Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  The best of the Root begins upstream of the little town of Lanesboro. There it is the quintessential Blufflands river, rambling as it does through the wooded hills, past the tall sandstone cliffs that it has spent thousands of years carving, chattering through gravel bar riffles and occasional light rapids. Cold and secretive little trout streams flow in through the willow thickets that bristle at their mouths. The fishing is good, turtles and otters frequent the banks, and birds are everywhere: eagles, hawks, herons, bank swallows, songbirds, kingfishers. A paddler with some time to spare can spend days canoeing, fishing, and camping along its banks.

  Like many Blufflands rivers, however, the Root originates in heavily farmed glacial till land. Its tributaries bring in runoff from the watershed’s urban areas as well. “The Root begins in a judicial ditch in Mower County and ends in a judicial ditch in Houston County,” said Rich Biske of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Since 2006, TNC has been working with soil and water districts in the watershed to target areas with the greatest runoff. Biske said their strategy is to address the problems—both nutrient overload and historic changes in the landscape that affected the stream’s hydrology and now exacerbate flooding downstream—at the source, working on prairie streams in Mower County. Near Chatfield, TNC is working with a landowner to restore a floodplain wetland. In the Forestville area, they have worked on restoring contiguous lands.

  Starting about five miles before its confluence with the Mississippi, the Root is channelized, the victim of historic flood control and agricultural drainage efforts, and near the town of Hokah an earthen levee follows the channel. Conservation groups continue efforts to restore and manage much of the Lower Root River floodplain, however, and over thirty acres of riparian buffers have been installed along tributaries of the Lower Root. TNC has designed a hybrid concept that allows farmers to use riparian buffers for limited grazing and haying rather than just setting the land aside.

  “Right now,” Biske said, “less than 3 percent of the watershed is protected. There are such heavy demands on the tillable land. And I don’t know how much more that land use can be stretched.” He said there are fewer rain events than in the past but these few are more intense, and they need to prepare for those in order to protect the streams from the floods that follow torrential rains. Research by the USGS in eight agricultural watersheds across the river in Wisconsin supports this idea, finding that a small number of rainfall and snowmelt runoff events accounted for the majority of phosphorus and sediment loading to streams.

  “Despite all the challenges, these bluffs are still home to more species of greatest conservation need than most other places in the state. It’s wonderful to crown a slope and just explore the plant communities that are there, such a diversity of plant and animal species that call this ancient landscape home. We take it for granted, but it’s a really cool place,” said Biske. Amen to those sentiments.

  From the bluffs of Minnesota to the bluffs of Wisconsin, the river’s gorge is almost four miles wide now. Back in La Crosse the Mississippi was a braided channel of narrow waterways laced with islands. Now it has broadened to over two miles of open water, a lake-like expanse. We feel quite small out here.

  Who lives under these waters? It’s definitely too murky for fish spotting. In talks with fisheries people, I have learned the basics about the pool’s finny demographics. In a recent EMP fish census, the Number One Fish in Pool 8 was a little minnow called the weed shiner, only a few inches long, a slender, delicate, silvery creature with disproportionately big round eyes. The pumpkin-seed-shaped bluegill, my favorite at a Friday fish fry, ran a distant second. Third was largemouth bass and fourth, emerald shiner, another little guy. And black crappie rounded out the top five. All five species are happier in the relatively sluggish water of an impoundment—an environment described as lentic—than in the swift current of a free-flowing river, and their populations seem to be replacing the riverine species, like white bass and quillback, that were more common twenty years ago. For some species, the fisheries crew caught only one specimen, yet noteworthy on that list were the northern hog sucker and the stonecat, both known to be intolerant of pollution. The fish that didn’t make the top five but have relatively stable populations include channel and flathead catfish, northern pike, small-mouth bass, walleye, sauger (close cousin to the walleye), and yellow perch, a favorite food for fish-eating birds and ice fishermen alike.

  The survey turned up one of the lowest numbers of common carp in twenty years. Happily, the survey found no Asian carp, which doesn’t mean they aren’t there, only that they weren’t caught for the count by electrofishing or netting. On another cheerful carp note, commercial fishermen in Illinois have found a market for the invasive Asian carp so prevalent in the Illinois reach of the Mississippi. Several companies now freeze the fish and ship them to China, where diners prefer wild caught carp. The Chinese-American business owner of Two Rivers Fishery told the Wall Street Journal that carp farm-raised in China taste like mud. It seems fitting to send them home again: Asian carp, the international traveler.

  The roster of long-distance travelers in the Upper Mississippi, fish that instinctively migrate to spawn and feed, includes the mythic bewhiskered channel catfish, which in these reaches can grow to over forty pounds and over forty inches long. But if you can believe Mark Twain, that’s not so big. In Life on the Mississippi he wrote, “I have seen a Mississippi cat-fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.” No doubt a blue catfish, rare in these parts and a fish that grows bigger and travels further than the channel catfish. Fishermen go after channel cats at night, for like its mammalian namesake, it sleeps all day and prowls all night. Another big cat, the flathead catfish, is a homebody, rarely traveling more than five miles, and is less tolerant of murky water than the channel cat, preferring the clearer tributaries to the big river.

  One of the lesser-known migrators in this region is the lake sturgeon. Steve Zigler of the USGS described a project that will track the movement of the lake sturgeon between Lake St. Croix, the lowest reach of that river, and the Mississippi. They’ll take tiny samples of the fin rays of the sturgeon to study the trace element content, hoping to find a trace element “signature” unique to the place where the fish was spawned. Their guess is that the trace element signature in the fin ray of a sturgeon that grew up in Lake St. Croix can be distinguished from that of a sturgeon spawned in the Mississippi. If this is true, the research team will be able to learn where a fish was spawned, where it will spawn again, and where it travels as an adult to eat: the itinerary of its life. It’s a bit like the concept of terroir, a French word meaning that an organism or food grown in one distinctive area has that unique elemental composition, the signature of the land or river in which it grows. The lake sturgeon: a fish with a sense of place, and yet a yearning to travel.

  A gathering of big birds sails over us, playing on the wind, a vivid white V against the grey sky. When I was a child, I thought my mother knew every bird. But apparently she didn’t, because many years after, when I was a mother myself, on a summer day at that lake house near Faribault, she and I and the others watched eight big white birds flying in a V overhead. And she didn’t know what they were. The birds flew upward from the lake in a slow effortless spiral, more or less keeping formation, riding the thermal with amazing grace. They reached the height they wanted, soared off to the northeast, then returned, swooping low enough to show off their distinctive profiles—backward curve of neck, long sturdy wedge of beak, legs trailing behind. As they sailed by on the wind, Mom said, “heron?” but without any conviction, just to satisfy our need to identify, and then they were gone. If I shut my eyes, the picture of them climbing the wind, silhouetted against scattered clouds on blue sky, their white bodies reflecting the light of the sun each time it moved from behind a cloud, is still there in my mind’s eye.

  We never did look them up in a bird book. Two years after, though, on a visit with our children to a natural h
istory museum in St. Paul, the lingering question of those birds was answered in a strange postscript. The first exhibit hall presented a wall of many drawers, deep glass-topped drawers filled with items like miniature kayaks, arrowhead collections, preserved animal bodies, American Indian jewelry. It was like a game of chance to open a drawer. You didn’t know what would be inside because there were no labels on the outside, only numbers. As I slowly opened drawer number five, my first choice, the folded body of a large bird lying flat under the glass gradually appeared. In order to squeeze it into the drawer, the curator had arranged its body, legs, and wings in a position no bird had ever chosen. The poor creature was nearly folded in half, but instantly I recognized the neck and head. The label read:

  American White Pelican

  Lake of the Woods, 1978

  MN DNR ♂

  Warroad

  We finally knew the name of our dreamlike fliers. Pelicans on the Lake Pepin sand spit, pelicans soaring over Pool 8— it is quite exciting to realize that pelicans are returning to the Upper Mississippi, after years of scarcity and even absence. In 2006, during our paddling adventures on the Upper Minnesota River, a more remote habitat, Bob and I saw hundreds of pelicans, but for years they were rarely seen on the Mississippi. Refuge scientists say that pelicans now nest every year on sandy islands in the Mississippi south of here, the first colonies on the Upper Mississippi since 1909. The nesting season is over now, so the flock soaring over Pool 8 is more likely to be on summer vacation than house hunting.

  Across the river a dredging rig fills a barge tow with the mountains of sand they call “dredge spoil.” We’re in the main channel now, where the cruiser traffic is light but steady. Whenever we hear the low grumble of an inboard motor behind us, or see a boat cruising toward us, we raise our paddles in a joint salute, hoping the driver will see the flash of the wet blades and slow down to reduce the wake. Some do, most don’t. Those who don’t often smile and wave as they roar past, oblivious to the unpleasant effect their big wakes have on a canoe.

  After a lunch break at Wildcat Park landing in Brownsville—gouda cheese and Wasabrod once again, as we have no imagination when it comes to the midday meal—we follow the Minnesota side of the river into leafy green backwater channel beauty, the quiet water where migrating waterfowl feed. Here are stiff and broadleaf arrowhead, also known as duck potato, and wild celery, also known as eel grass, the leaves of which move in lovely sinuous patterns on the water’s surface. Both grow underwater tubers that are the favored forage of birds such as canvasback ducks and tundra swans. Here also are yellow lotus, another source of tasty tubers, and big beds of nutritious wild rice. In the past ten years, these avian greengrocery stores have increased in Pool 8, in part due to restoration efforts. “Some of these rice beds are huge and stalks may reach nine feet in productive beds,” said John Sullivan, retired Wisconsin DNR water quality specialist and long-distance paddler who has lived on this reach of the Mississippi for nearly thirty years and loves to explore the backwaters.

  In late fall, many thousands of tundra swans, traveling south from the tundra to winter on Chesapeake Bay, and guided along this leg of the journey by the great river valley that is their flyway, rest and feed on the Upper Mississippi backwaters. And they hang out here long enough to attract flocks of people. Along the Great River Road south of Brownsville, there’s an overlook where bird watchers gather in November to take in the magnitude of the migration, a spectacle graced by the conversations of the resting tundra swans, a sound sometimes described as a mellow murmuring. In recent years, more than 78,000 tundra swans have congregated on the river throughout the Refuge for up to a month, feeding and resting for their long journey, until finally the river froze over and they moved on. Canada geese, eagles, white pelicans, mallards, gadwalls, pintails, widgeons, and other winged migrators join them, numbering in the thousands as well. On the flight north again in the spring, tundra swans don’t linger here—only on the fall flight.

  These backwater channels are beautiful. John Sullivan says he hopes people will understand that the river is so much more than the main channel. A navigational channel just can’t compare to the amazingly diverse aesthetics of the backwaters, the network of life that is the life-blood of the river, the places that Sullivan loves to explore, often standing in his canoe and poling it through the mazes of his favorite backwaters, like the Black River Delta, Whitman Bottoms, Tiffany Bottoms. “These tributary delta areas are very hydraulically complex and offer diverse aquatic plant communities and floodplain forests,” said Sullivan, who spends much of his warm-weather free time in his canoe. “They’re where the river is most beautiful and interesting.”

  As we float the backwater channel, I think too of how Featherstone-haugh described the braided channel of this same reach on September 4, 1835: “The valley betwixt the opposite bluffs was here near three miles wide, and I seemed to look down upon an immense forest, growing upon innumerable islands, among which various streams were gliding. Some of the islands were so extensive as to contain ponds of considerable extent, and large areas of the zizania, already frequented by the wild fowl, which had begun to arrive from the north in immense quantities.”

  Though the once abundant zizania (wild rice) is returning to the river, when a river becomes a lake, it loses. The intricate web of habitats that the sloughs, the off-channel lakes, the backwaters offer to the rich community of creatures that live on a river such as the Mississippi gradually disappears. Trying to restore the river that once was is a big, ambitious project and one that will never bring the Mississippi back to the way it was before the lock and dam system forced the river to permanently flood much of its former floodplain. Rehabilitating is a better, more realistic word, according to Jeff Janvrin of Wisconsin DNR, who coordinates the Corps habitat projects on the Wisconsin side of the river, such as building new islands. We float past Boomerang Island and Horseshoe Island. Long, low narrow curves of land completed twenty years ago, the islands are now covered with vegetation, and their orientation to the prevailing winds allows beds of tasty greenery to grow in the lee of the curved shorelines. From above their shapes must look artificial, but from down here on the water their wooded shores look as though the river spawned them and they have always been there.

  If you were to fly over the Upper Mississippi you would see a pattern in the changes wrought by the lock and dam system. Just downstream of a dam, the river is channelized at first, then the islands and backwaters appear, relatively intact, and the channel becomes riverine and braided rather than lake-like. As you move downstream, the islands gradually disappear and the water spreads across the former floodplain in an open featureless expanse. If you hovered over the next lock and dam you would see the pattern repeat. Though I already knew, at least abstractly, that this is true of the Upper Mississippi, here on the water I feel rather than know the profound changes wrought by impoundment. Downstream of a dam, the river still feels like a living river. Approaching the long straight line of a lock and dam, it becomes a different creature, artificial, confined and controlled.

  Aerial photographs taken in 1930 of the river reach that is now the lower end of Pool 8 reveal an intricate braided channel, the river’s flow split in half by a wide floodplain forest laced with narrow waterways and small off-channel lakes; that area is now a wide-open lake. For a time after the dam created Pool 8 in 1937, high points of land in the wooded floodplain, formerly only seasonal islands, found a new role as permanent islands. For a time. Within sixty years, however, wave action and current had swept 90 percent of these islands downstream. Today all that is left of that wide floodplain forest is submerged stump fields.

  By damming the river, we humans introduced wave action, a force that can destroy river features like islands that were deposited by the glacial flood and protect the river’s geomorphology and ecosystems. Divided thus into braided strands, the river flows faster in some strands and slower in others, yielding the varied kinds of living spaces—vegetation-filled bac
kwaters, quiet shallows, deep pools, fast channels—that attract and nurture a wide range of fish and other creatures. Islands deflect the persistent wind that builds the waves that nibble away shorelines and fill the river with suspended sediment, and small islands are where migratory water birds nest and raise their young. “With future sedimentation, the pooled portions will slowly evolve to conditions somewhat similar to what existed prior to the impounded river. This will also mean increased dredging to maintain the navigation channel. The speed of this new resurrection will vary by pool and will likely be influenced by tributary sediment loads and habitat projects such as those constructed in Pool 8,” said John Sullivan.

  During the early stages of rehabilitating Weaver Bottoms, back upstream in Pool 5, Janvrin said they observed the way some small islands functioned as “sand traps,” capturing sand by changing the way the current flowed and deposited its sand load, and they used these lessons to build six islands in the open areas of Pool 8. Charmingly named “seed islands,” these small seedlings were simply piles of rock, oriented to capture and hold some of the sediment that the river continuously carries downstream. Though the little creations were expected to grow much larger over time, their actual growth has been slight. Janvrin says the concept was a bit like that of slightly emerged wing dams, which are rocky fingers interwoven with willow mats extending from the shoreline into the channel, angled like wings and designed to capture sediment and divert the scouring flow away from the banks and into the channel. Because the sand captured by the seed island piles only as high as the water, the small island grows slowly, though it does give the river what Janvrin calls “a little bit of sandpaper” to work with.

  Island building on the Mississippi isn’t new. In the early twentieth century, for example, before impoundment, two long islands were built downstream of Ferryville, Wisconsin, in order to straighten the channel. Today, these islands, like many built in recent years, are indistinguishable from the river’s natural islands. When we change the river to meet our cultural needs and desires, the river always adapts, often in ways we later regret. Occasionally the adaptation is for the good, as in the case of the islands.