Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  In Nature’s Metropolis, historian William Cronon describes the early growth of the city of Chicago as a process by which “natural and cultural landscapes began to shade into and reshape one another.” And it seems that this is the story of the Mississippi River valley, which has become what Cronon would call a cultural landscape, not to the extent that Chicago is, of course, but no longer a natural landscape either. We push the river, and the river pushes right back, by flooding our dwellings and our farmland, by no longer being the beautiful, life-filled, swiftly flowing, almost animate being that it once was, the beguiling riverscape that first drew us to settle along its banks. The pushing match continues until a truce of sorts is reached, where we humans grudgingly acknowledge that we cannot continually reshape the river without the risk of losing what we first valued in it. Then we begin our rehabilitation efforts. Perhaps we must not ask whether we can return the river to what it once was, which we cannot, but whether the future changes we plan are worth the price we know the river will make us pay. “The most important question about the river’s future is how long it will take the changes we have already made throughout the watershed to work their way through the system. It is like we started pulling at loose threads that we thought were bothersome and are now watching to see how much of the garment unravels,” said glacial geologist Carrie Jennings.

  When we depart the greenery, it is to cross toward the Wisconsin side through what is labeled on the navigational chart as “stump fields.” This is where that low-lying bottomland forest once grew. Despite the chart’s seemingly dramatic warnings, we see no stumps, only feel the threat of long-ago decapitated trees lurking below the surface. We cross ever so cautiously, on the diagonal, a downstream ferry so to speak.

  Upstream, I can just barely see the houses of Stoddard, Wisconsin, and the green and tan traces of more Corps-built islands. Stoddard is where Coon Creek flows in, the stream that Nicollet called the Raccoon River, the stream made famous in the 1930s when conservation crews began to rebuild the deeply eroded land of Coon Valley, a story told in a later chapter.

  A long barge tow is parked along the Wisconsin shore, pointed upstream, the tug engine quiet. Behind the barge, the railroad tracks and the Great River Road run in tandem along the shore, three strands of transportation lined up together. Intrigued by the big beast, which looks far less threatening while at rest, we paddle close and follow the entire length of the tow, studying the rusty riveted sides and speculating about the cargo that weights it down, why it’s parked here, going nowhere. Just before we reach the bow of the tug, a disembodied voice booms over a loudspeaker.

  Barge tow on the Mississippi

  “You! Canoe! You shouldn’t come around the front of a tow where we can’t see you from the wheelhouse. That’s a good way to get killed.”

  Silence.

  Bob calls, “We’re really sorry.”

  Silence. The voice is not accepting our apology.

  We paddle downstream, deeply ashamed of being so foolish.

  Bob turns to me and says quietly, “I didn’t realize the engine was idling, not shut off. He could have started up at any time.”

  It was pure stupid. Ironically, even though Bob and I pride ourselves on being careful canoeists, we broke one of the cardinal rules of paddling the Mississippi: always stay clear of the barge tows. That’s a good way to get killed.

  Big swells generated by our constant companion the tailwind, but no breakers this time, take us on a long roller-coaster ride toward Genoa, alongside the straight levee-like shoreline topped with railroad tracks and banked with riprap. The lock and dam appears, a tiny concrete rectangle on the horizon. A long earthen dike stretches from the dam across the river to Minnesota, its straight edge an incongruous shape on the river. Behind that dike is Reno Bottoms, a sprawling labyrinth of backwater sloughs with not a straight edge in sight. A canoe trail has been mapped through the maze with signs to guide the way, and paddlers often travel the sloughs to see the wildlife. Yet it is rumored that some get lost deep in the bottoms, where they find that every little island looks alike and none look like what they see on the map. We’ll bypass those bottoms tomorrow.

  As we cruise alongside the railroad tracks, I see a small figure far ahead, standing alone atop the riprap, waving what looks like a white flag. As we paddle up, she smiles widely, dishtowel in hand, introduces herself as Anne, our innkeeper, and directs us with her towel toward a low timber railroad bridge. Under the bridge we go. Anne and her husband Jim, along with their friend David, meet us at the concrete ramp on the edge of a duckweed-bedecked pond. As these gracious and generous people help us load our gear into Anne’s car, Anne tells their story. Anne Zabolio Muirhead is the descendant of immigrants from Campodolcino, a town in northeastern Italy. Her people settled here on the Mississippi River before the Civil War, about 1850. Many of the Italians who immigrated to Genoa were stonemasons whose skills are evidenced by the fine stone construction of Anne’s family’s house, and it seems the northern Italians may have been drawn to the rugged terrain of the Driftless, a smaller-scale version of their mountainous homeland, but Anne’s ancestors were not stonemasons. They established the Zabolio General Store in Genoa, a business that was in the family for four generations. She and Jim lived in Texas for years and have just moved north to tend to the property.

  We carry the canoe across Highway 35—Wisconsin’s Great River Road. Just past their 1868 stone inn, the Zaboglio House (Anne’s family dropped the g that was used in the Italian spelling of the name), we come to the adjoining Genoa Motel, where we will stay. In our large, comfortable room is a sign reminding us not to clean fish in the bathroom.

  In the evening, over deep-fried channel catfish and coleslaw at the Big River Inn down the street, we talk about our kind innkeepers, about the easy life of Mississippi River canoeists like us who stay in motels and eat delicious fish dinners in restaurants, about the unexpected Italian heritage of this river town, and about the remarkable early twentieth-century mural of the local riverscape, a wide landscape scene painted on the wall behind the restaurant’s bar, long ago, before the lock and dam system was built, in a time when the river was wild and free.

  In Their Own Pool

  July the first. The day dawns cloudless and cool, and our tailwind still sleeps. Mostly, anyway. On the water by six, and into Lock & Dam 8 without a hitch, we’re glad to be ahead of the big tow that’s lumbering toward the lock from upriver. As we drop the eleven feet to the level of Pool 9, Bob asks the sleepy lockmaster about the best route through the backwater maze to Harpers Ferry, Iowa, some miles downstream of the dam. He shakes his head, tells us he’s not sure where Harpers Ferry is, and apologetically explains, “On the river, pretty much everyone stays in their own pool.”

  And it turns out that he is right. A FWS study done in 2006 on boating habits in Pools 4 through 9 revealed that 87 percent of recreational boaters do stay in the pool into which they launch. It’s the barge tows, the tournament fishermen, and the long-distance travelers in canoes and kayaks that lock through. Navigational pools are separated from each other by dams almost as effectively as natural lakes are by land, and the experience of being on a lake that some seek, combined with the extra effort required to lock through because of barge traffic, no doubt persuade many boaters to stay put.

  Of course, not everyone stays in one pool. And for a certain breed, the lure of traveling the Mississippi under one’s own power is strong. Written accounts of these adventures abound, and we’ve met a few people who made the journey. In the summer of 1936, soon after reading Eric Sevareid’s iconic Canoeing with the Cree and less than a month after the locks at Trempealeau and Fountain City were first put into operation, my Uncle Harry and his cousin Jim canoed the Mississippi from Jim’s home in Winona, Minnesota, down to Hannibal, Missouri. My uncle told me with a wry smile that they didn’t know they could lock through and portaged those first two dams. In Hannibal, they sold their canoe and camping gear and used the proceeds to take
the train to Chicago and then home. Not the whole length of the big river, by any means, but an exciting summer adventure for a couple of teenagers. In 1975, Denny Caneff, now director of the River Alliance of Wisconsin, canoed with a friend the whole length of the river, from Lake Itasca, the Mississippi’s northern Minnesota source, to the Gulf of Mexico. Caneff, who turned twenty-one on the trip, recalls the awe he felt knowing he was floating on the water that drains off almost half the land in the lower forty-eight states. John Sullivan, the water scientist and long-distance canoeist who lives in La Crosse, paddled the length of the river in two stages, from the headwaters to La Crosse in the spring of one year and from Lock & Dam 9 to the Gulf in the fall of the following year. “I did this last trip to make it to an Interstate Water Quality meeting at Fairport, Iowa—I figured I would paddle to my last meeting,” said Sullivan. Sullivan has also paddled the length of the Minnesota, the Wisconsin, the Iowa, the Ohio, the Illinois, and even the big Missouri— state-named rivers that flow into the Mississippi, going solo on all but the Illinois.

  Sullivan told me of the interesting ways that modern technology and social media have transformed long-distance paddling. Before beginning his trip to the Gulf, he learned of a Facebook group called the Mississippi River Paddlers. On the river, Sullivan used his cell phone and iPad, both powered by a portable solar charger with an external battery, to check the group’s Facebook posts, post his own entries and questions, and stay in touch with fellow paddlers all down the river. In Memphis, a member of the group picked him up at the river and took him to their home, where he showered, ate dinner with the family, and stayed overnight. The next morning, he was back on the river.

  “There’s a network of people you don’t even know,” said Sullivan. “People we call ‘river angels’ will help you solve the problems that always come up. And the network constantly changes as you go downstream. Someone I reached through a Facebook contact took me to the Cape Girardeau post office to pick up my food drop.” The paddlers share their stories, their advice, their time, their homes. This growing internet network seems to have led to a lot more people doing trips like this, Sullivan said, and he warned against people taking unnecessary risks on the river, assuming they will be saved by technology. Then he chuckled, “Can you imagine what Marquette and Joliet and other earlier explorers would have to say about today’s modern technologies?”

  Before he retired, Sullivan didn’t leave his day job entirely behind when he headed out on river adventures. At work he focused on long-term water quality changes and problems in the Wisconsin reach of the Mississippi. And so, as he paddled down the Mississippi, he sampled water quality along the way, measuring dissolved oxygen, water transparency, water temperature, and conductivity—a measure of dissolved solids. Sullivan speculated about the potential of today’s many longdistance paddlers to contribute to deeper knowledge of the river, as citizen scientists, trained to test the river water and report what they observe on their journeys to natural resource agencies that manage the river. He sees the growing group of long-distance paddlers as an untapped resource.

  Soon after we leave the lock, we pass the coal-fired Dairyland Power Plant and the Boiling Water Reactor. The latter is an inactive nuclear power plant that has been in the process of being deconstructed since 1987. The twin stacks cast their looming industrial shadows over lush green riverbanks and a quiet river, populated only by a few fishermen in their small boats. Within a mile, though, as we wander the sandy shoreline during a stop, I sense only the natural persona of the river. An egret fishing in the shallows flies away, calling kuk-kuk-kuk, scolding us as it departs. Bob finds a nest of turtle eggs partly buried in the sand. We listen to the rustle of small creatures in the undergrowth. Back and forth between the cultural landscape and the natural landscape.

  Floating along the main channel edge once again, I study the chart, and it occurs to me for the first time that we have been following, approximately anyway, the state line between Minnesota and Wisconsin, an invisible line that meanders with the channel, a line I only think about when looking at the river charts. As a wandering dashed line on the map dividing the channel, it does seem a bit more real, but close the chart book and it’s invisible and forgotten. And now we’re getting close to the equally invisible state line between Minnesota and Iowa, surveyed in 1849 by Captain Joseph J. Lee of the U.S. Topographic Engineer Corps, a line that runs straight, true, and imaginary along the parallel of 43 degrees 30 north latitude. Somewhere in the middle of the river channel ahead, just east of Island No. 135, the boundary lines of the three states meet, at a politically important yet physically invisible point, plotted by the intersection of a line drawn from mathematical concepts with a meandering line designating the middle of the ungovernable river channel. Sometimes the collision of the cultural world with the natural world seems quite absurd.

  Even though physically invisible, boundary lines are no less powerful in defining our world, and each state has its own regulatory relationship with the ecosystems that lie within these boundaries. A river channel will shift and change over time, yet a river is widely accepted as a useful political boundary. This may be because of the practicality of letting nature choose the line. I muse about Joseph N. Nicollet’s map, which shows only rivers. Rivers were the roads, the boundaries, and the reality of the presettlement land. Back then, all the important stuff happened along the rivers. When a political boundary is also an ecological boundary, there is implicit agreement with nature’s design.

  But when these three states were surveyed for settlement, government bureaucracy imposed a grid on the land, defining boundaries without regard to the shape of the land. This is the reason for the deeply familiar landscape grid we see when we fly over this land today, a grid that in our imaginations almost defines the land of the Upper Midwest. In his essay “The View from Man Mound,” conservation biologist and historian Curt Meine writes about the survey: “In subdividing and bounding the land—legally, politically, economically, and imaginatively—it would reshape the biological diversity, ecosystems, and human communities of Wisconsin in profound ways.” He argues that by imposing the grid, we reduced the importance of the watershed as the dominant reality by fragmenting and simplifying a complex and fragile ecosystem and speeded the ecological problems of the Driftless Area, the host of ecological problems that reached a crescendo in the early twentieth century. Speeded, not caused, he is careful to point out. Now we are involved in “refitting rectangular land parcels into watershed-shaped realities,” backpedaling our way into nature’s original map-making design.

  Yet the wonderful nature of the river is that it has always defied the grid. All along the edges of this vast river valley, the shape of the intersection between the land and the river has shaped the way that towns and villages can fit into the landscape, not the other way around. When humans build on a river terrace rather than the floodplain, the natural landscape is, in Cronon’s words, shaping their cultural landscape.

  Lost in my thoughts about imaginary lines, I forget to look for the confluence with Wisconsin’s Bad Axe River, flowing in through the backwater tangles on our left, and we float on past. If we had paddled just a short distance upstream on the Bad Axe, we would have found the Genoa National Fish Hatchery, where biologists raise channel catfish to stock the river with this iconic creature. But that’s not all. The channel cat plays an integral part in the life of an endangered mussel named the winged mapleleaf, which the hatchery also raises. Bringing up mussels is an intricate process for human beings. Each September, on the lower St. Croix River, at the only known mussel bed where the winged maple-leaf still reproduces in the Upper Mississippi valley, scuba divers collect female mussels that are carrying tiny mussel larvae, bi-valve babies called glochidia, and bring the mothers and babies back to the hatchery. Here’s where the catfish comes in. Hatchery biologists prompt the female mussels to expel their glochidia, and these tiny floating organisms attach to the waiting fish’s gills. And it has to be a catfi
sh. If they don’t attach to a catfish, the glochidia die. The catfish and its hitchhikers live in a hatchery tank for the winter. In the spring, having grown to the juvenile stage, about the size of the head of a pin, the tiny mussels drop off the gills to the bottom of the tank. In June, the biologists gather these juveniles and move the new cohort to their ancestral mussel bed home on the St. Croix. Those that survive have grown to the size of a marble by the following year. Those that thrive may live another thirty to forty years.

  But life is uncertain when humans have altered the ecosystem.

  Less than five hundred winged mapleleaf mussels live in that St. Croix bed, making it the most endangered mussel in the Upper Mississippi watershed. The hatchery at Genoa also raises Higgins eye pearly mussels, a bigger creature which hatchery manager Doug Aloisi says has a better survival rate than winged mapleleaf. Biologists plant Higgins eye juveniles in beds near Harpers Ferry, Iowa; in the East Channel at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin; and in the Orion Mussel Bed on the Lower Wisconsin River.

  If we were to paddle even further upstream on the Bad Axe, past the hatchery and up to its tributary, the North Fork of the Bad Axe, we would find good trout water. For much of the twentieth century, this was not true. Like most Driftless streams, the Bad Axe was damaged by past farming practices that led to the topsoil washing from ridge tops down the steep valley slopes and into the stream, destroying the flood-plain, which is nature’s best flood control.