Crossing the Driftless
Page 23
We’ve finished crossing our lake. As with the upstream lakes, a low dam controls the outflow of the Yahara from Lake Kegonsa to maintain the water levels. Surprisingly, considering this summer’s low water, the lock is wide open today. We’re grateful that we needn’t climb out of the canoe into this mucky mess to portage. Instead we slip smoothly through on the flat water without thinking about why. The algae slips through as well and follows us downriver, keeping us company as the Yahara meanders south between the cattails, wanders through the quiet place where we spot wild swans and yellow-headed blackbirds, across the wide shallow wetland where the channel is often hard to find and where our small town’s annual spring canoe race starts, under the low bridge at Highway N, past the little island where our boys once loved to camp, down the river to Stoughton. As the blocky shapes of the buildings atop hospital hill, the dark horizontal line of the railroad bridge, and the low wooded rise of the hill on the opposite bank of the river appear in the distance, I am no longer thinking about the algae. Almost there.
“You know, we didn’t see a single other canoe, the whole way down from Madison,” says Bob as we paddle under the railroad bridge.
“Nope. And we never did eat lunch,” I reply. “Let’s hurry!”
At Division Street Park, our son Greg waits on the riverbank. Together, we portage up the hill to our home.
In this quiet fashion, our journey ends. We have traveled home by river, and in doing so have experienced the connectedness that the rivers offer, the physical reality of the riverine network that our ancestors used by necessity, a way to travel from one place to another that keeps us immersed in the natural world rather than detached from it, participants rather than observers at the window of a train or car. As we paddled past the confluences of rivers we had formerly canoed as visitors rather than river travelers, we became acutely aware of distances between rivers, their relationships to each other, discovering that we had a new sense of what it would mean to canoe down the Cannon, down the Mississippi and up the Zumbro, for example, not abstract knowledge derived from studying a map but a physical sense that would allow us to say with some authority how long such a canoe trip would take, what it would feel like, what difficulties we would face, what pleasures it would offer. I found that we like traveling the river from point to point even better than we like visiting the river on the usual kind of canoe trip where we return to our starting point, and the former also satisfies that goal-oriented part of our natures. And yet, though it was a struggle, we grudgingly learned that it is best for river travelers to be patient, to accept the conditions that the river and nature set forth, as the river and nature generally call the shots.
Sifting through the many mental images I gathered over the past twelve days, I am surprised by some that linger vividly in my mind’s eye: the long, low line of a lock and dam ahead, slowly coming into focus as we close the distance; the flash of a goldfinch in a riverside willow thicket; the bleakness of a bermed and rock-clad riverbank; the startling beauty of a white steeple rising from the greenery of a Mississippi river town; the intimidating stony hulks of Barn Bluff, Frontenac, and Wyalusing; our first glimpse of each secretive wooded confluence; the wild overwhelming tumult that is a train roaring down the river valley; the ominous power of a barge tow. I recall with lasting fondness the riffles of the Cannon, the flight of the pelicans, the grand movie that is the Mississippi River valley bluffs, and the soft golden sand of the Wisconsin. In the end, I realize that I felt, rather than observed, the sudden absence of the Driftless following our departure from that compellingly rugged landscape, a passage we had made so many times over the years but which I had never experienced with such clarity and such a powerful sense of connection.
References
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Index of River Names
Bad Axe River, 117–19, 152
Belle Creek, 28
Big Green River, 158
Black Earth Creek, xiv, 5, 7, 63, 139, 201–3, 205, 207, 215, 221
Black River, 89–94, 104
Blue Mounds Creek, 7, 199, 201–2
Blue River, 164, 168
Buffalo River, 61
Burns Creek, 78
Cannon River, x, 11–21, 24–29, 31–33, 36, 38, 42, 47, 141, 215, 225
Chippewa River, 42, 43, 47, 53–58, 93, 161
Chub Creek, 25
Coon Creek, 108, 151–52
Devil’s Creek, 7
Door Creek, 220–21
Garvin Brook, 78
Gilmore Creek, 78
Kickapoo River, x, 134, 146–50, 153–54, 157, 191
La Crosse River, 89, 95–96
Little Cannon River, 16, 26, 28
Mill Creek, 186
Minnesota River, 3, 25, 28, 36, 42–43, 82, 103, 114, 138, 160
Mississippi River, x, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 15–16, 20, 24, 27–28, 31, 33–39, 42, 46–47, 49, 53–57, 59–62, 65–71, 74–77, 79–80, 82–83, 87–93, 95–101, 103–7, 109–15, 118–23, 125–28, 131–39, 144, 150–51, 153, 161–62, 164, 168, 177, 186, 1
95, 208, 215, 223, 225
Namekagon River, 38
Pecatonica River, x, 195–96
Pheasant Branch Creek, 7, 203–4, 209
Prairie Creek, 16
Rice Creek (Spring Brook Creek), 20, 21
Root River, x, 70, 89, 98–99
Rush River, 38
Spring Brook Creek. See Rice Creek
St. Croix River, 38, 101, 118, 132, 138
Straight River, 12–13, 15–16
Tank Creek, 89–90
Timber Coulee, 151–52
Trempealeau River, 83–84, 91
Trout Brook, 28
Upper Iowa River, 119–20, 123
Vermillion River, 32, 36, 42
Waumandee Creek, 74
Whitewater River, x, 68–70, 72, 75
Wisconsin River, x, 5, 7, 8, 17, 54, 82, 92–94, 114, 118, 132–33, 136–40, 142–43, 145, 147, 153, 157–69, 171–79, 182–87, 189–92, 194–95, 197–99, 201–2, 204–5, 208, 211, 225
Yahara River, xi, 7, 207–10, 213–14, 216–19, 221–22, 224
Yellow River, 131
Zumbro River, x, 15, 65–68, 70, 141, 225