by Lynne Diebel
When the river is connected to its floodplain, floodwaters can spill over the banks instead of being forced to rush straight downstream, as floodwater does when the river cannot reach the floodplain. Though the same amount of water flows in both situations, spreading into the flood plain reduces the energy of the flood and slows its downstream rush.
Even though agriculture has changed its ways, it takes years and lots of work to restore the floodplains. The Mississippi Valley Conservancy and Trout Unlimited have established conservation easements, primarily for trout habitat, on about nine hundred acres of land in the Bad Axe watershed, a holding called Eagle Eye State Natural Area, named for the prehistoric rock shelter that was discovered on the land. And over the last forty years, the Wisconsin DNR has used income from trout stamps to fund the work of reshaping and replanting the stream banks, gradually restoring the river’s access to its floodplain. The test of their restoration came with the historic floods of 2007 and 2008. In areas with flood control dams but where the floodplain had not been restored, dams were badly damaged, unstable hillsides became catastrophic mudslides that carried houses downhill and washed out bridges and culverts. According to the DNR Bad Axe River Watershed Plan 2010, in reaches without floodplains to absorb the deluge, stream banks were devastated. Yet the many stream miles with restored floodplains were relatively undamaged.
Not too far downstream from the Bad Axe confluence, across the river from the site of the shameful Battle of Bad Axe where federal troops massacred the last of Chief Blackhawk’s people at the end of the Blackhawk War, the mouth of the Upper Iowa River hides behind an island along the Iowa side. This Blufflands river originates in Minnesota and in its upper reaches swoops and dips along the borderline between Iowa and Minnesota for several miles before dropping decisively into Iowa where it meanders east for another eighty miles to the Mississippi. In his guidebook Paddling Iowa, writer and paddler Nate Hoogeveen describes the swiftly flowing Upper Iowa as “ultra-scenic,” riffling past “breathtaking” limestone bluffs topped with pine and balsam fir. It is “heavily spring-fed and the water clarity is excellent,” a real beauty of a river. Where it meets the Mississippi, however, the Upper Iowa is straight as a drainage ditch, an anticlimax for paddlers after all the upstream beauty. We paddle the short distance upstream to see the confluence, an unremarkable meeting of waters. Yet having read Hoogeveen’s glowing descriptions, I know there is so much more upstream. We will paddle the Upper Iowa someday.
Pool 9 on the Mississippi
Though the chart, still open on my knees, shows me that the Great River Road runs close to the river along the Mississippi’s Wisconsin shore, wooded islands buffer the channel from the highway, and this uninhabited reach of the river feels quite remote for a moment. Then, with a low warning growl, a barge tow moves around the bend ahead, the engines of the tug uttering their sustained rumble, the low waves of the wake crashing rhythmically onto the sand as it passes us. It’s headed upstream and is soon out of sight. The quiet returns and we meet no more traffic downstream.
Until we reach Lansing. As we near the Iowa town, a dredging rig crane’s engine roars, the big mechanical arm swings back and forth, moving sandy spoil from a barge and dumping it on one of the islands. Just as we pass the rig, another big tow comes around the bend, headed upstream, straight toward us. It’s a veritable barge tow traffic jam. Not wanting another close encounter, we dart over to the Iowa shore, slide under the Blackhawk Bridge, and paddle hard up to one of the town landings, where we park the canoe and go foraging for groceries. It feels good to be on foot instead of sitting, and our tour of Lansing lasts longer than planned.
“Hey, how about something to eat?” says Bob.
Sidetracked at River’s Edge restaurant, over a second breakfast of classic diner food—cheesy omelets and buttered white toast served with little plastic containers of grape jelly on the side—we eavesdrop on three women who are drinking coffee and planning an ice cream social. The loudest member of the group bemoans the fact that they can’t get anyone to volunteer for the dunking booth.
“I wouldn’t volunteer either,” I whisper to Bob.
Back on the river, our stomachs full, groceries and a bag of ice from Moore’s IGA stashed in the cooler, we float serenely downstream. I’ve heard there’s a mussel bed near here, at a place known as Whiskey Rock, but it’s not shown on the chart. And so my gaze goes upward to the bluffs. Goat prairies, those dry south and southwest-facing prairielands found almost exclusively in the Upper Mississippi River valley, are visible on the high bluffs, beyond the sloughs and the open water of Lake Winneshiek that separate us from the Wisconsin shore. Goat prairies, because only goats can keep their balance on the steep inclines. One after another, small treeless prairies front the march of the bluffs. These little grassland wonders are remnants of the prairies and oak savannas that once covered most of the Driftless. Despite being thin and dry, the soil on goat prairies supports short grasses like little bluestem, side-oats grama, and hairy grama (also known as mustache grass); and the bunchy growth habit of the grasses invites wildflowers to fill in the gaps, species like pasque flower, bastard toadflax, and harebell, whose populations are otherwise declining throughout the Midwest. Goat prairies like those in Rush Creek and Sugar Creek Bluff, both units of the Wisconsin State Natural Areas program, are little field museums that remind us what the vegetation of the Upper Midwest once looked like. And in the Driftless, soil building on the bluff tops is a wonderful thing.
In tribute to the prairie plant, Aldo Leopold wrote, “What is the most valuable part of the prairie? The fat black soil, the chernozem. Who built the chernozem? The black prairie was built by the prairie plants, a hundred distinctive species of grasses, herbs, and shrubs; by the prairie fungi, insects, and bacteria; by the prairie mammals and birds, all interlocked in one humming community of cooperations and competitions, one biota.” From down here on the water, I can’t see those grasses and flowers, of course, but they’re there, quietly humming, plumping up the thin soil of the rocky bluff with their deep roots.
In the midst of this happy prairie interlude, the modern world returns, this time in the form of Alliant Energy’s power plant, another huge coal burning facility at the foot of a high rocky bluff on the Iowa shore. The beast in the beauty, again. This is the third of its kind we have passed on the Mississippi, and each time, the massive structure has a starkly incongruous presence in a national wildlife refuge. Its sheer size forces me to wonder about it.
Power companies have historically built plants on big rivers like the Mississippi. One reason is the ease of delivering coal by river barge to plants like the one at Lansing. And perhaps building power plants on the river and delivering the coal by barge makes power generation less expensive for consumers, perhaps not. The more variables one introduces, the more unpredictable the results of the cost equation. This and other difficult-to-answer questions about the economics of barge transport as opposed to train transport are posed in an interactive exhibit in the National Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa, an exhibit that lays out all the variables, not just the financial costs. And the individual museum visitor forms his own opinion.
Quite separate from the ambiguous economics and environmental impacts of coal delivery, power plants like this definitely and directly affect the river because they use river water to cool their generators. Another reason power plants are built on the river. Yet if handled wrong, this cooling process is destructive to the riverine ecosystem. The cooling systems for all three power plants we have passed on this journey— Alma, Wisconsin; Genoa, Wisconsin; and Lansing, Iowa—systems which are termed “once-through cooling,” draw in river water to cool the generators and discharge the resulting hot water back into the river. According to the 2009 U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Electric Generator Report, the daily river water intake capacity of just these three plants combined is 757 million gallons per day. Though the actual intake varies seasonally and the plants don’t
always operate at full capacity, that’s a lot of hot water. In comparison, a tributary river like the Upper Iowa contributes an average of only about 466 million gallons of water per day to the Mississippi.
“Heat is like any other pollutant,” said Helen Sarakinos of the River Alliance of Wisconsin. “It is an impairment to water quality.” Because heat is destructive to the river and its denizens, states that border the Mississippi have set temperature caps that hot water discharge to the river cannot exceed, limits that vary with the season, sometimes described as narrative standards. According to Rochelle Weiss of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the rules that govern this Lansing plant we are passing today are narrative standards. Simply put, these standards mean that discharge cannot heat the water more than five degrees Fahrenheit above the normal temperature of the river for that time of year, as listed in a table of monthly maximums.
Wisconsin once had this type of thermal discharge regulation as well, but in 1975 the Wisconsin Supreme Court nullified the standard because of how it was written. Rewriting the law took thirty-five years. According to Sarakinos, this remarkably long delay was due to several factors including Wisconsin DNR delays, opposition by utilities and municipalities, and a ruling by the court that the former narrative standards had to be replaced with numeric standards.
“[Wisconsin is] the first state in the country to develop numeric standards. Every other state had that five degree Fahrenheit change standard for rivers since no other state Supreme Court nullified it. That was part of the angst—there was no precedent,” said Sarakinos. “Heat is hard for the DNR to permit. Heat does weird stuff; it dissipates in a way no other pollutant does.”
For this reason, dischargers are given a “mixing zone” at the end of their discharge pipes where heat is allowed to further dissipate before they need to meet the water quality standard. Discharge water from a power plant is often so hot that water at the end of the pipe is termed by some as the “zone of immediate death” for aquatic organisms. The permitting process defines the extent of the mixing zone for every discharger as a function of the effluent temperature and the size and flow of the receiving water. According to Sarakinos, determining the base temperature of the discharge and the size of the allowable mixing zone were contentious issues in the Wisconsin debate. Those who advocated for a big mixing zone—this would have allowed them to discharge hotter water because the heat would dissipate before the temperature was taken—were the paper plants, the utilities, and the food canning facilities.
Wisconsin’s recently adopted numeric standards apply to the Alma and Genoa plants. Permits for these facilities not only define the size of the mixing zone, but also define how hot the discharge can be by considering the base temperature of each specific water body as well as the specific time of year, because the temperatures that fish and other aquatic organisms require to thrive vary with the seasons.
Once-through cooling is an old technology. According to the Sierra Club, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began in 2001 to require newly built plants to use what is called “closed-cycle cooling,” where the water is cooled down to ambient river temperature before discharge. Converting to closed-cycle cooling can reduce total water withdrawals by about 95 percent, but the change is expensive and translates into higher utility rates. But closed-cycle cooling also dramatically reduces the number of aquatic organisms that are swept into the intake pipe of a once-through cooling system where they are boiled and ground to death in the system—collateral damage in the struggle between our economics and our ecosystems.
Down the river, we leave the power plant conundrum behind us, but not the beautiful bluffs of Iowa. Soon we pass the tall wooded face of Capoli Bluff, named by the French as Cap à L’Ail, or Garlic Promontory, and well known to river travelers. Catlin painted the distinctive half-dome bluff on his Mississippi travels. Were we to hike up the backside of the bluff, we would find a southwest-facing goat prairie much like the ones we saw upstream at Sugar Creek Bluff and Rush Creek.
The beauty of the Mississippi Blufflands, including the distinctive goat prairies, has lured American landscape painter Sara Lubinski, who has captured the shapes and textures of the valley landscape in her compelling oil paintings. Lubinski formerly worked as a botanist and the integrity in her paintings derives from her wide knowledge of native plants. The places she is drawn to paint are often conserved properties, like the goat prairie at Capoli Bluff, which she called “a fabulous example of preserved native species, like compass plant and seven foot high Indian grass.” When I first saw her painting of Capoli Bluff, I was instinctively drawn to her depiction of the shape of the land, to its truth. She said that the way that she merges her science and her art recalls the awe of nature’s grandeur that Thoreau, also a botanizer, shared with the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, whose art she aspires to emulate. “Art has the power to connect us to our world in ways that a photograph cannot,” said Lubinski, “and in my art people see what their own region is like through the eyes of a painter. They see places they know intimately and places they didn’t even know existed.” And seeing is the first step toward understanding.
After Capoli, river traffic diminishes and then, remarkably, disappears. Though it is an illusion, the islands, the sloughs, and the bluffs of the Mississippi feel wild and remote again, a haze of gentle green midsummer bluffs. A beautiful illusion. No talking, just quiet paddle strokes. I get lost in the rhythm of the paddle—the torso pivot, the reach, the catch, the pull. Release and repeat, and each time, a delicate line of water drops traces the path of the paddle on the bow wake. An eagle soars above us, climbing a thermal in lazy circles. If I had to choose a Mississippi pool to call my own, it would be this pool.
Too soon, it seems, we reach Lock & Dam 9, a little ways downstream of tiny Lynxville, Wisconsin. We float in the quiet water beside the lock’s concrete retaining wall while first a southbound tow and then a northbound powerboat lock through. That powerboat’s an outlier— it’s not staying in its own pool, I think idly. As we wait, a northbound freight rumbles by. Bob studies the chart as we wait and tells me that the elusive town of Harpers Ferry lies, unseen, beyond the maze of islands to our right. I remember that there’s supposed to be a mussel bed near there. That’s where the Higgins eye pearly mussel lives. But we aren’t going there.
Finally we are within the lock, and as the river water lowers us about ten feet, there’s time enough for a chat with the lockmaster. Tom Caya tells us that his family has been in the Lynxville area since his father’s grandfather, a French-Canadian named Michel Caya, moved here in 1846. He asks about our trip, eager to hear our story and to tell his.
Mississippi Lock
“You know,” he says, “my great-grandfather Caya and his partner Louis La Force, they had the contract with the government to carry the mail between Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien and Fort Snelling in St. Paul. They sometimes went by horseback, and the Indians referred to my great-grandfather as Long Knife, because he carried a machete-style knife on his belt. And other times they went by canoe.”
“Delivering the mail by canoe? Amazing!” I say.
“No dams to lock through then, of course, and there must have been a lot more current then. It’s close to two hundred miles, I think— they say it took them two weeks to do the whole trip, by horse or by canoe,” he adds.
The lock gates are open now, and as we paddle out, I think about those intrepid mail carriers paddling upstream against the power of the undammed river’s current, about the inevitable bad weather, about the wind that so often sweeps the length of Lake Pepin—and I’m grateful we are headed downstream on this powerful river.
Island No. 166 on the Mississippi near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
“Good luck!” he calls, as we leave the final lock on our journey down the Mississippi.
We are now in Pool 10, as lovely, green, and quiet as its upstream sister. I may have to change my mind about which is my own pool. There’s not
another soul on the river, and as the wind gently dies, the surface of the water shimmers softly in the golden light of late afternoon.
We land at a likely camping spot on the floodplain along the Wisconsin side: a wide, flat sandy shoreline backed by a sparse forest of mostly silver maples, a single swamp white oak and scattered undergrowth, Island No. 166 on the chart. Bob fries steaks, potato slices, mushrooms, peppers, and onions over our little camp stove. As usual, we sit cross-legged on the sand to eat our dinner, watching the sun drop behind the tall bluffs of Iowa.
“It’s less than ten miles to the confluence,” says Bob, smiling.
“And our water bottles are almost empty,” I reply, taking a small sip.
Take a Left at Wyalusing
July the second. Before the sun rises, fishermen are already on the water, quietly casting from small aluminum motorboats, drifting slowly in the current. We float past them, wordlessly easing our way into our last day on the Mississippi. Small songbirds are up and about as well and as their morning racket fills the silence, I am reminded that peregrine falcons nest on these bluffs and eagles nest in big dead trees on the floodplain. To a raptor, a songbird is just an amuse-bouche with wings. These avian predators make a better living by hunting ducklings and goslings, cannonballing out of the sky to snatch the young waterfowl from water or land. I scan the treetops hoping to spot an eagle’s nest, but see none, and no airborne hunters are on the prowl.
We’re just upstream of the mouth of Iowa’s Yellow River, a lively stream that races swiftly through Effigy Mounds National Monument to its confluence with the Mississippi. But we never do see that junction. Downstream of us along the Iowa shoreline, a tugboat captain darts his powerful craft about. He revs the engines forward, then a hard reverse, then forward again, as he rearranges his collection of barges into proper lineups. We swing wide around the chaotic water and head through a narrow cut to reach the East Channel, a side road between the islands that lie along the Wisconsin shore at Prairie du Chien. Surely there’s drinking water at the park on St. Feriole Island.
