Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  “Alright, we’ll turn around.”

  We’ve spent twelve days canoeing together without getting even close to an argument, until now. It stuns us both how quickly the conflict sparks and grows. But without any discussion of my capitulation, we begin the return trip down the creek, battling our way back to the Wisconsin.

  It is almost eleven in the morning when we pull the canoe up on the sand at the Arena landing, fingers crossed that we’ll find a cell phone signal there. Three bars. Bob calls Matt, who by good fortune is working at home today and agrees to shuttle his bedraggled, unwashed, crabby parents to Pheasant Branch Creek, the next leg of the journey. While we wait for him to arrive, Bob dials the Edgewater Hotel and reserves us a room for tonight.

  “We’ll be arriving by canoe,” he says.

  A long pause.

  “Yes, by canoe.”

  Another pause.

  “We can store it in the parking garage? Great!”

  Pause.

  “Oh, thank you!”

  He hangs up and grins at me.

  “Since it’s Monday night, they’re giving us a really good rate for a really nice room.”

  A quiet truce.

  Driving along the River Road into the village of Arena, leaving behind the bluffs that line the north side of the Wisconsin and heading across the valley’s flat terrace that spreads from this side of the river to beyond Highway 14, we pass and cross stretches of the stagnant backwater stream that we had planned to paddle. Everywhere, it is filled with fallen trees and algae and looks more like a pestilent swamp than a creek. But between the towns of Mazomanie and Cross Plains, its tributary Black Earth Creek runs close to the road several times, and I can see that it is clearly passable. It’s a beautiful, clear, swiftly flowing stream that runs through a green, bucolic valley. Though we have never paddled the Black Earth and won’t today, we do know the stream. Bob has fished for trout in its waters, and we have hiked together along its banks, where jewelweed and black-eyed Susans grow. We could have paddled this. But I keep my mouth shut. And I will later learn from paddler John Sullivan, who canoed the creek downstream on a trip from Madison to La Crosse, that Black Earth Creek itself is quite a challenge, frequently blocked by cattle-crossing fences, blockaded low bridges, deadfalls and debris dams. He took out just upstream of the confluence with Blue Mounds Creek and portaged the final couple of miles to the Wisconsin.

  For many years, Black Earth Creek has been a popular Driftless Area trout stream. And for over twenty years, the Black Earth Creek Watershed Association (BECWA) first led by Steve Born has been trying to keep it a healthy trout stream. As a watershed group, BECWA is a clear winner. Over 90 percent of the landowners in the watershed support the group’s vision and actions. Citizens in the small communities— Cross Plains, Black Earth, and Mazomanie—that lie along its banks are fiercely protective of their stream. But it was not always so. In the early years, working to establish a watershed-wide base of support for the group, Born enlisted the help of mediator Howard Bellman. Observing the squabbling citizens—developers, farmers, environmentalists, fishermen, and urbanites—Bellman is said to have commented, “You’re nothing more than a dysfunctional family.” He added that people identify with a village, town, or personal interest, not with an ecosystem. One supervisor from the town of Cross Plains said, “It’s just too bad we can’t do what we want with our own land.” Which I believe goes to the heart of the problem. Whether they want to be or not, rural residents are part of communities, and communities need to reach a civil consensus on land use. In her research for A Thousand Pieces of Paradise, Lynne Heasley reached these same conclusions.

  Under Bellman’s guidance, the dysfunction diminished. “I’ve seen drastic changes in the way the communities and people view the creek,” said Pete Jopke, longtime resident of the watershed and water resources planner for Dane County. “And I think there’s been a cultural shift since the 2002 fish kill,” added Jopke, referring to a devastating manure runoff event that killed thousands of trout. “There’s less dairy in the watershed now, and we have an early detection system that is triggered when oxygen levels in the creek drop, telling us there’s a problem. We’ve formed a good neighbor group, and communication is better than ever. Conservation-wise, the group’s a poster child.”

  Despite the wrangling and infighting, it is clear that this is a well-loved watershed. Working with landowners, the Natural Heritage Land Trust has protected seven hundred of the valley’s twenty thousand acres through land purchases and conservation easements. Agricultural buffers, which Jopke estimates protect about 90 percent of the creek’s trout fishery, are permanent easements, wide margins of land along the edge of the stream where vegetation is allowed to grow wild. Deep-rooted native plant growth reduces erosion of the creek banks and helps shield the creek and its finny inhabitants from the destructive effects of agricultural runoff.

  Long ago, the stretch of the creek that runs through the village of Cross Plains was straightened to meet the needs of a mill dam in town. The dam disappeared some time ago, but the creek stayed unnaturally straight until the village decided to restore the natural meanders of the creek along this short stretch between Highway 14 and the railroad tracks. The rebuilt reach is complete with critter habitat: lunkers, root wads, vortex weirs, and deflectors, everything a trout could wish for. And along with the restoration, the village added two pedestrian bridges and rebuilt the segment of Ice Age Scenic Trail that runs along the creek in Zander Park.

  On land that was opened to the public by local farmer Fred Wolf, a mile of Black Earth Creek has been restored to its presettlement meanders and contours. The Natural Heritage Land Trust and Dane County hold the forty-five-acre conservation easement and led the restoration of a part of the stream that had been straightened and dammed over 150 years ago. The silt and mud have washed downstream, and this reach of creek now winds and riffles over the gravelly bottom favored by trout. Gently sloping banks have reconnected the creek to its flood-plain. One of the best parts of this story is that crews removed the only dam left on the creek, a low-head structure that diverted water into an impoundment called Lake Marion. Black Earth Creek now flows freely its full length.

  The first segment of a Good Neighbor Trail that will eventually connect Mazomanie and Middleton runs along the creek, a three-mile stretch connecting Mazomanie to Wisconsin Heights High School, the valley’s consolidated high school. Students can walk, bike, or ride snowmobiles to school, connecting them to the creek along the way. The late fall day that I hiked part of the trail, the stream project was so promising. Yet at the same time, the New Zealand mud snail, a particularly aggressive invasive creature that competes for food and space with the trout, had just been found in the creek for the first time.

  Just east of Cross Plains, we drive over the barely detectable height of land between the Black Earth Creek and the Yahara River watersheds. We have finished crossing the Driftless.

  Admittedly, these last twenty miles were by car, not canoe, but we have crossed it, and it is clear we could have done the entire journey under our own power, had we been more prepared and more patient. As it is with a confluence, the edge of a watershed feels like a momentous place, but this one is almost invisible, except to the eye of the geologist. Yet today I see it because I’m looking. A meandering boundary, a low ridge of sand and gravel bulldozed in and left behind by the last glacier, defines the edge. It’s called the Johnstown Moraine. Along that moraine runs a part of the Ice Age Trail, a long hiking trail that traces the furthermost reach of the Green Bay lobe of the recent glacier, the glacier that departed Wisconsin eleven thousand years ago.

  We are now in the land that was smoothed flat by that last glacier, and we are now in the Rock River watershed. From here, water flows not to the Wisconsin River but through the Yahara chain—Taychopera to the Ho-Chunk tribe—four lake beads strung on the strand of the winding river, downstream to the Rock. From there the waters join the Mississippi near Rock Island, Illin
ois, the southern tip of the long Upper Mississippi Wildlife Refuge.

  Though the moraine is easily missed unless one is looking for it, leaving the Driftless is a topographical shift that most people notice. In the Driftless, heavily forested hills dominate the landscape, suggesting a land less influenced by people than by nature, a land displaced in space and time from the decisively urban landscape only a few miles away in Madison. Over the sinuous line of the Johnstown Moraine, the world is suddenly flat. And on that flatness, people have reshaped the natural landscape into a cultural landscape, to revisit Cronon’s premise: “By using the landscape, giving names to it, and calling it home, people selected the features that matter the most to them, and drew their mental maps accordingly. Once they had labeled those maps in a particular way … natural and cultural landscapes began to shade into and reshape one another.”

  In the Driftless, it seems that people have been less successful in reshaping the natural landscape than they have outside the Driftless. There the natural world pushed back more than it did outside, and in some senses, the Driftless landscape prevailed. Driftless towns are small, farming the rugged land is difficult, and Driftless roads follow the contours of the landscape and run through the river valleys, rarely conforming to the straight lines of the grid.

  In the low land along Airport Road, the arrow-straight road that would have been our portage route had we not wrecked our wheels, is where our next little stream heads up. We find that the North Fork of Pheasant Branch Creek, which was still flowing four weeks ago, is now a nearly dry ditch. Moving on to the other side of the beltline highway, to Century Avenue in Middleton, we find some water in the creek bed, an alarmingly small amount, and decide to follow the creek into the conservancy marshland anyway. About a mile in, the creek doubles back and empties into Lake Mendota, known in Nicollet’s day as 4th Lake, and labeled thus on his map.

  Matt helps us unload and hurries back to work. Soon after we launch, we realize that Pheasant Branch is far too low to paddle, and piles of dead branches and tangles of urban trash, including a battered plastic wading pool, intermittently block the narrow channel. After slogging downstream for a half mile anyway, grumbling at each other once again, we reach a unanimous agreement. We will reslog that half mile and carry everything along one of the conservancy hiking trails— about a quarter mile—to the point where the creek has returned from the Conservancy, just before it flows into the lake. We had not thought of this simple solution before because we were so bad-tempered.

  Paddling out into big Mendota, I feel exhausted, from the long morning of slogging creeks, from the long portage, and from the long argument. Happily, the lake is relatively quiet. Even with all the fetch afforded by over fifteen square miles of open water, the gentle west-northwest wind doesn’t seem to be kicking up waves … yet. Still, it’s a big lake, which we know from experience can change quickly, and with our low-slung canoe loaded above the gunwale with gear, we will follow the shoreline rather than head straight across to the hotel.

  Decision time. Do we go right and follow the south lakeshore, past the Shorewood neighborhood, around the curve of Frautschi Point and the long slender spit of wooded land called Picnic Point, past the University of Wisconsin’s limnology building and Memorial Terrace, to the hotel pier?

  Or do we go left, the much longer northerly route, past Governor Nelson State Park, past the inlet where the little Yahara River flows in from the DeForest area, past Cherokee Marsh, past Governor’s Island, Maple Bluff and the governor’s mansion, past the outlet of the Yahara River at the Tenney Park locks?

  Going left will shelter us best from nearly all of the west-northwest wind that blows only lightly now but could easily rise as the afternoon progresses. If we head right, the journey will be half the distance.

  Our decision has everything to do with the aforementioned tipping point. Because we’re homeward bound and are thinking of nothing else, we go right. And for a time the paddling is easy, our watery path delightfully clear of obstacles. With each paddle stroke, our crabbiness dissolves a little more, and soon we are laughing about how cool it will be to stay at the Edgewater tonight.

  Near Marshall Park, however, the wind begins to rise, and rapidly. It’s time to get serious about the paddling, as a following wind can be even more treacherous than a headwind. And as we trace the curve of the lakeshore into a southeast heading, the gusts become a crosswind, a nastier opponent. Even worse, motor boaters are buzzing about, their wakes hashing the waves into liquid chaos. Soon whitecaps dot Mendota and we are dodging the crests of unpredictably choppy waves, occasionally plunging into a trough, knuckles white on the paddle grips, struggling to find the rhythm of the waves, to follow a safe line along the shore. Whitecaps break over the gunwale and puddle around our feet. Along the shore ahead, three boys play in the frisky water, leaping from an official looking pier and swimming to shore in the breaking waves. I look down at my feet; we have taken on over an inch of water, and we’re only half way to the hotel. We should have given Matt most of the gear.

  Ahead are Frautschi Point and Picnic Point, where the full force of the wind blowing across the open lake will slam us before we can duck into the lee of University Bay. Another unanimous decision. We slide the canoe along the downwind side of the pier, grateful for a safe place to land.

  “Where are we?” Bob calls to the boys.

  “Shorewood Boat House,” yells one, as he leaps off the pier again, an agile little otter in the waves.

  Safe on shore, we could wait out the wind. But instead, we indulge our impatient natures once again and further compromise the already questionable authenticity of the voyage by calling for help, for the second time in one day. Our friend Pat, who lives nearby, arrives in her station wagon, a bemused grin on her face.

  “How is it that you two experienced paddlers can’t handle Lake Mendota?” she ribs us. “You paddle all those wild northern rivers and then you’re beaten by your home lake?”

  “Well, when the lake tries to swamp the canoe, it’s time to land,” I say, struggling out of my smelly paddling shirt so that I can pull on a less pungent garment. “We could hang out here at the Shorewood Boathouse, I suppose, and leave at night when the wind has died,” I add. “Or could you give us a ride to the Edgewater?”

  She can’t stop laughing.

  Strewn about our fancy hotel lodgings—a suite with a view of the lake, two televisions, and two bathrooms, one for each of us—our big red waterproof paddling pack and filthy clothes do not belong. We’re definitely out of place in this hotel, and we love it. It takes at least an hour of bathing, scrubbing, shampooing, and shaving to remove the ground-in layers of Wisconsin River grime. As I did in the river, I float with only my nose out of the water, submerged this time in a warm soapy bath. Once restored, I dress in the clean shorts and t-shirt that have quietly traveled with us, hidden away unused in a corner of the pack. Yet the grittiness of Wisconsin River sand lingers in my well-worn sandals, and its familiarity is sweet. We walk hand in hand to State Street for dinner at Nadia’s Restaurant and Grapevine Lounge. Almost home.

  River Home Yahara

  July the seventh. As the day dawns, Bob calls me out of a deep sleep to come over to the window. Lake Mendota is glassy smooth. It is barely light, and four members of the university men’s rowing crew already skim across the mirror-like surface in four long slender solo shells, bodies leaning forward then smoothly pulling back, oars moving like metronomes. Two coaches and a driver motor alongside. Though we can’t hear him through the sealed windowpane of our room, we can see the bullhorn one coach holds to his mouth and know he is barking commands to the scullers.

  “Wow, they are out early,” I say, adding blearily. “Do you want to leave now?”

  “Sure, let’s get on the water. I’d like to see them up close.”

  Bob and I once went to rowing camp. Our friend Steve was headed out east to spend a week rowing—or more precisely, sculling—those skinny little boats, and he aske
d us if we wanted to go. This was his second year at camp, so we figured it must be good. Bob and I love boats of all kinds, and summer camp on a lake for grownups sounded like a good adventure, so we said yes. Which means we ended up sculling long skinny solo shells down a long skinny lake called Big Hosmer Pond, deep in the Lowell Mountains of Vermont, every day for a week. Camp ended with a big race down the lake. Learning to keep the shell, no wider than the sculler’s hips, from tipping over was the first challenge: never take the sculls out of the water unless you’re in motion. Next was learning to keep the shell upright while also pulling on the long sculls and periodically glancing backward to stay on course. We learned to reach far forward to make the catch and to generate much of the power for the stroke by pushing back with the legs on the pull. By the end of the week, we both felt reasonably comfortable in these uber-tippy craft, and the added sense of balance on water that is required to scull without dumping improved the kind of paddling we do at home. Steve loves to quote the Rat in Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows, who famously muses, “there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

  After a quick breakfast, we hustle down to the parking garage to fetch our little canoe and portage it and the gear around the hotel to the pier. The guys are still out there, streaking across the water almost silently, except for the coach, and he isn’t as loud as we expected. In minutes, we too are on the water, watching the crew fly by as we paddle slowly toward the locks, headed home.

  It’s early on a Tuesday morning, and the Tenney Locks, entrance to the Yahara River that is the river road to our home, are closed for business. Locked, so to speak. We portage around the blockade.