Thick River Alphabet Soup

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 20

Thick River Alphabet Soup

As Laura's plane approached the Mississippi River near Wyalusing, she pressed her head against the window and peered down, searching for the Effigy Mounds on the Iowa side. The early light set a gold burnish on the lush green of field and forest. She first saw the Yellow River wandering among the steep bluffs and coulees. She squinted at the panorama of paradise below her, obscuring the towns and farms. Then, sure enough, there they were, a line of bears marching south, bears circled by falcons and an eagle. So amazing! The ursine mounds tread along the river’s high ridge, intent on their path, deliberately celebrating a place on Earth so rare that early humans recorded it with unnumbered baskets of earth, untold sweat, and unknown ceremony for all time to see.

Laura looked down from the ridge top to the river's sweeping bend at Catfish Slough. An upbound tow with fifteen light barges made its way slowly ahead of white propwash and a trailing sediment plume. She made a note to compare the Mississippi's towboat sediment with one she may see in a few minutes over the Illinois River. The big boat on the muddy river stirred the tailings of corn and bean mining as it headed north for more grain, ever more grain.

She loved this area, wanted to share it with Alexander. She relished for just another moment the surprise on his face when she'd stepped back from their kiss at the airport. What a guy! Hiking the ridges and exploring all the views and sloughs here with him would be such fun. She wanted to look at the Iowa bluffs from the Wisconsin side, to explore the big trees in the old park at Wyalusing. She'd like to see places in stories she'd heard about pirates long gone from the mouth of the Wisconsin River, tales of nefarious activity almost as terrifying as those of the nasty Harp Brothers at the mouth of the Ohio.

As her plane sailed north and east, her eye caught one more detail on the big river -- the unmistakable arrowhead signature vee of a fast moving flatboat heading down just below the towboat. She could see the turbulence in their intersected wakes, and imagine the bucking flat and its riders leaning into the river’s pounding as their craft skipped over the tow wake, showing air to a scarred aluminum hull.

In fact, had she known, Laura would have been only somewhat surprised to learn that one of those two flatboat riders was Rick Garcia, her friend Ruthie's husband. Rick was out early, too, touring Pool 10 with the St. Paul District's Larry Grimm, an Army Corps planner-project manager. Grimm had just invited Garcia to join his planning team, in keeping with the Corps’ new direction, seeking a more holistic perspective in its projects.

After they cleared the tow wake, Grimm throttled back the 50 horse Mariner outboard so they could talk. He wanted to get to know Garcia better, to understand what his regional NRCS conservationist counterpart was thinking about the Corps. Grimm, along with plenty of other civilian professionals attached to the Corps' huge river effort, was feeling the pinch of the recent navigation study debacle, and the Sweeney revelations about the cooking of the economic numbers to favor expansion outright.

The two had launched Grimm's flatboat at the Sny McGill landing downstream from the mounds. Grimm could tell Garcia was proud of the cooperative effort the NCRS had pulled off with the Iowa DNR and the Iowa State extension folks. Yet, there were no easy answers.

"Here's a high quality community-based effort, one that achieved unprecedented sediment and toxin reductions via real change in farming and conservation practice," Garcia continued, as if their conversation had not been interrupted by the fast ride past the towboat, "and yet the nitrogen discharge count remains almost as high as ever! It's almost as if we've banked N in the Sny McGill watershed for so many years that we have to learn patience while the land flushes it all out."

Grimm nodded. "I looked at some of the material you guys put together on that project. Nice work. I don't know, maybe it's the beauty of this part of the river basin that makes people so willing to get involved. You have a really impressive list of landowners participating. Do you think it's the trout that do it? They're surely a more handsome fish than the homely buffalo."

"Yeah," replied Garcia, "the trout make it easier, no question. But you've got something, how do we extend that spirit of involvement to places where trout can't live, to where only my favorite, the freshwater drum makes music?"

"It's in the planning, I think, anyhow," said Grimm. "I have to admit, the system we've got now has become so convoluted and layered, that the planning process has excluded the public. I should know better, and I'm part of it!

"What do you mean, really?" asked the conservationist. He looked around intently at Grimm in his captain's chair behind the flat's wind-screened control console.

"Well, this is off the record, so don't quote me. We don't announce all our different meeting times, and we don't publish our minutes. I mean that the alphabet soup is so thick on this river that the public will never figure it out. Hell, even the governor's staffs can barely get it, and those are the smart lawyers they surround themselves with to make sense of everything. The planning directorate is so interlocked that it's rife with potential for conflicts of interest and bureaucratic intrigue.”

"Get this,” he continued, “first, there's the UMRBA, the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, the panel of the five state governor's representatives, who put forward the states’ perspectives. Then, the EMPCC, the Environmental Management Program Coordinating Committee, the federal oversight committee for the EMP, the Environmental Management Program, funded via the Corps, and its two-pronged effort; one, the LTRMP, Long Term Resource Monitoring Program, and, two, the HREP, the Habitat Rehabilitation and Enhancement Program. Further, the LTRMP has an "A" team, the lead bunch who advises the LTRM on funding priorities. Plus, we've got the UMRCC, the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee, who are the fish and wildlife biologists who set ad hoc policy and direction for the upper river. Then, there's the UMRRC, the Upper Mississippi River Research Consortium, made up of the Corps, USGS, and states DNR guys, and a few academics, who together parse up the state and federal research money, and do studies to on their projects. Then there's the RRF, the River Resources Forum, the group of same state and federal biologists the Corps convenes to discuss everything from dredge spoil disposal to recreation."

"The irony in all this is that many of the same people sit on several of these organizations, and all we do is go to meetings! We don't really manage much. We just meet a lot," Grimm concluded.

"I see what you mean," laughed Garcia. "It's no wonder my wife, the farmer, gets frustrated because there's so little feedback from the Mississippi River community relating the work she's doing with buffer strips and new pasture rotation to what's happening with problems down in the floodplain."

"You got it," answered Grimm, pushing the throttle forward and raising his voice to a near shout. "In my view, the Corps of Engineers has to reinvent itself as one of the fed's best advocates for the health of the rivers and the uplands. We're badly damaged by the navigation study fiasco, and we need to own up to it."

The Corps flatboat carved a white sine wave on brown water as it raced downriver toward Bagley Bottoms.

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Next week... "Thinking Outside the Tracks," Chapter 21.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 20 was written and edited by John Gabbert with Barry Drazkowski.

Resources:
Effigy Mounds National Monument, US Park Service
Desired Future Habitat Conditions In Pool 10, Mississippi River, USACE (PDF)
Sny Magill Creek Watershed Project 1991-1999, UMBSN

Comments? Email feedback to The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 20

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.