Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  We talk about a canoe trip we took a few years ago in Whitewater State Park, paddling from the tiny town of Elba, Minnesota, downstream for about ten miles. In many ways, the Whitewater is a lovely river. The frequent riffles, the broad sandbars, the sense of isolation and glimpses of distant bluffs all make for a good day of paddling. That warm sunlit spring afternoon, the valley was filled with the song of the warbler, the loud insistent call of the flicker, the whistle of the oriole. Sandpipers and killdeer skittered across the sandbars, swallows built nests in the clay banks, and wild turkeys roamed the high grass on the banks.

  Yet amid the beauty, erosion is the darker story of the Whitewater. On the reach we paddled, the channel was often burrowed so deep in the earth that we felt as though we were in a roofless tunnel. This sad tale began in the late nineteenth century. Over a period of forty years, farming practices in the Whitewater valley led to catastrophic erosion. By the 1930s so much soil had poured off the surrounding hills that it lay twelve feet deep in the valley, building steep-sided riverbanks now sometimes fifteen feet high. Records say the flood of soil buried the riverside community of Beaver up to the chimney caps, and much more washed downstream to the Mississippi. Now, every time it rains and the river rises, more soil from these high banks crumbles into the river and washes downstream. Because the floodplain lies deep under the soil, disconnected from the river, flood water has no place to go but downstream, and the edge of the channel is no longer home to the plants and animals that make up a healthy, dynamic floodplain.

  Erosion in the Whitewater uplands has largely been corrected by changing the way people farm and where they farm. And the land in this valley is part of over a million acres of land that lie between the Zumbro River and the Root River valleys, land that has been designated as Minnesota’s Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest, named in honor of the man who helped inspire the changes and who is buried in the historic Beaver Cemetery. In his classic book The Streams and Rivers of Minnesota, Thomas F. Waters tells Dorer’s story:

  He respected all wildlife, the native plants, the soil and rivers, and all the natural elements of what we now call an ecosystem working in harmony. And he saw man as a part of the ecosystem—hunting, fishing, learning, planting, and modifying his own impact on the system. Concentrating on the Whitewater Valley, Dorer (Minnesota Department of Conservation) led the fight for restoration of the eroding slopes. Trees, shrubs, and grasses were replanted, gullies were blocked and filled, grazing stopped, improved cultivation practices were encouraged…. Dorer was an environmentalist before the word was coined; Minnesota is fortunate to have had him. The restored river valleys of the southeast are today living monuments to his stewardship.

  Yet the legacy of what happened, the altered shape of the land, is still there. The relationship between the water table and the surface of the ground was changed back then, and there is a new equilibrium. Ever since the damage was done, the Whitewater has been dumping too much sediment into the Weaver Bottoms. On the wide-open expanse of water at the confluence, wind-driven waves keep the sediment in suspension and uproot vegetation that tries to grow. In Immortal River, his book about the Mississippi River, biologist and ecologist Calvin Fremling tells the story of the demise of the Weaver Bottoms that once was. In 1940s and ’50s, during the first decades after the river was impounded, the wetland was so rich with vegetation and muskrat mounds and migratory waterfowl that great numbers of hunters flocked there every hunting season. But as the sediment poured in, the once verdant wetland deteriorated steadily, eventually becoming a shallow lake almost devoid of plants and wildlife.

  Because the lock and dam system keeps water levels pretty much the same, the river no longer follows its natural cycle of a high spring pulse giving way to low water by late summer, when the soil in the bottoms dries and compacts enough for aquatic plants to germinate, root, and thrive. The tall grasses, smartweed, cattails, duck potatoes, bulrushes, and other species that once filled the bottoms no longer had a chance and had all but disappeared by the late 1960s. With them went the swan and the mallard and all the other waterfowl. And the wind and waves were free to persist in their erosive habits.

  In the mid-1980s, as part of the Environmental Management Program (EMP) for the Upper Mississippi, the Corps built Swan and Mallard islands as windbreaks and planted vegetation, the first attempt at reversing the destruction. Unable to root in the constantly flooded conditions, however, the plants died. In 2005 and 2006, the Corps reduced water levels of Pool 5 during the growing season, but most plantings still died. Drawdowns help consolidate the sediment, giving vegetation a chance to root, but their use was limited by the need to maintain the nine-foot channel, thus they were only done when flow was high. In addition, the effect of a drawdown is greatest at the downstream end of the pool, and Weaver Bottoms is only about halfway down Pool 5.

  After all that work, Weaver Bottoms still looked pretty bad and many people said as much. One river scientist says in retrospect that the agencies in charge were over-optimistic about the results and consequently the public had unrealistic expectations and that the Corps just wanted to get rid of a lot of sand.

  Corps hydraulic engineer Jon Hendrickson, on the other hand, said that the Weaver Bottoms project that some judged a failure was actually not, that the decline in vegetation during that time was generally true all along the Upper Mississippi. “And Weaver Bottoms was an incomplete project,” added Hendrickson. Swan and Mallard islands, sand islands that look as though they were drawn with a draftsman’s French curve, did reduce wind fetch, but these two islands were not enough. For years, swans and mallards just flew on by.

  Island building is back in favor now, yet Congress chronically under-funds the EMP, by half. And, as Anfinson writes, “Critics of the EMP contend that its solutions are too local and too insignificant to make much difference.” The Ikes would like to see Congress authorize restoration of the bluff tops and the tributary deltas, to go to the source of the problem.

  Despite the slow pace at which Weaver Bottoms is returning, FWS Winona district manager Mary Stefanski said migratory waterfowl are coming back. “A wild rice bed is filling Weaver Bottoms,” said Stefanski, “and we’ve had a great recovery during fall migration.” She credits both those drawdowns—which reproduced the river’s natural low-water cycle—and improved water clarity for the rice’s return. FWS aerial surveys over the past decade find increasing numbers of migratory waterfowl resting and feeding in the bottoms during fall migration. Though numbers certainly haven’t reached the levels seen in the 1950s, the swan and the mallard—not to mention the blue-winged and green-winged teal, gadwall, widgeon, scaup, pintail, northern shoveler, canvasback, goldeneye, bufflehead, merganser, and my favorite, the little coot— have returned to Weaver Bottoms to feast on wild rice.

  Just past the bottoms, I look up the riverbank toward the Minnesota village of Minneiska, a seemingly unremarkable small town when we have driven through on Highway 61. From down here on the river, though, Bob comments that it looks like a perfect little European village, nestled in the lap of the high green bluff, a cluster of bright rooftops and steeples pointing skyward from the trees. On his map, Nicollet labeled the nearby Whitewater River as Miniskah River, and though the river’s name was later translated to English, the modern name of the village evolved from this Native American word for white water.

  Now the main channel narrows, bounded on the Minnesota shore by a railroad berm and on the Wisconsin side by a long straight dike all the way to the dam that lies downstream. Behind the dike, disconnected from the river except for two culverts that allow oxygen-rich river water to flow through, is the north end of Whitman Bottoms. When the river was impounded, the dike protected this maze of narrow channels and small lakes from the wind and waves that changed Weaver Bottoms, preserving habitat that hosts visiting waterfowl during spring and fall migrations.

  We’re closing in on Lock & Dam 5. Bob turns on his marine radio and clicks to channel fourteen. H
e has been rehearsing this.

  “Lock and dam number five. Southbound white canoe requesting permission to lock through. Over.”

  A pause, filled with static, then a brisk voice replies, “Just give me ten minutes to fill it up. Over.”

  I swivel around to look at him, and we both grin.

  Red traffic light turns to green. Massive double doors creak open, we paddle in, doors creak closed behind us. We’re all alone in the huge lock—large enough to hold a tugboat and eight barges—until the lock-master leans over the side to greet us and to remind me to hold the mooring line that hangs down the concrete wall, but not to grip it or tie up. She asks where we’re headed and wants to hear all about the journey. All the while, river water is quietly flowing out of the lock chamber. Ever so slowly, the wall of the lock slides by and the line slips through my hand as we drop with the water, chatting with her as she slowly rises higher and higher above us. It’s an odd, rather disconcerting feeling, like being in an invisible elevator. The distance we drop, six feet, is the dam’s head, the difference between the water elevation above and below the dam, a measurement that varies with changes in the river’s flow.

  Downstream doors swing open, light changes from red to green, whistle toots, and we paddle out through the slight turbulence of the tailwaters, waving goodbye without looking back. No matter how many times I lock through in a canoe, I will always feel that the dam exerts only illusory control over the immense power of the waterway that Fremling calls Immortal River. The knowledge that a six-foot-high wall of water lies behind those doors is deeply unsettling. Only long after we leave the dam behind does my hand relax on the paddle grip.

  On the Wisconsin side of Pool 5A is the undiked lower half of Whitman Bottoms, a huge backwater hardwood forest with a complex ecosystem, about six thousand acres of bottomland swamp. It’s a maze of waterways that floods when the water is high, as is the natural relationship between a river and its floodplain. Waumandee Creek flows through the bottoms to the Mississippi. In some upland areas groves of gnarly swamp white oak grow, a tree that was once more prevalent in bottomland throughout the river valley but has slowly died out since impoundment. Slowly is the right word—these trees can live to be over three hundred years old. To help reverse the losses, John Sullivan, retired Wisconsin DNR water quality specialist, raises swamp white oak and American elm seedlings as a hobby for the Corps and FWS to plant along the river.

  The whole of Whitman Bottoms is the preferred hangout of a real live river rat named Kenny Salwey. Though Salwey lives in the hills north of Alma, for most of his life he has hunted and fished, guided hunters and fishermen, run a trap line, dug ginseng, and otherwise eked out an independent living in the undeveloped land along the river, a way of life once followed by many others, in the early twentieth century. Selway spends his days, and often his nights, in the Whitman Bottoms, where he has built several small shacks for overnight accommodation. Encouraged by the local conservation warden to share his experiences, Salwey now talks to kids, speaks on public radio, writes books, and tells stories, about his life, about the Upper Mississippi River valley, about respect for the environment. And he has found an eager audience for his storytelling and his downhome writing in books like Muskrat for Supper. The BBC filmed a documentary about Selway’s life, titled Mississippi—Tales of the Last River Rat. Salwey and Whitman Bottoms are relics of what the river once was.

  Floating down Pool 5A, we pass the opening to a side channel at the bottom of Island No. 52. A path into the bottoms? The chart says yes, but it looks shallow and impassable, and there’s a better way into the backwaters downriver and off the channel, at Merrick State Park near Fountain City.

  Pool 5A. The name makes the impoundment sound like a bureaucratic afterthought. But, then again, you will find on the navigation charts that there is no Pool 23 in between Pool 22 and Poll 24. Clearly, the Corps didn’t have their numbering act together when they labeled the dams. It’s the government approach to natural resource management, no doubt, but I often think about names, how they change our perception of a place. For example, compare the impersonal utilitarian “Pool 5A” to the evocative names of its backwaters—Haddock Slough, Horseshoe Bend, Pickerel Run, Pap Slough, Polander Lake, Betsy Slough. The last gravel state highway in Minnesota, the one that follows the Whitewater River, is mentioned on local radio broadcasts in the spring, as in “the Beaver to Weaver Road is closed again due to flooding,” referencing the places that the road connects—ghost town of Beaver and live town of Weaver—in a homespun, inadvertently poetic fashion. Every name has its stories.

  Yet there are many who do not care whether it’s a name or a number. Mike Chicanowski, the founder and president of Wenonah Canoe in Winona, said that Pool 5A is his favorite place to paddle on the Upper Mississippi, that when Europeans visit, he takes them canoeing on Pool 5A, where they are invariably amazed by the vast and beautiful world of the Refuge, especially the backwaters of this very impoundment. “They tell me there’s nothing like it back in Europe,” he said. “Nothing.”

  A few years back, we took his advice and paddled the Straight Slough Canoe Trail, from just below Lock & Dam 5 to the Verchota landing near Minnesota City. In contrast to the sometimes boring and even sterile uniformity of the main channel, the bottomland world can be a fascinating tangle of vegetation. Here is where the birds hang out— white egrets, blue and green herons, bald eagles, turkey vultures, ducks of every stripe and color, songbirds everywhere. A riot of swamp willow thickets, beds of rushes, the round leaf pads and yellow blossoms of American lotus, arrowhead plants, and flowering wild iris edge the wooded banks of the slough.

  The birds are here in the backwaters because this is where the food is. On the hot June day that we were there, a small gang of common mergansers floated on the dark water, bottoms up, searching for minnows or whatever other little fish they could find. One dove, with a slight leap, and disappeared; the others immediately followed. Anglers of the human variety sat quietly in flat-bottom johnboats drifting with the current.

  We had heard that the improbable-looking longnose gar—a long narrow relic of the Cretaceous, armor-clad in shiny diamond-shaped scales and sporting a long beak—lives in these sloughs, as it has for millennia, patrolling the water column for minnows and carp, aggressively grasping prey with rows of needle-sharp teeth and swallowing it whole. Though the gar is known to sometimes migrate—and even to shoot right through a dam gate that’s open at high water—the usual habit of the gar is to live and fish in quiet pools. Anglers have no luck catching them unless they have the patience to allow the gar to swallow the hook. And we saw no trace of the ancient river denizen, though I looked.

  Another layer of the river’s history hides deeper, under the bottom of the slough, unseen except by mussel scientists. Wisconsin DNR biologist David Heath told me that beds of empty mussel shells, the remains of mussels buried by the river’s impoundment, lie preserved under the sediment, and when biologists dig deep enough, they find excellent clues to the historic fauna, the astonishing numbers and varieties of mussels that once lived in the Upper Mississippi. Mussels still live on the bottom of the Mississippi, but only in areas where silt hasn’t coated the gravel and stone substrate that they need for their living quarters. According to Heath, one of the noteworthy mussel sites remaining on the Upper Mississippi lies back upriver in Pool 5, somewhere in Pomme de Terre Slough, also known as Belvidere Slough. When we took the Straight Slough canoe trail, we paddled slowly through Straight, Burleigh, and then Crooked sloughs. The fast-moving interstate highway of the main channel seemed miles away on that trip.

  Today, unwilling to be patient, we make only a brief exploratory foray into the slough and then return to our downstream voyage. Still remarkably alone on the river—except for a motionless figure in a hooded jacket hunched over in his fishing boat, who seems to be trying to shut out the rest of the world—we follow the red nun buoys to the Wisconsin side, floating past the town of Fountain City, another river
ine beauty crowned with two slim tapered steeples. Just as I suggest that we stop for lunch at the Monarch Tavern, a shrill whistle echoes off the bluffs and a freight train rumbles through town, headed south. It’s a long, long freight and we’d have to wait for it to pass before we could land. Ever restless, we move on.

  Each day, about sixty-five trains travel both sides of the valley. A handful of Amtrak trains carry passengers. The rest carry freight, bulk commodities such as grain, fertilizer, taconite, frac sand, coal from Wyoming, and shale oil from North Dakota. The Burlington Northern & Santa Fe and Canadian Pacific freight lines are major iron strands in the big transport braid that is the modern Mississippi River valley. Inns on the river generally offer their guests earplugs.

  Locking through at Dam 5A, we’re on our own. Though Bob’s radio alert works fine again, this time there’s no friendly lockmaster waiting in the lock, hanging over the wall to chat, just a flat, detached voice through a speaker, like an automated lock-through, a letdown after the good time we had at the first lock. A quiet drop in the lock and we’re in the Winona pool.

  Winona is a town I thought I knew well. All through the late 1960s, on my way back to college, it was in Winona that I caught the Milwaukee Road, riding the train to Chicago on what is now Amtrak’s Empire Builder line. And I often visited high school friends who had moved to Winona. But I didn’t know then about the town’s interesting geological past.

  In Immortal River, Fremling explains that after the level of Glacial River Warren dropped, the river bottom was much deeper than it is now. Sediment carried by the river’s many tributaries gradually refilled the scoured-out gorge. Because the river itself was now much smaller than Warren, it no longer filled the wide valley. Instead, interwoven strands of flow carved smaller channels in the sandy sediment, leaving sandbars between the strands. One watery strand of this braided channel system flowed along the base of the bluffs behind what is now Winona. Sediment from small tributaries—Burns Creek, Gilmore Creek, and Garvin Brook—built deltas that blocked this side channel, forming the small lakes, Lake Winona and Boller Lake, that now lie between those bluffs and the huge sandbar that is their eastern shore, and the city’s site. Down here at river level, this arrangement is far less obvious than from bluff-top Garvin Heights Park, where there’s a panoramic view of the sandbar city.