Spring Offensive

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 35

Spring Offensive

Early in spring the towboats glide downriver at evening with many lights ablaze -- running lights, amber lights, and TV and florescent lights glowing in the dayrooms and the galleys. Only the pilothouses are dark but for a dim sheen of instruments reflected in pilots' eyes. The big twin diesels drive the tows, heavy with grain, down the Upper Mississippi, down the center of the continent, running corn and soybean gold south through deep purple twilight. Later, in the zero hours of the after watch with no lock just ahead, only the ambers and the runners shine. With a waxing full moon on the water, night-piercing spotlights stay dark over upbound fertilizer tows pushing north on the mighty nitrogen- and sediment-laced stream.

Alexander Murphy and Laura Paruzzi sat with their backs to a small campfire atop a nameless bluff above the river. It was past ten p.m. Alexander's three kids were asleep (mostly) in his tent nearby. Laura's tent was empty. Rick and Ruthann Garcia, and their two kids, were settling down in a third tent pitched at a well-worn campsite on the east side of the river. After a year of talking about it, they'd finally set out early that Saturday morning -- bound for Effigy Mounds, and the sights of one of the most scenic parts of one of the earth's most famous rivers.

Grandma Teresa had clucked a bit at being left behind, "Oh, go on! Next time, we'll get a B&B. You kids will have fun camping, no mosquitos yet," she said.

The mounds fascinated the younger kids, who could barely contain their enthusiasm for running up the trail in a small herd. Among the "older" kids, Alexander wished they would be more quiet, would appreciate the rarity of such a place. The bear mounds circled by falcons and an eagle moved him to wonder at the enormous effort of countless baskets of earth, at the patience of the people, and at their unknowable ceremonies. Yet on the first balmy Saturday morning in April with families out in force, "quiet children" was a wishful state. (He recalled coming here on a weekday in early fall, years earlier. Not a soul walked the leaf-strewn trails. Except for the manicured mounds themselves, he had almost expected to meet a group of native mound builders at any moment.)

When they reached the monument's heart-stopping overlook, some 500 feet above the river, each one envied the red-shouldered hawks kettling in twos and threes below them. Suddenly they all looked up toward the calling of a flight of tundra swans, gleaming white and wide-winged in the bright sun. The northbound "V" shifted, and formed and reformed.

Rose said, "Look! It's an "M," Dad! They're flying to Minnesota!"

"Could be, hon'," Alexander said, "but I think they just crossed into Wisconsin. Now it's a W."

"Is not!" nine-year old Rose retorted. "I can spell!" The swans did seem to swing east away from all the chatter below them.

"Do you think there's a swan mound somewhere, kids?" asked Laura.

They were quiet for a moment, then, "Yes! There must be!" and "Why not?"

From the park, Rick drove them northwest for a brief tour of a bit of the Yellow River watershed upstream of the mounds monument. There, with some urging from the National Park Service, several federal, state, and county agencies were creating the beginnings of a watershed study project. The thing was brewing, gaining momentum with plans for a rapid environmental assessment, and the intent for requests for funding for real improvements to the watershed in the future.

"This is trout habitat, my friends," Garcia said. "We'll come again one day properly equipped to fly fish, I promise," he exclaimed while pointing toward several promising limestone pools and riffles.

By midafternoon, they had crossed the river where armed officers eyed them at the bridge approaches. They turned south toward a farm that Laura knew, where a pair of bachelor farmer brothers owned tillable ground, bluffland and timber. The Simonsons, Lester and Stanley, made a traditional farming living on corn, soybeans, and cattle. The brothers had a primitive campsite on a bluff above the river. She had learned of this place after making their aquaintance at a public meeting when she worked for the Army Corps. Later, Laura had convinced them to move their cows permanently off the steepest timberland, and away from the creek entirely.

"We're hiking in, kids, so saddle up!" said Alexander when they pulled off the road. "It's not far from here to there, but it's all uphill."

"We know, Dad!" said Michael, "Next you're gonna say, 'Tomorrow, it's all downhill from there,' too!"

"Hey! That's my line!" said Alexander, playfully jostling his oldest child. Laura, meanwhile, already had three-year old Lucy out of her carseat, and into a carrier backpack. Ruthann held the pack while Laura shrugged it on. She belted her own hefty fanny pack just under the child's dangling feet.

"Let's go, you old folks!" shouted Ramon Garcia. He and his sister Rachel led the way up the limestone creek track. As they climbed, Rick and Laura showed Alexander and Ruthann how the track's continually crossing and recrossing the creek in the narrow coulee was causing plenty of damage to the habitat.

"See how this bank is broken down, and how the soft sediments are filling this little pool below?" Laura pointed out. Although the water was clear and cold, the pool's full load of last fall's oak and hickory leaves were in near mint condition, covered with a layer of fine silt, but all intact.

"What's missing?" she asked her friends.

"No crayfish or stoneflies here," said Rick as he overturned rock after rock in the creekbed. "No snails or caddisfly larvae or bloodworms, either, I'll bet. No shredders to grind up all the leaves and plant matter to start the food chain running. No collectors like midge larvae to reduce things further. No grazers to feed on the algae. Too bad! There were trout here once, I'm sure of it."

The adults rounded a bend where the four older kids waited in awe at cow-sized blocks of yellowed limestone laying in the creek at a massive cutbank. The water undercutting of the soft gray shale and sandstone layers had changed the course of the creek.

"Wow, I'm glad I wasn't swimming in that pool!" said Rachel.

"Can you image something like that damming the entire Upper Iowa River a few years ago?" asked Alexander.

"Layers and layers of time," said Ruthann as they climbed onward.

"So why all this silt and erosion and missing pieces of creek life," asked Alexander.

"Not sure," said Rick, "Likely it's caused by years of continual runoff from the high ground row cropping. Cold water species don't do well in silt. Things get too warm."

Laura had warned the young campers about another sad thing they would see that day. In stark contrast to the carefully tended mounds at Effigy, there were several small ones along the bluff top, mounds just four to six meters across and a meter or so high, that were decimated by looters at some earlier time. A few had a good sized hickory growing in the trench that bisected them. Others did not.

"Who did this, Dad?" asked Michael.

"Graverobbers, son, artifact hunters," said Alexander, "even archaelogists in an earlier time. It's illegal now. The nation passed a law in the early 1990s to put a stop to it, to return many bones and objects to the native people for reburial, to acknowledge the wrong doing. It's called the 'Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.' This desecration went on for a long time, and it will take longer to make it right, if ever."

"We should fix these, Dad. Someone should fix them," said Rosie.

"There are thousands of these mounds across the country, Rosie," he said. "Some will be repaired. Many have already been lost. We can tell people about them, so people will work to save them." The group moved quietly away.

After that, the blufftop camp site on little point some distance from the mounds had a feeling of reverence, even for the usually boistrous boys. Together, they set up camp, and talked quietly about the day, about the beautiful blue river below. After a simple dinner of rice and beans and burgers, the kids roasted marshmallows.

The sun began setting over the Iowa hills, falling like a dim orange ball through the dusty purple haze in the west. The last pelicans and herons flew to their roosts. A wood duck called. The towboat lights appeared ahead of the throb of their diesels. The BN and Santa Fe trains whistled at crossings across the river. Little Lucy, such a good traveler all day long, was the first to begin to nod off. The Garcias soon said goodnight. Alexander tucked his three into the tent.

Alexander and Laura sat side by side. They watched the night fall, the moon rise, and the stars appear. Finally, they too, crawled tired into their tents. The towboats ran all night long.

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Next...Chapter 36

Thanks for these resources:
Effigy Mounds National Monument
Iowa Department of Natural Resources
Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation
Yellow River State Forest
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site
Native American Graves and Repatriation Act
Indian Country: The Nation's Leading Source of Native News
Indigenous Peoples Task Force

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 35 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

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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.