Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  At the table next to us, a group of fishermen drink beer and grouse about their lack of success this morning. I turn around to talk with them.

  “Hi. Do you know why the river dropped so much last night?”

  “It’s all about dam closure and release,” says the one closest to me. “They close it just to keep the water high on Lake Wisconsin, for the people up there. That means we don’t get enough down here. It shouldn’t be this low, not even with the drought and all.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “They’re not about to let the lake levels drop. It’s always been this way.”

  Wisconsin River near Spring Green

  The dam upstream at Prairie du Sac is owned by Alliant Energy and regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). According to Mark Cupp, director of the Riverway board, it became a “run-of-the-river” hydroelectric facility in 1990, which means that the levels below and above the dam must vary proportionately, with the downstream varying within one foot of the upstream variation. Theoretically.

  Does the FERC license allow Alliant to maintain higher than proportionate levels upstream, for the sake of the property owners on Lake Wisconsin? The simple answer seems to be yes. Lake Wisconsin is fifteen miles long, heavily developed and heavily used, and that creates pressure on Alliant to favor the impoundment. When there is a drought, keeping water levels pretty much the same in Lake Wisconsin means that levels on the lower river drop even lower than a proportionate decrease would dictate, though the flow to the lower river cannot drop below a defined minimum. For water on the Lower Wisconsin to drop abnormally low is one of the many prices we pay when we dam our rivers.

  Full of burgers, fries, and sodas, we depart Bob’s. It soon seems that either we’re sluggish from the digestive demands or perhaps the current is now flowing faster, but the journey to the Highway 23 bridge, just over a mile, feels unreasonably slow, especially compared with this morning’s blazing pace.

  At the bridge, the channel narrows as the river flows around a sharp bend, bounded on the south by an imposing rock bluff that runs right down to the water. As we paddle doggedly along the limestone face of that bluff, our canoe advances upstream so slowly that I am able to closely examine and even count the leaves of each liverwort and lichen growing out of the shaded rock crevices. Remember the Zen thing.

  Partway up the bluff above us, out of our sight from this angle, County Highway C cruises along a narrow road cut. We’re also below the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center, where the dining room overlooks the river. Wright’s home Taliesin is in the hills just south of the river, and his architectural style, deeply rooted in the landscape of the Driftless, echoes the shapes and forms of these bluff faces, their out-croppings, and the low, rounded hills that rise above them, an organic expression of this land where the architect grew up, the materials and shapes derived from the landscape, and at times from the riverscape. Wright built with Cambrian sandstones and dolomites quarried from the hills of the Driftless and mixed Wisconsin River sand into his plaster.

  On the opposite shore is Peck’s Landing, the canoe access where great numbers of canoeists have now parked their boats and are milling about like water bugs in the shallows by the big sandbar adjoining the landing. Peck’s Landing has long been a crossing, located as it is at a narrowing of the channel. According to Richard Durbin in The Wisconsin River: An Odyssey Through Time and Space, it was here that an enterprising fellow named Alvah Culver ran a flat-bottomed scow ferry across the river in 1840, from the mouth of Mill Creek at the Tower Hill State Park canoe landing to approximately the site of the canoe landing. Durbin writes that the ferry service changed ownership at least five times before the first bridge, a drawbridge resting on a massive turntable, was built in 1887, followed by an iron bridge in 1906, an army surplus Bailey bridge in 1948, and in 1966 the concrete structure that now bridges the river, carrying the road that leads to Spring Green.

  The village of Spring Green was built above the river valley’s flood plain, but not by much. When the Baraboo ice dam that held back Glacial Lake Wisconsin broke for the final time, about fourteen thousand years ago, the torrent raged down the Lower Wisconsin River valley to the Mississippi in a sudden and spectacular flood that geologists Dott and Attig write “likely happened in just a few days or weeks” and was over a hundred times the present size of the river, carving the old valley much deeper. Erosion of glacial deposits in the upper river’s watershed refilled the valley with up to 150 feet of sand and small pebbles in places. As the flow diminished to become the modern river, it carved a much smaller channel in the sediment of the wide valley, leaving a meandering trail of sandy terraces along its banks, above the flood plain but below the level of the high valley walls. Spring Green, like many towns in the valley, is built on such a terrace. To the north of the river near the village, groundwater flows from an aquifer and emerges from upland springs. The same aquifer feeds a network of sloughs—Hill Slough, Cynthia Slough, Hutter Slough, Norton Slough—that weave a watery web on the terrace, a web that connects to the river, especially during flooding. These backwaters, which lie all along the Lower Wisconsin, are important threads in the fabric of the riverine ecosystem.

  At Spring Green’s River Valley High School, science teacher Joel Block weaves lessons from the river into his conservation science and biology classes. These kids, juniors and seniors in high school, are already tuned into the river’s offerings. Many spend their summers fishing the backwaters and their fall weekends hunting on the floodplain. “The sloughs are the place that a lot of them spend more time than on the main river, though they like to go tubing in the summer,” said Block. “Hunting for waterfowl in the marshes and sloughs and on Long Lake is big for them.” In class, Block talks with them about the connection between the river and the forest, about the wetland community of plants and animals, about the ecology of fishes that live in the Wisconsin. Lessons are sometimes outdoors, in the school forest near the river or at the river landing. When they take a trip to Peck’s Landing, the students fish and Block teaches them about what they have caught.

  “The river is important to the kids, and they value and respect it,” said Block, who has himself canoed the river from Spring Green to the confluence.

  “If we can get kids outside, those who live here will value the Riverway. The Riverway is an educational opportunity, a living laboratory,” said Mark Cupp.

  The lower layers of the river, the less visible threads of the intricate tapestry, can be found in those sloughs that Block’s students know so well. These quiet, off-channel lakes are homes for species of fish most of us haven’t heard of, fish with fanciful names and unexpected ways—purple pirate perch that have their anus located right under their gills, starhead topminnows that will jump out on the bank to escape a pursuing bass and then jump back into the water when it leaves. And fish that don’t like fast currents, like bluegills and largemouth bass, spawn in the sloughs. Unless the river is high, these small shallow floodplain lakes that lie between the river and Spring Green are fed almost entirely by the groundwater of the aquifer along the side of the river valley, also the source of the river’s baseflow.

  The sloughs have long been clear-water refuges for their finny inhabitants, but in the last decade nitrate levels in the water have crept up to a point that threatens the fish and feeds dense algal blooms on the once clear ponds. Nitrates are also increasing in private wells, and fish aren’t the only ones hurt by nitrates—babies who drink water high in nitrates can suffer from “blue baby syndrome.” Aquatic biologist Dave Marshall, recently retired from the DNR, feels that the nitrates are coming from agricultural fields on the river terrace. Because the farmer must add nutrients to this sandy infertile soil in order to grow a crop, many truckloads of liquid manure and tanks of anhydrous ammonia are spread on a field during the growing season. Nutrients that are not used by the crops percolate down through the porous sandy soil into the groundwater. Marshall suggests that establishing
buffer zones planted with deep-rooted plants—the roots of prairie grasses like big bluestem and switch grass go down twelve to fifteen feet—may reverse the trend of excess nutrients in the sloughs, an idea supported by research at Iowa State University, but it is up to landowners to decide whether to install these buffers. He also feels that sloughs with excess nitrates, and in some cases, excess phosphorus as well, should be placed on the Wisconsin’s Impaired Waters list.

  Now here’s an interesting paradox. In the high rocky bluffs north of Spring Green, those icy springs bubble from the vast subterranean aquifer to feed the little tributaries of Bear Creek and the floodplain lakes and sloughs of the Wisconsin. Very occasionally, this groundwater even floods low-lying areas of the town. Yet on the south faces of these bluffs the land is so sandy and infertile and temperatures get so hot that prickly pear cactus grows there among the sand dunes. Years ago, Bob and I hiked there with a Nature Conservancy group led by a guide named Gigi who explained that Spring Green Preserve is a little desert microclimate, populated by lizards, snakes, pocket gophers, and open-country birds like dickcissel and lark sparrow. There are black widow spiders and wolf spiders here, and cicadas, tiger beetles, and predatory wasps. Clumps of native sand-prairie plants—silky prairie-clover and yellow evening primrose, false heather, three-awn grass, and rare prairie fame-flower, plains snake-cotton, Venus’s looking-glass, and dwarf dandelion—are scattered across the sand. Sand barrens like this, a fascinating anomaly in the Driftless topography, are not unique to Spring Green. Scattered all along the Lower Wisconsin, at Arena, Gotham, Blue River, and Woodman, are other remnants of sand barrens, a reminder that glacial meltwater had long ago filled this valley with sand, from bluff to bluff.

  Two more miles upstream of Peck’s Landing, we discover that crews are still working on the new bridge for Highway 14 and the river is a chaotic construction zone. We’re paddling harder than ever, yet are traveling slower than at any other time on this river, less than one mile per hour. It feels as though a surge of swifter current, or a narrowing of the channel, is pushing us back downstream. Under the blazing midday sun, somewhat overheated and cranky, I clutch my paddle grip tightly as we maneuver between sandbars and construction equipment in the river, obstacles that swirl the current in confusing patterns.

  I want to look one last time at the old bridge, a handsome steel through-truss bridge with eight curved arches painted a classic bridge green, a structure that has carried traffic since 1949. But the heavy, graceless span of its concrete replacement blocks its shape from our view until the moment we are in between the two, trying to find the best route through the maze and focusing on the river. This fall, the old bridge will be torn down and forgotten as traffic moves to the new.

  The push of the current and the swirling eddies ease upstream of the bridge, and we return to our relaxed paddling rhythm. Now chaos of a different variety reigns at the boat landing upstream of the old bridge. As we paddle past, canoeists and motor boaters are jockeying about, all trying to use the ramp first. Cars, trucks, and boats on trailers fill the parking area, as do piles of aluminum canoes, some dumped in the middle of the ramp. “The landings are where trouble happens on the Lower Wisconsin,” said Mark Cupp, director of the Riverway board. “There are so many more people on the river, and inconsiderate people— both canoeists and motor boaters—bump heads at the landings. Some canoeists refuse to move their rental canoes off the ramp because they feel that they paid the canoe livery to do that, so the guy with the boat on a trailer who can’t use the ramp jumps out of his pickup truck and gets angry and the conflict begins.” In one sense, the conflicts are a problem begging for a solution. In another, they signify that people value their time on the Riverway but really need to learn some manners.

  Speaking of which, as we paddle under a second Wisconsin & Southern railroad bridge, a jet ski roars by, pulling an inflatable raft. Three preteen kids wearing swim goggles cling to the raft, screaming ecstatically, continuously, in unison, as they bounce over the water. As he abruptly crosses our path, throwing off a big wake for us to slam into, the driver smiles and waves.

  Upstream of the tracks, Bob suggests that we detour into a back channel between an island and the riverbank. Several small camping trailers parked along the shore are empty and quiet. Here the river is just deep enough to float our canoe, the water is coppery clear and minnows dart away as we approach. I think of a small northern Minnesota river we once paddled, where it was like this, the mesmerizing movie of a sandy riverbed sliding past under the canoe, everything visible, fish, rocks, waterlogged branches, shells. Here now are dozens of lovely big mussels—live ones—resting quietly in the water along the edge of a sandbar, their hieroglyphic tracks etched in the sand tracing their paths to the water, the mussels I’ve been longing to see.

  So many varieties of mussels live in the Lower Wisconsin, and the folksy names of these bivalves are as delightfully evocative as those of snails along the Kickapoo. One can imagine their gnarly shells without even seeing them. The imagery is sometimes pedal: elktoe, Wabash pigtoe, Ohio River pigtoe, fawnsfoot, deertoe, squawfoot, creek heel-splitter, white heelsplitter, and pink heelsplitter. Sometimes it’s facial: Higgins eye, sheepnose, and monkeyface. Sometimes the names are festering: purple pimpleback, wartyback, threehorn wartyback. Sometimes they’re delicate: fragile papershell, pink papershell, paper pond-shell. Simply descriptive can also serve: mucket, fat mucket (as in buckets and buckets of muckets), giant floater, flat floater, cylinder, yellow sandshell, rockshell, spike, threeridge, fluted-shell, black sandshell, plain pocketbook, mapleleaf, and hickorynut. And some names are fanciful: lilliput, pistolgrip, salamander mussel, and butterfly. The long list of names, reading like catalog verse, testifies to the species’ past diversity and fragile hopes for the future. The mussels that already lie on the bottom of the river, wherever there are the layers of gravel and rock that are their preferred housing, will probably live out their long reclusive lives. But if conditions change and they are unable to reproduce, some say they could be gone from the Wisconsin within several decades.

  These relatively sedentary creatures depend on certain fish to expand their ranges. This isn’t a handshake deal. The female mussel tricks its chosen fish, often by extruding and wiggling the ruffled edge of its mantle, the mollusk version of a fan dance. When the fish moves in close to nab what looks like prey, the mussel quickly sprays a cloud of nearly microscopic mussel larvae right into the fish’s face. The tiny hitchhikers swiftly attach themselves to the gills or eyes of the fish. When the startled fish darts away, they hang on tight, riding their fish to a new mussel bed, and if all goes well, to a long life as well. Some live several decades and in a few cases, a century or more. You can find out how old a mussel is without asking; just count the ridges on the shell, each of which represents a winter resting period, as you would count the rings on a tree stump.

  Looming over the Lower Wisconsin’s population of artfully named yet reclusive bivalves is the knowledge that the dreaded zebra mussel has invaded this reach of the river. Were the small striped alien with the razor-sharp shell to gain a foothold, the future of the river’s native mussels would be even more uncertain. Zebra mussels attach to just about anything, including other mussels, and grow so prolifically, typically several hundred on a single native mussel and sometimes thousands, that they starve the native mussel by limiting its movement and reproduction. On a less existential level, these rapidly reproducing menaces can also clog manmade devices such as water intake pipes, turbines, and other equipment. And with a multitude of sharp-edged shells on sandbars and in shallows, it would no longer be safe for us bipeds to walk barefoot.

  Beyond our back-channel byway, we meet more of the high, noble bluffs that grace the Lower Wisconsin. Here the cliffs crowd dramatically close to the river’s edge and the valley is even more beautiful than it was downstream—awe-inspiring in fact. The shape of the land here and the wide sweep of the river valley, textured with pale gold sandbars
and wooded islands, flanked by an undulating band of wooded hills, evoke the grandeur of the entire Driftless—the softened ruggedness that millennia of erosion and vegetal growth have wrought on the ancient bedrock of the Paleozoic Plateau that was the raw material for this creation. I always feel this way on the Wisconsin, and even more so on a day like today.

  As it is for many, this reach of the Wisconsin is our favorite. It is Sunday afternoon, the peak moment of the long holiday weekend. On this hot July day under a clear blue sky, the river shimmers crystalline blue in the sunshine. Who would not want to be playing in the waters of the Wisconsin today? And it is true that more people than ever are out on the river now. They float in canoes and kayaks, recline on inflatable rafts, drape themselves over inner tubes as they drift downstream on the current, slowly weaving their way between the islands. They play on the sandbars and fish the sloughs. River rats, every one.

  When the planning for the Riverway was in its infancy, the designers knew they had to document how people used the river, to convince the legislature it was important to preserve the aesthetics of this river valley. This led to a whole lot of DNR employees being out on the river during a whole lot of the spring, summer, and fall, counting river rats.

  “In the early 1980s, there were thousands of people on the river every weekend. People were just flocking to the river then,” said Gary Birch. “And we’d go out and count the people, most summer weekends for two years.” The pilot of an aircraft that Birch called “a teeny, weeny plane” would stuff Birch and his colleague Tom Watkins into the little cockpit with him, take off from Truax Field, and fly the whole length of the Riverway. They had removed the doors of the plane so they all could see better, and the pilot took the plane pretty low, only about five hundred feet up. “We’d each have a counter in each hand: one for the canoeists, one for people on tubes, one for the fishermen, one for the pleasure boaters. And we’d be just clicking like crazy the whole way down the river,” said Birch. “Between Sauk City and Spring Green, where most people were, he’d have to fly in a curlicue so we could get them all. We did these flights maybe fifty times over a period of two years.”