchers, and farmers who saw the eagle as a predator of game animals and livestock, a bird with no redeeming value, routinely shot every eagle they saw and destroyed the eggs and the huge nests as well. Alaska had a bounty on the eagle. Not everyone who killed eagles was driven by scorn or hatred: Native Americans had long hunted eagles for the feathers, which they prized. But regardless of motivation, the result was the same for the eagle.
Even after the killings were outlawed, the decline continued for many reasons documented by the FWS: contaminated water, electrocution by power lines, and lead poisoning from eating carrion containing lead birdshot. Rachel Carson asserted in her 1962 book Silent Spring that the eggshell-thinning chemical DDE, a breakdown product of the insecticide DDT, is the primary cause of eagles’ declining populations. In 1921, however, W. V. Van Name had written in the journal of the Ecological Society of America that bald eagles were close to extinction then, twenty-five years before DDT was used in the United States, and a 1937 Smithsonian bulletin reported that the bald eagle had vanished from New England. These reports, which were used to support passage of the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940, suggest that DDE was probably only one factor.
It also became more difficult for eagles to find enough food as the population of human hunters and fishermen spread in the Upper Mississippi River valley. But in an interesting irony, the lock and dam system that has inflicted so much damage on the river has inadvertently helped the eagle at dinnertime. The turbulent waters below a dam stun and kill fish, offering the piscivorous bird an easy meal, year-round. Some believe the most important reason for the raptor’s resurgence is that our citizens now value the eagle and act accordingly, as evidenced by the creation of the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, with its mission of education and protection.
As I am thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about Wabasha, I notice three small boys standing along the riverfront railing, smiling and waving. I smile and wave back, and they hurl a barrage of small stones, which fortunately fall short. I am the mother of three sons, so I don’t take it personally.
“Little hooligans,” chuckles Bob.
Downstream from the town, Pool 5 is a frenzy of fast boats and jet skis, at least in the main channel. Bob suggests that we escape through a quiet backwater channel to Robinson Lake, to avoid all the cross-chop. In that quiet place our bow carves a dark path across the sluggish water’s duckweed carpet and tiny emerald duckweed leaves cling to our paddle blades. As my paddle snags the tough anchor line of a pond lily, the edge of its leaf pad flips up to show off the purple underside. A single lily flower blooms in the wide green bed. Canoeing the back channels is slow but peaceful work, a meditative respite from the intensity of the weekend boat traffic. In the backwaters, the river is once again somewhat natural, no longer a highway. Though the flow is gone and the water stagnant, here the river has a quiet, intricately detailed beauty that draws us in and passively resists our desire for a fast downstream pace. There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
Wandering through the duckweed, we talk about where we’ll sleep tonight, debating whether to camp on an island or try for a room in the little river town of Alma, Wisconsin, five more miles down river. We decide that finding an island campsite on this busy weekend night seems unlikely and camping there could be noisy and unappealing. Which are really just excuses. I pull out the cell phone and dial up our son Greg, who agrees to look online for a place. He calls back to say we can stay at the Alma Hotel. Our cell phone connection is marginal. “She said it’s a sort of ‘hostel,’” he adds in a dubious tone, “I think it’s …” and the call fails.
As we traverse the shallow open water between Robinson Lake and the channel, swarms of jet ski riders buzz our canoe as though we are not there, darting across our path, turning suddenly to create the craft’s signature rooster tail wake, generating inordinate amounts of irritating noise. Once past Teepeeota Point, we cross the equally busy main channel to the Wisconsin side, buffeted all the way by the chaos born of tailwind and wakes. It is a strenuous Sunday afternoon.
We follow the Wisconsin shoreline berm, crowned with railroad tracks. Behind the berm, invisible to us out here in the channel, the confluence with the Buffalo River hides in the backwater called Beef Slough. Before emptying into the slough, the Buffalo flows through wetlands and shallow Riecks Lake. Tundra swans long depended on the lake for a rest stop during migration, but the Buffalo, one of the Upper Mississippi’s more ecologically challenged tributaries, has filled the lake with silt. A native plant called bur reed, a species that thrives in shallow water, gradually replaced the wild celery and arrowhead that the birds once fed on, and thick beds of bur reed choked the open water runways that the birds need for takeoff. Most migrators have been landing elsewhere to rest and feed, and though the lake has recently been dredged in a vain attempt to restore its appeal to migrators, the swans go where the food is.
Landing at Alma involves a ladder and a rope, mysteriously yet conveniently hanging down the ten-foot-high, sheer bank, and then a quick hop across the tracks. It’s nice to be out of the riverine madhouse. We’re at the northern end of long narrow Alma. Like many little towns on the Upper Mississippi, Alma is stretched thin along a glacial outwash terrace, and this particular stretch of terrace is only wide enough for two streets, one perched diagonally above the other, the upper street wedged snugly into the base of steep towering bluffs. The town’s commercial buildings, mostly dating from the nineteenth century, have elegant bones but somewhat worn exteriors. Winter on the Upper Mississippi dramatically reduces the stream of tourists along the river road, and many businesses in Alma struggle to survive. Others, like The Commercial, a classy art gallery in a restored brick building on South Main Street, have been there for years. Wings Over Alma draws visitors to watch eagles year-round and especially in the winter. The warm water discharged by a power plant makes eagles’ winter fish
ing expeditions more profitable, as does the open water in the tailrace of a dam, where the birds find stunned and dead fish. Thus the winter abundance of eagles on the river at Alma, with both a dam and a power plant. During the spring and fall migrations, bird enthusiasts watch from Wings Over Alma’s riverside spotting deck as many thousands of swans, cranes, geese, pelicans, and ducks pass through, traveling the Mississippi flyway.
Halfway down Main Street to our night’s lodging, and soon after we drop the canoe rig over a steep curb cut, our portage wheels begin wobbling in a dramatically new fashion: not a good thing. At the Alma Hotel, we park the canoe on the sidewalk. Still wearing his lifejacket, Bob walks up to the bar, where five patrons in various stages of Sunday afternoon inebriation are seated on barstools.
“Our son called about us getting a room tonight,” Bob says to the barkeep.
“You don’t need a lifejacket in here,” offers one of the patrons. “I don’t know about that, our canoe’s right outside on the sidewalk.”
“Oh!”
Everyone, including the barkeep, hurries out the door to see the canoe.
“You ought to get a motor,” suggests one thoughtfully, adding that he works on a dredging rig. We chat for a bit about the hazards of canoeing the big river.
“So, about the room?” Bob asks the barkeep.
“You should probably see it first.”
Up the stairs from the bar, we see why she said that, as the place is being renovated. There’s no light in the upstairs hall, paint is peeling from the walls, and there’s one shared bathroom. But the room and the bed are clean and comfortable. Our window overlooks Main Street, where groups of motorcyclists gather, revving their engines, not too loudly. We say yes and follow her downstairs to the bar.
“How much do we owe you for the room?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s very expensive, about …”
“Two hundred ninety-seven dollars,” interjects the dredger.
“Twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents; that includes the tax,” the barkeep concludes with a grin. “It’s just a sleeping room.”
When we lock the canoe to the dumpster behind the hotel, Bob inspects the recalcitrant portage wheels. One metal support has buckled so much that another bounce down a curb will render the wheels useless and the other support is twisted.
“So what’ll we do about the portage from Black Earth Creek?” I ask.
“We’ll figure that out when we get there. Let’s get dinner.”
On our evening walking tour of Alma, we have a tasty meal at Kate and Gracie’s, a session at the laundromat, and a trip to the pier downstream of the dam to scout tomorrow’s exit route. As an afterthought, we carry the wheels to a municipal trashcan and drop them in. He should have taken the ten dollars.
Locking Through
Five o’clock Monday morning. Though the barkeep assured us that the cook would be fixing breakfast by now, we knock and knock on the kitchen door, in vain. Sans breakfast, we carry our gear up the street and over the tracks to the town pier, happily downstream of Lock & Dam 4. As we hustle past, a barge tow pushed by an Archer Daniels Midland tugboat is locking through. The tow isn’t moving, and the captain too sits motionless in the wheelhouse, staring straight ahead. Is he asleep or just concentrating?
Below the dam, the river temporarily ceases being a carefully managed navigational pool, a caged animal, and surges like it isn’t chained up, like it’s a natural river. And in the pearlescent gray light of early dawn, we are alone on the water, swept along by the swift current and the tailwind that never sleeps, traveling right down the middle of the main channel, masters of the Mississippi.
Then, for only a moment, I am distracted by a massive structure on our left. At Dairyland Power’s Alma Station, a steady stream of coal rides a conveyor belt into the plant. From the barge? That’s a question for another time.
I turn away and search the opposite bank of the channel instead. Along this reach, the Zumbro flows in from Minnesota, and I’m watching for the confluence. Though Nicollet labeled the river on his map by the Dakota name of Wazi-Oju, or Place of Pines, the French had long called it “La Rivière des Embarrass,” which translates to “River of Difficulties,” in reference to the many snags and deadfalls that block its lower reaches. Des Embarrass, pronounced by the French as day-zahm’-bah-rah,’ gradually deteriorated into Zumbro.
As a child, I lived along a tributary of the South Fork of the Zumbro, close to their confluence, and I want to see the confluence of my old home river with the Mississippi. Upstream of the tiny Bluffland town of Zumbro Falls, the three forks of the Zumbro become one river, and this main stem rambles eastward for forty-four miles into the Kruger Unit of the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood Forest, meandering through a beautiful narrow valley flanked by high bluffs covered in hardwood forest. By canoe or kayak, it’s a wonderful stretch of river, swift flowing, often punctuated by gravel bar riffles and light rapids. This reach is especially scenic in the fall, when the forested hills blaze with color. After it passes the Kruger Unit, the river drops deeper into the Mississippi valley, runs through a short channelized stretch northeast of the little town of Kellogg, then meanders through the woods to its confluence with the Mississippi. We always ended our paddles down the Zumbro at the Kruger Unit, so the river’s final reach is a mystery to me.
Duane Hager farms near Kellogg, and the Zumbro runs through his land. “Rivers and farming are interrelated as far as I’m concerned,” said Hager. “The soil on my farm doesn’t erode into the river much at all. Ever since right after high school, when I went on to school and took a Farm Management course from a teacher who looked at things differently from most, I’ve made a lifelong commitment to building the life in the soil. It’s just like your livestock, you’ve got to feed it.” Hager raises a rotation of small grains, such as oats, and alfalfa and corn. He pastures beef and dairy cattle. He said he doesn’t go after organic certification; the calcium and trace minerals he adds and his tillage practices make the difference that he believes in. “The life in the soil—fungi, bacteria, and invertebrates—makes it more crumbly, stickier, and much less prone to runoff,” he added, “and healthy soil reduces my dependence on inputs, the things that you have to add to the soil if you don’t keep it healthy—fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. I don’t know how much our environment and the people themselves can tolerate.” Though he personally resists the pressure to grow big, Hager laments the economics that often rule the farmer. “I’m almost the Lone Ranger around here. It’s too bad the numbers don’t favor stewardship more.” Hager’s stewardship—conservation tillage and well-fed soil that soaks up the rainfall—offers a way to address the sedimentation problem.
The elusive juncture with the Zumbro that I seek seems indistinguishable from the entry to a slough, a backwater, or a side channel. So many islands, so many choices! On the chart, it looks as though the opening we’re passing must be the mouth. Or is this West Newton Chute, the opening to a side channel? I had heard that the Zumbro once joined the Mississippi farther north, closer to Wabasha, and further south, near the Weaver Bottoms. Where is it now?
Before the last glacier, the Zumbro flowed directly into the Mississippi, but glacial meltwater plugged the mouth of the river with a sand terrace that is now ten miles long and three miles wide. To get around the terrace, where sand prairie, savanna, and woodland communities now grow, the Zumbro had carved two more channels—one to the north and one to the south, and the land along the Mississippi east of the terrace and along the Zumbro to its west is now wetlands: open water marshes, wet meadows, and floodplain forests. This complex confluence was altered again in the 1970s, when a manmade channel was dug through the terrace and the Zumbro once again had a direct route to the Mississippi. It was a big project, one that Duane Hager remembers well. A straight shot to the Mississippi now means that when the Zumbro floods, the water runs off the fields faster because the water ahead of it flows downstream faster, a good thing in terms of short-term
flood control but bad in terms of loading the Mississippi with more sediment.
Modern Mississippi River floodplains are the sediment that is continually deposited by the impounded river. Tributaries like the Zumbro carve their own paths across this floodplain, their channels splitting and rejoining in wide meandering curves, and continue the endless task of moving their sediment loads into the big river, ever rebuilding their deltas for dredgers to remove. “Sediment transport by rivers is a natural process, but easily thrown out of balance by human activities, and sometimes in ways that are not intuitive. For example, when a river goes over a dam, it drops its sediment upstream of the dam, and downstream, the water will be relatively free of sediment, which may seem like a good thing. But in order to transport the amount of sediment it is capable of carrying, the water will then start to erode new sediment from the downstream riverbed, incising and changing the channel with its energy,” explained Wisconsin DNR aquatic ecologist Matt Diebel. “The health of a stream depends on a balance between the water supply and the sediment load.” Duane Hager is doing his part.
If you drive north on Highway 61 from the town of Kellogg toward Wabasha, along that stretch of highway you see small watery bits of abandoned channel and then a slough on the right that connects to the Mississippi in the middle of town, probably the route of the old northern channel. South of the modern Zumbro channel, Minnesota’s Kellogg-Weaver Dunes Scientific and Natural Area and the Nature Conservancy’s Weaver Dunes Preserve protect species like Blanding’s turtle. And five miles south of Kellogg along Highway 61, where the southern channel once emptied into the Mississippi, is Weaver Bottoms, now fed by the Whitewater River.
We sweep past the presumed mouth of the Zumbro, silent in our morning solitude and personal musings, enjoying the ease of being alone on the river. And soon we float along the eastern edge of Weaver Bottoms, a wide, shallow, windswept backwater of mostly open water at the confluence with the Whitewater, partly concealed from those of us in the channel by a long line of low islands. The river’s name references the milk-pale sediment that washes from its banks when it is in flood, as there are no whitewater rapids on this river, only one short boulder-filled drop created by an old rock weir.