Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  We unload and trek everything: cooler, Duluth packs, portage wheels, paddles, and canoe, one by one, sixty feet down a treacherously steep dirt trail crisscrossed by slippery tree roots and studded with rocks. At the bottom, a dozen or so anglers quietly fish the swift outflow of the dam. On the last trip, as I reach the final five-foot drop to the water’s edge, one angler takes my load. I jump to the rocky shore and thank him.

  Portage complete. Bob takes a picture of me standing in the shallows, grinning victoriously, and then we’re back in the boat. The Cannon is shallow here—the result of several years of drought and pressure to keep water levels up in the impoundment—and we paddle to the opposite shore to find a good flow line down the boulder-strewn channel. We turn the canoe downstream and take a few strokes. Then, in a quick and careless moment, the canoe rolls suddenly to the right. We both roll out, landing up to our chins in the river. Oh no, the camera! It’s in the zippered mesh pocket of Bob’s life jacket, not in the little waterproof Otter box he keeps tethered to the thwart! But getting back in the boat comes first. Dragging the canoe to the shallows, we climb back in and wave sheepishly to the watching anglers, who kindly do not laugh. We are soggy but fine, our gear is secure, and surprisingly little water flowed into the canoe. Predictably, though, the camera refuses to work. The last time we capsized was five years earlier, running a small waterfall on a northern river. A camera was a character in that story too.

  Soon the little town of Cannon Falls is behind us and we’re floating into the Blufflands, down a valley that snakes between high rounded hills covered in hardwood trees. Paddling alongside a mossy limestone cliff face adds a vertical dimension to the riverscape, and the world of the river becomes sculptural. Three big turtles, the largest at least a foot and a half across, look like boulders on the sand shore. A pair of anglers stands quietly in the shallows, slightly apart from one another, casting and watching. The river winds and riffles, a red-tailed hawk hovers overhead, our spirits lift.

  A river terrace, set far back from the river edge, is up to thirty feet higher than water level. Jennings says terraces are glacial outwash sediment which once formed the river’s floodplain when water levels in the Mississippi and its tributaries were higher. And much wider. My imagination fills this wide valley with a powerful torrent of glacial meltwater, carving the land and depositing sediment along its margins. At the River Terrace Prairie Scientific and Natural Area, this glacial sediment is laced down firmly by the grass roots of a restored prairie and stays out of the river. But sediment from the mostly cultivated land along two upstream tributaries, the Little Cannon and Belle Creek, clouds the water. Jennings says that the hills north of the river are covered with highly erodible loess soil, deposited there by glacial winds. Putting slopes like this under plow sends topsoil down the river.

  At the confluence with Trout Brook, we stop to walk up the trail that follows the tributary stream. An owl watches us from a big oak tree, its head slowly swiveling as we pass. Upstream landowners are working with the Dakota Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) to reduce erosion on their properties and Dakota SWCD monitors the trout stream to see if their strategies are working. Right now the stream looks good, as the drought means even less runoff than usual. Back at the confluence, where the clear shallow water ripples into the more turbid Cannon, a father and his two teenaged daughters are fishing. The older girl has just landed a smallmouth bass. “I don’t want to touch it!” she squeals to her amused father.

  A passing hiker tells us that canoeists sometimes camp on the wide sandy bank just across the river, so we cross over. As we land on said sandy bank, two pickups roll in from the gravel road that follows the river on this side. Three black labs jump down from one of the truck beds and several men unload coolers and lawn chairs. We wave and move on down the river, hoping to find our own piece of riverbank.

  Around the next bend, a glimpse of several bicyclists reminds me that the Cannon Valley Trail runs along the river too, on an old rail line between Cannon Falls and Red Wing, and I remember that there’s another trail in the works. The Mill Towns Trail will run between Cannon Falls and Faribault, linking the Cannon Valley Trail with the Sakatah Singing Hills trail. Bicyclists will be able to ride from the Mississippi River at Red Wing along the Cannon River to Faribault and continue on the Sakatah trail from Faribault to Mankato, the city where the southeast-flowing Minnesota River makes its big bend to the north. River to river, just like we’re doing.

  A slight movement on a long low branch that shades a quiet eddy: a green heron, his rust-colored neck and long bill outstretched, crouches now motionless on his perch, waiting for the intruders to pass so he can give his full attention to fishing.

  It’s nearly dusk now and we still haven’t found a place to camp. We overtake two boys floating in huge inner tubes and ask how far it is to Hidden Valley Campground, but they’ve been smoking weed as they drift along and their answers are vague and confusing. Another mile brings a group of teenagers in a flotilla of inner tubes, floating coolers in tow, laughing and splashing. From downriver comes a booming bass beat, the music of Snoop Dogg. The campground! At the landing, a boy of no more than sixteen wades in the shallows, mumbling earnestly, “I have to pick up the cans. We’re good kids, just want to have fun.” A young couple—Michelle and Kevin—befriend us and we talk rivers together into the evening. Friday night on the Cannon, 44.1 miles downstream.

  On the Upper Mississippi

  June the twenty-seventh. Mornings on the river begin with a quiet dawn ritual. One of us boils water to make muesli and coffee; the other packs the gear. We’re grateful that last night’s party ended before eleven; they are indeed good kids. This particular morning dawns in a muted fashion, a lovely mist hovering over the river. Even the birds are hushed. As we float under the Cannon Bottoms road, I recall the year that flooding had piled a small mountain of debris against the bridge pilings, leaving no space for even a canoe to slip through. Our quiet journey continues, curving through the gentle meanders, past the sandbars of the Cannon River Turtle Preserve Scientific and Natural Area, where the rare wood turtle is sometimes found. But not today.

  The sun has almost burned off the fog as we reach the Cannon bottomland, where the river wanders through miles of marsh, splits into several channels and later regroups. This broad delta was built with sediment from upstream farmland, loess soil blown over the land by glacial winds. Jennings said, “When I canoe the lower Cannon—Welch to Red Wing—what I see is the thick, black organic soils once present on the long sloping hills of the lower Cannon tributary watersheds— this dust blanket that had an extra hundred thousand years to develop into a soil, that was so eagerly put under plow when settlers arrived— that now clogs the floodplains of the lower Cannon. I see a squandered resource.”

  A wood duck takes flight as we glide round a bend, and a male merganser swims warily ahead of us, then flies off as well. We’ve met many a merganser on the rivers, often a female followed by an obedient string of fluffy young ducklings. When the mother spots us, she quickly herds her brood into the shelter of shoreline grasses and then distracts us from her babies by pretending to have a broken wing, flapping and squawking dramatically downstream, apparently hoping that the predators in the canoe will see her as more tempting prey than her now hidden babies. Once she judges that we are far enough from the chicks, she abandons the broken wing act and flies back upstream to her brood. Although it’s comical to watch, all merganser mothers seem to do this, so it must work.

  The current is almost imperceptible and the marsh grasses are so high that we can’t see what lies beyond, so we follow a compass heading. Are we on the right channel? The Cannon Bottoms are a marshy maze, a malleable wetland where a spring freshet or a drought will rearrange the river’s flow patterns, rendering any previous map useless. It was here in this intricate network of quiet waterways that Native Americans once hid the canoes that they used to travel up the Cannon toward the vast bison hunting grounds that lay to
the west. Which is why French traders named it La Rivière aux Canots.

  We pass what Bob thinks is the confluence with the Vermillion River, a quiet channel emerging from the woods, sluggishly flowing into the Cannon from the northwest. A turkey vulture cruising overhead seems vaguely sinister, and as if on cue, a horrifyingly loud shriek pierces the still air, then another and another. Wild dogs or coyotes running deer? More shrieks. Is that a human scream? No, it has to be a deer. Deer sometimes scream, right? Another piercing cry hits a high note and then trails off. As abruptly as it began, the frightful noise ends. But there’s no time to talk about the haunting shrieks and we’ll probably never know for sure what they were. Minutes later we emerge from the Cannon Bottoms and paddle around a bobbing green can buoy into the main channel of the country’s biggest river.

  We’re just downstream of Lock & Dam 3. Traffic is light this morning, but the weekend has begun and the motorboats are on the move. We stay alert, feeling our way into the rhythm of this riverine interstate highway. The Cannon was all about maneuvering through riffles, drifting with the current, peering into the clear water to spy on fish, spotting denizens of the riparian zone. On the big river, motor craft preclude that kind of leisurely paddling. Surprisingly, the deep-keeled pleasure boats throw bigger wakes than the much larger but less frequent barge tows, and our canoe rocks and rolls each time. As each boat passes, we turn to meet its wake, pointing our bow into the closely spaced waves to keep from taking on water. We follow the edge of the main channel, defined by red and green buoys gently bobbing in the current. Red on our left, green on our right. On the edge we can be agile, ready to dart aside. But we want the speed the channel offers. In the deep main channel is the river’s flow, its power. It’s a delicate dance: the motorboats lead and we follow.

  A Mississippi channel that is reliably deep enough for river commerce is a modern construct. Between Minneapolis and St. Louis, a series of twenty-nine locks and dams impounds the river into a string of what are called “pools,” which form a stairway down the river’s gradient. More like lakes with a current than a river, these pools are deep enough for commercial river traffic to navigate.

  A river is a dynamic system, however, and maintaining the depth necessary for navigation is a Sisyphean task. Huge dredging rigs work up and down the river, sucking up the riverbed’s ever-shifting sands to maintain the depth necessary for fully loaded vessels to travel and spitting these massive amounts of sand onto the banks, mounded in startlingly high dunes. They must do this for as long as the river is used for commerce; if dredging were to stop, the river would fill the channel with sand again. Along the channel’s shorelines are long narrow wing dams, composed of willow branch mattresses weighted down with stone and mostly submerged and invisible but for the slight disturbance their presence causes on the surface of the water. Like long fingers pointing into the channel, they were built before the lock and dam system to help to divert the flow from the banks into the center, where it scours and dredges. Closing dams partially block water from leaving the channel, leaving the river’s extensive floodplain and wetlands and their inhabitants disconnected from the river itself.

  Impoundment, dredging, flow diversion: these are radical changes to the river’s flow regime and thus to the Mississippi’s complex ecosystem. In its 2010 report, Big Price—Little Benefit, the Nicollet Island Coalition alleges “documented environmental degradation to river ecosystems resulting from barge navigation,” concluding that damming the river is the root of its problems. The Upper Mississippi serves the transportation sector at the expense of its own health.

  Or perhaps more accurately, the river serves the Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), the Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF), and the Inland Waterway Users Board, an industry advisory board that decides how to spend both the IWTF fuel tax revenue and U.S. taxpayer money. The Nicollet Island Coalition report indicates that despite the declining economic value of river transportation, the Corps continues to propose expansion of the lock and dam system. According to the Izaak Walton League, IWTF currently receives about 90 percent of its funding from taxpayers and only 10 percent from taxing its corporate participants, and taxpayers are fully responsible for new construction. A new dam? No problem, the taxpayers will fund it. The Izaak Walton League calls barge transportation “an unprofitable industry,” citing studies that compare barge and train costs, and labels this subsidy a “corporate bailout.” A 2011 report to Congress estimates that on the Upper Mississippi taxpayers pay six times the amount of revenue generated by the fuel tax for maintenance alone. Because so much of the tax money is spent on maintenance and new construction, there’s less left over for restoration of the river’s struggling ecosystem.

  The project of remodeling the river to meet the needs of commerce began early in the nineteenth century. Before the makeover, the Upper Mississippi was a braided stream of shifting sandbars, thousands of heavily wooded islands and hidden snags, sometimes deep and sometimes shallow, ever changing. Easily navigated in the canoes of the Native Americans and pirogues of the French traders, the river was inhospitable and unpredictable to larger craft. In the 1930s, after over a century of small changes, the Nine-Foot Navigation Channel Project was launched. Within less than a decade, the Corps transformed the free-flowing Upper Mississippi into a riverine interstate highway, fully navigable by barges from Minneapolis to St. Louis, a very different creature than it had been for over twelve thousand years. This is the river we paddle today.

  Soon we’re at ease with the traffic and enjoying the ride. Bob and I like paddling together. Though we talk about all sorts of things as we travel rivers, we rarely find reasons to talk about the job of moving the boat along. Sometimes, when people learn how many miles we’ve canoed together, they ask how married people like us can get along in a canoe when many couples get fighting mad at their paddling partners, especially if they’re married. I think it’s because after so many miles of paddling downstream together, we both know what the other is doing without talking about it very much. I’m always in the bow and Bob is in the stern. We know that theoretically we should switch, because the bow paddler is the power source and Bob is a foot taller than I am and much stronger, but after this many years we’re just going to leave it as is.

  In those rare and silly moments when we tried to switch places, the fighting always began immediately. “Why did you do that?” So we stay in our places, specialists, so to speak. Up there in the bow, I see things before Bob does—submerged rocks, logs, shallows—and react with a corrective stroke. Sometimes it’s a simple draw stroke, which pulls the bow sideways, though my favorite is called a crossbow draw, which I prefer because it has more power than a simple draw. For those of you noncanoeists, I’ll explain. Say I’m paddling on the left and I spot a big, slightly submerged rock dead ahead. Without switching my hand positions on the paddle shaft, I swing the paddle over to the right side of the bow, lean out as far as possible, and draw the paddle blade through the water toward the bow, as fast and hard as I can. This immediately pulls the bow to the right, away from the onrushing rock. When Bob sees me do this, he instantly does whatever it is he does back there to draw the stern of the boat to the right as well. He doesn’t ask me what I’m doing, just follows my lead. If we’re quick enough, we skim past that pesky rock without a scrape. Bob, as stern paddler, is the steersman, so if I sense that he is doing a corrective stroke back there, I act accordingly, without asking. We can paddle a Class II rapid without much talk other than to first agree on the approximate line we will follow as we weave through the maze of obstacles ahead. And to those who ask about what all this canoeing together does to our relationship, I just say that after over five thousand miles of canoeing together, we’re still married.

  My thoughts wander to the river itself. It’s deep and dark, laden with sediment from its tributary the Minnesota River, a big-volume river that flows across Minnesota’s southern agricultural land—run-off country—and pours its load into the Mississippi
at Minneapolis. I’m struck by the uniform appearance of the banks, thickly wooded in silver maple trees, right down to the water.

  At a break in the forest, a sandy beach appears on river right, marked as the Red Wing Wildlife League’s private landing. The League owns considerable Cannon bottomland—twenty-eight hundred managed acres shelter waterfowl and other wetland creatures—and the group’s goal is to return the land to its 1930s condition, the way the floodplain was before the lock and dam system arrived. The last time we paddled down the Cannon was several years ago, when instead of heading directly to the Mississippi, we dove further into the bottomland to explore a bit and quickly got lost. Wandering the maze of narrow intertwined channels and dead-end sloughs, we met a fisherman in a flat-bottomed boat who kindly showed us the way. He led us down the Vermillion Slough, around the downstream end of Diamond Island, over a closing dam that was submerged under high water that day, into the channel. Along the way, we glimpsed only a small sample of the vast bottoms, which also includes Minnesota’s Espen Island State Wildlife Management Area.

  From the opening of a cut leading into those small off-channel sloughs and lakes, it’s less than a mile to the town of Red Wing. This old river town was built on a high glacial outwash terrace that follows the outside of a channel meander dominated by a huge riverside bluff known as Barn Bluff. Ancient burial mounds attest to this bluff’s importance to prehistoric Oneota peoples. The Mdewakanton Dakota who built a village at its base used it as a lookout. All the early explorers mentioned it in their journals. Henry David Thoreau, in one of his rare travels outside of Massachusetts, in fact on the last journey of his life, visited the Mississippi valley. He traveled here on the advice of his doctor, who felt the clean air would be good for him. As part of his Mississippi tour, Thoreau climbed Barn Bluff to “botanize,” taking extensive notes on the flora, and traveled by steamboat down the river to Prairie du Chien. From there he headed back east, crossing the Driftless by train.