Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  At dusk it is clear that the wind has no intention of abating. At least the persistent gusting has blown away the bugs and we have no need of a tent tonight. Spreading our foam pads and sleeping bags on the stones, we lie down but can’t sleep, anxious with the knowledge that the wind may not let up at all.

  “If it does quiet later tonight, we could paddle at least a little ways down the shore, maybe reach a landing where there’s drinking water,” I say. Bob doesn’t reply. Either he’s asleep or he’s weighing the risks. I resist the urge to say more. We can always drink boiled river water.

  As the sky darkens, I slowly sense someone or something watching us, but see nothing at first. Then a slight movement shakes the branches of a stunted tree growing straight out of the bluff. A masked face peers out of the leaves, shining eyes unreadable. It is a raccoon, perched on a branch about twenty feet above us, meditatively licking his long front fingers, watching us closely. The gouda, he must have found the gouda. I nudge Bob. We silently watch the raccoon get comfortable, adjust his position on the branch, scratch his ear with his hind paw in a relaxed fashion, watching us thoughtfully all the while.

  “I think he’s waiting for us to go to sleep so he can rummage through our cooler,” I finally say with a sigh. “I hope he has red wax stuck in his fingernails.”

  Reluctantly, we pitch the tent and drag all the gear inside with us. As dark finally comes, the raccoon descends from the tree to circle our thin-walled refuge, hissing from time to time. When I shine the flashlight through the screen, his eyes are red and malevolent in the beam, and he growls. He circles again and again, toenails clicking an erratic tattoo on the stones, but can’t figure out how to get in. The scent of orange drifts into the tent and I realize that he must have found an orange peel we carelessly left outside.

  After he finally gives up and leaves, silence descends, broken only by the rhythmic shush of waves on the stony shore and the ever-present sound of the wind. Then a distant train whistle on the other side of the river reverberates against the bluffs, and I fall asleep.

  A low heavy sound slowly intrudes into my semi-conscious mind and I feel the stones under my sleeping pad begin to vibrate slightly, in tempo with the rumble. A moment later, a sudden beam of intensely bright light flashes over the tent, jolting us both wide-awake.

  “What the hell is that?” hisses Bob.

  The light comes from the river. Against the charcoal velvet of the midsummer night sky looms an undecipherable shape—massive, black, ominous, as though the starship Enterprise has just landed on Pepin. The light sweeps us again and then stops, like an interrogator’s beam, right on our little green tent. I’m ready to confess, or to be beamed up, or both. At the same moment, Bob tells me it is a triple-wide barge tow, the largest allowed on the Upper Mississippi. How does he know that? Moving up river in the dark of night. The crew scans the river with a searchlight to spot obstacles and channel markers, not marooned canoeists. Though the lake is wide here, the tow runs surprisingly close to our shore. Rumbling ponderously past, it looks now like an enormous lighted floating factory and, magnified by our sense of threat, seems to take up more than its share of the river. Even after the light has past, the beast’s low departing growl keeps us awake for what feels like a long time. Finally, the only sounds left are again the wind soughing in the trees and waves hitting the shore. Theoretically we should start paddling now, while the lake rests a bit. But the slender crescent moon has been swallowed by high black bluffs across the river, and neither of us has any desire to share the dark river with a giant starship.

  Windbound on Pepin

  June the twenty-eighth. Launching before dawn, we paddle furiously to clear the breaking waves, to get back into the shipping lane. The wind is still gusting some, the waves, still cresting, but not nearly as much as yesterday and there are no boats about to hash the water into confusing patterns. We paddle on, soon finding the rhythm of the water, but with a sense of trepidation about what our tailwind has planned for the day. “The lake seems both idyllic and menacing this morning,” muses Bob.

  The formerly elusive shore of Old Frontenac is behind us when the sun rises from the dark bluffs of Wisconsin. We pass Long Point, where white pelicans waddle along the narrow sand spit, edging nervously away from us, beaks luminous gold in the soft dawn light.

  As the wooded point of Hok-si-la Park appears on the starboard bow, our tailwind has become even friskier, urging us down the lake. Though there is no lee to be found, at least we’re not taking on any water, yet. We sail on past the park’s sandy beach, and by breakfast time we’re landing at Lake City, Ohuta Park. It’s the last day of Water Ski Days and volunteers from a local church are selling pancakes in the park. Canoe in tow, we get in line.

  Pulling a canoe around on wheels is an open invitation to strangers, who love to ask us questions and tell us their own stories. An elderly man in line with us says that as a boy he swam the mile and a half from Lake City to the Wisconsin side, along with four of his friends. No boat to accompany them, he tells us, shaking his head and chuckling, just five boys swimming across that big stretch of rough water. And their parents didn’t know a thing about it until they got there. From Pepin, he phoned his dad, who drove downriver, crossed the river at Wabasha, and drove up the Wisconsin side to fetch the boys. His dad was not pleased.

  “In the car,” the man says, “it was ‘Yadda, yadda, yadda,’ and ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’” But then he chuckles again and tells us that he and his friends quickly forgot the parental firestorm. “We swam it again later that summer.”

  An elderly dairy farmer tells us he lived for seventy-five years on the land his immigrant German grandfather had settled, high on the bluff, watching the river flow by. “I was born there on the farm,” he says, “and I milked seventy-five head of cattle until I retired.” Now he helps his son, an electrician, who milks fifty in his spare time. He smiles, “The cows don’t talk back to me. And I love looking at the lake.”

  With the farmer are two women, both curious about our journey, both eagerly studying our maps. One tells us she spent her life raising beef cattle near Plum Creek, Wisconsin, and now lives in a condo on the bluff above Lake City, overlooking Pepin. The other says she used to own a golf course. Both women tell me they long for adventure.

  Another man, who grew up on the dry Great Plains of North Dakota, with no chance to learn how to swim or canoe, says that as a boy he had an opportunity to go to Boy Scout camp along the border with Canada. In preparation for the adventure, his scout leader showed the boys how to canoe. They sat in canoes lined up in the middle of a street in their North Dakota town, and the leader handed out paddles and demonstrated the paddle strokes. The next thing the boy knew, they were all up at the farthest tip of northern Minnesota, crossing Lake of the Woods to Oak Island on a steamer, canoes strapped to the deck of the boat.

  “Two miles out, the steamer ran into trouble and caught fire. The scout leader and the boat’s captain just loaded us and our gear into the canoes. As we paddled away, canoeing on real water for the very first time, the burning boat sank behind us. I still don’t know how to swim,” he concludes with a grin.

  Cara Grisim, one of the event organizers and a local businesswoman, is seated at a picnic table with her dad, Jerry, and they invite us to join them. By the time we’re halfway through the pancakes and sausage, she insists on driving us in her pickup truck the nine miles to the bottom of the lake.

  “This wind’s just going to get worse, for three more days,” she says, “and there’s no place at all to get off Pepin until you get to Reads Landing. The tracks run right next to the water and it’s a long steep drop straight down to the water’s edge. If you get into trouble in the waves, you’re out of luck. I’ll give you a ride.”

  We have choices. We could be purists, camping in Lake City until the wind dies, probably in three days. We could tow the canoe on its rickety wheels for nine miles along the shoulder of U.S. Highway 61 to Reads Landing. Or we could take t
he ride. We’re both a bit impatient, one of us more so than the other, so we don’t even have to discuss it.

  “That’d be wonderful!” I say. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Of course I’m sure! I just need to run home and get the truck,” she replies.

  By the time we reach Reads Landing, we have shared so many stories about our lives that we feel like old friends, and Bob and I are no longer windbound.

  Back in the day, Reads Landing was a bigger town, with a multitude of warehouses, twenty-seven hotels, twenty-one saloons, fifteen stores, one church, and one school. That was before the railroad arrived, during the time that the Mississippi’s confluence with the Chippewa was a bustling hub for logging drives and riverboat travel, and many loggers wintered in the town’s hotels. The town even made a bid to be Minnesota’s capital. Reads Landing is now a village of about two hundred people, and the historic red brick schoolhouse is now the Wabasha County museum.

  Across the river from the landing, low tree-covered banks frame the confluence with the Chippewa, emerging from the huge delta that formed from the alluvial fan at this confluence, the land that transforms the Mississippi River into a lake. When the Chippewa lobe of the Laurentide ice sheet melted, it drained through the Chippewa, scouring a deep wide canyon, creating a braided meltwater stream. The modern Chippewa, the Mississippi’s largest tributary between Lake Pepin and the Wisconsin River, flows within a broad sandy outwash plain deposited by that glacial stream. For thousands of years, the Chippewa carried in sand and gravel from the Central Sands region, lining the riverbed of the Lower Chippewa and spilling out into the channel of the Mississippi. And the river’s sand just keeps building. Heavily wooded and laced with wetlands, with countless beaver dams creating intricate networks of ponds and sloughs, this ever-growing delta is the downstream end of Tiffany Bottoms, the most extensive contiguous floodplain forest in Wisconsin.

  Thousands of acres of state-owned land—floodplain forest and interior swamps, upland forests and savannas—lie along both sides of the river between the towns of Nelson and Durand, extending fifteen miles up the Chippewa from the confluence. According to the Wisconsin DNR, this wild area attracts nearly every species of bird found in Wisconsin, including species like whip-poor-will, redheaded woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, yellow-headed blackbird, red-shouldered hawk, great egret, cerulean warbler, prothonotory warbler, great blue heron, and blue-gray gnatcatcher. Flycatchers, night herons, and bitterns inhabit the interior swamps. That’s just a starter list. One group of bird watchers counted seventy-six species in one outing. In the warm months, groups arrange trips with the Chippewa Valley Motor Car Association, an organization that operates a train of little yellow track-maintenance cars along ten miles of railroad track that once carried train cars loaded with logs. The bird watchers ride the slowly chugging mini-train into the heart of an otherwise roadless wildlife area. And year-round, anyone can hike the tracks to explore the depths of the reserve.

  The Chippewa River originates in far northern Wisconsin, in two headwater forks. When Europeans arrived, Native Americans had long traveled between Lake Superior and the Mississippi by paddling up the Bad River, then down the West Fork of the Chippewa and the Chippewa, and though the Bad was said to be rough going, with many portages, the newcomers adopted this river highway as well. The Chippewa was a famous logging river during the nineteenth century, as the Chippewa watershed was the source of about a third of the logs from north woods pineries. I have never paddled the river and must confess that my most vivid—though imaginary—images of the Chippewa come from fourth-grade regional history lessons and from listening as a teenager in the ’60s to Joan Baez’s version of the traditional American ballad “The River in the Pines.” Originally collected in Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy by Franz Rickaby, who got it from a fellow in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it tells the sad tale of a young woman and her lover, a young log driver who met his end in the “fatal rapids” of the Chippewa. Baez’s version ends with these words:

  Now every raft of lumber

  That comes down the Chipeway,

  There’s a lonely grave that’s

  Visited by drivers on their way

  They plant wild flowers upon it

  In the morning fair and fine.

  ’Tis the grave of two young lovers

  From the river in the pines.

  Hearing these lyrics evokes in me elementary school memories of old photographs depicting tiny figures of log drivers standing atop enormous log jams, and of vivid tales about how log blockades were released by those daring fellows, men who often lost their lives when the jam suddenly broke and a wild rush of pine logs surged and tumbled downriver, through the “fatal rapids.”

  It’s interesting to note that Nicollet knew the river as the Chipeway, which it was called for many years, and that spelling does rhyme better in these lyrics than does Chippewa. As folk songs are wont to do, the mournful ballad portrays the river as a scene of tragedy, and though I didn’t learn this in elementary school, the pineries were indeed the scene of an ecological tragedy, with the river playing its part in the drama by carrying the logs downstream. The good news is that, according to Mike Svob in his guidebook Paddling Southern Wisconsin, the Chippewa is actually quite a good canoeing river, especially from Eau Claire to the confluence where the journey ends in the wild, remote bottomland.

  Our companion the tailwind is in a ferocious mood today, and fortunately the Mississippi is riverine once again, buffered from the wind by wooded islands, waves manageable. Having left much of its sediment behind on the bottom of Lake Pepin, the formerly murky Mississippi now runs almost clear, with a lovely copper tint, apparently unchanged at least in color since Zebulon Pike passed this way, headed upstream on his unsuccessful expedition to find the river’s source. “The water of the Mississippi, since we passed Lake Pepin, has been remarkably red; and where it is deep, appears as black as ink,” wrote Pike on September 21, 1805.

  We push off from the landing, and through the copper-tinted lens I watch the sandy bottom moving beneath us. Eelgrasses sway gently in the current and a water snake whips past. Or could it be an eel? Gone too quickly to tell.

  If it is indeed an American eel, this fast-moving creature is one of the Mississippi’s greatest long-distance travelers. The eel’s life story weaves an epic tale. The larva hatches in the Sargasso Sea between the West Indies and the Azores and slowly drifts, a tiny transparent leaf-like creature called a glass eel, into coastal waters, metamorphosing over several years, first into a rounder darker being called an elver and then into a yellow eel. Adapted now to both brackish and fresh water, the yellow eel swims in the estuary of a coastal river like the Mississippi. Only the female ventures upstream as far as the Upper Mississippi, scaling dams and bypassing rapids by crawling overland on mud and wet grass. Her journey may take years. When she is sexually mature, she returns to the Mississippi estuary, where the males are waiting. They morph once again into saltwater fish and swim—together, one would hope—back to the Sargasso to spawn and die.

  Here at the foot of Lake Pepin, we’re also at the northernmost tip of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which extends south along 261 miles of river and covers 240,000 acres of land, from the mouth of the Chippewa to Rock Island, Illinois.

  The efforts and influence of a Chicago businessman named Will Dilg and his newly organized Izaak Walton League led Congress in 1924 to authorize the Refuge, to save the river from what they feared was the brink of a collapse. “The Ikes,” as they are known, were named after the well-known English author of The Compleat Angler. They pushed to end the destruction of the river’s floodplain by farming and draining and fought pollution of the river. “Will Dilg and the Izaak Walton League,” writes John Anfinson in The River We Have Wrought, “challenged agricultural and commercial interests as to the primary values of the river and its floodplains.” Though this remarkable legislative action came six years before the Corps,
authorized by Congress in 1930, began to impound and dredge the upper river, the pressure to build the lock and dam system was already building as the Refuge was born. The irony of these conflicting Congressional acts is inescapable, and the debate between agriculture, commerce, and the Corps on the one hand, and conservationists like the Ikes on the other, still rages. As does the dredging. As Anfinson wrote, “Apparently, Americans are unwilling to accept either the loss of the river’s ecosystem or the loss of the river as a transportation artery, since Congress has mandated that it be managed for both.” My father was a hunter and a fisherman, a member of the Ikes who took the side of the Refuge. Though I had no idea what the organization was about when I was growing up, I remember glancing at issues of the League’s magazine Outdoor America when they arrived in the mail, wondering briefly what it meant to him but never asking. Now I wish I could.

  Today, we stare at an enormous pile of dredged river sand, a pale yellow vertical desert towering over the channel across from Reads Landing, just downstream of the confluence. Down the face of one high dune runs a long sheet of plastic and atop the dune is a hose connected to a riverside pump that pours a stream of river water back down the plastic. It’s a homemade water park. This sand pile is a mere fraction of the sand dredged from the shipping channel. The Corps built a sediment trap in 1984 near the mouth of the Chippewa to capture inflowing sand, and the Corps pumps sand into an old gravel pit near Wabasha, piles sand in fields and along the riverbanks, and builds new islands from this excess of sand. It’s an endless job, and all for the benefit of the barge traffic.