Chapter 57

Anaerobica Exotica - A Dream of the River

Laura had a bad dream. She lay wide awake, blinking at the intensity at what she had just witnessed. A lifeless river. Dead oak trees. Scarred and deeply-gullied hillside farmland. Ditch-straight creeks leveed high from dredging. Everywhere junked automobiles, abandoned in farm yards and driveways. Mercy.

Earlier that evening, Rose, age 10, had read to the family from the "Wind in the Willows." Alexander had turned the TV off to play chess with Michael. Little Lucy was curled up with Grandma Teresa in her rocker, both already dozing just before bedtime. While Laura made popcorn, Rose found the family's well-worn copy of Kenneth Grahame's classic, and began to read. How they loved that book!

Now, hours later, Laura was wide awake listening to the prairie wind rushing through the big white pines outside and to the ticking of the old farmhouse as it gave up its warmth to the Iowa winter night. Alexander slept on in oblivion.

A picnic? Were they going for a picnic in the dream? That was it, the family was headed east toward the Mississippi River for a springtime Sunday picnic. Alexander drove. He slowed the car in second gear to coast down the final bluffland road to the river. The family flatboat bounced along on the trailer behind.

The windows were down, but where were the bird calls in the hardwoods? A pair of crows fed on long-flattened carrion on the roadside. The car's windshield was clean of bugs, but the glass, and the warm wind, wiped thick with dust. A brown haze thinned the late morning sun. Scrawny house cats slunk along the roadside ditch. A mangy pack of feral dogs chased a bony deer across the road in front of them.

As they approached the river, Laura noticed the southwest faces of the old goat prairies now covered entirely with red cedar. More than one was burned bare and sharply rutted with ragged gullies.

As Alexander gunned the car onto the ramp of the four-lane bridge at Lansing (where did this come from?), Laura began wondering in her dream about going out in the flatboat on such day. Large power cruisers and lurching pontoon boats roared upriver and down among leaping bighead carp. The channel was cut with wakes and chop. The stink of hydrogen sulfide floated in the breeze.

On the east side the bridge, Laura looked downriver across what she recalled as a maze of backwater sloughs and islands. Now there was a single unbroken stand of silver maple blanketing the flood plain away to the east and south. No back channels. No slack water. Just acres and acres of silver maple as far she could see.

Off Blackhawk Park , the jet-powered ski boaters wore hard armor and helmets. They ran together in loose formations, carving turns and cutting donuts everywhere. Each driver sported a stubby fish sapper dangling from a wrist lanyard. When a carp launched itself behind the ski ahead, the trailing craft would swerve in an attempt to volley the fish in midair with the club. A kind of uproarious fish tennis.

Above and below the county landing at Blackhawk Park , a pair of towering sterile sand piles nearly a 100 feet high covered the entire downstream side of Henderson Island and much of Battle Island , too. These sand mountains sheltered almost all the small boaters and many of the larger boats. Laura held on tight to Little Lucy as Alexander tried to run the flatboat safely across the channel to Lost Slough. Michael held on to Grandma Teresa. Rose was white-knuckled to the gunwale. Everyone looked scared.

As they pushed upstream along the line of beached boats on the Henderson Island sand pile, Laura saw a maniacally grinning camper hold up a round goby at her before laying it on the grill.

Upstream, reed canary grass flourished everywhere. The water was low for springtime and already warm and bright green with nutrient fed algae. Not much snow across the Upper Midwest to feed the watersheds. What had come was already melted from “snirty” drifts in the leeward fence rows. The boat traffic on Lost Slough raced up and down its center. Large round silver maple root discs flanked the slough edges where the boat wakes had eaten away the banks beneath and felled them dead.

Laura looked at Little Lucy, already fussing and struggling in her arms. Rose looked sick to her stomach from the effluent smell of the river. Grandma Teresa's eyes were closed, her mouth in a thin-lipped grimace. Alexander and Michael mirrored a pair of frowns.

“Let's go home. Let's go now. I've seen enough,” said Laura in her sleep. Without a word, Alexander swung the flatboat bow around, turning downstream in the shallow slough over mercury, cadmium, and PCB-entombed muck, following the atrazine-laced current back to the landing.

The night sweat had dried on Laura's forehead by the time she replayed the dream in her conscious mind. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes tightly against the encroaching dread of the nightmare river scene.

Laura struggled to find hope from despair in a place she loved, to pray that such a nightmare would never come true.

After a time, she began to drift into a more peaceful sleep. Somewhere she could hear Rose reading Kenneth Grahame.

Laura became the Mole as she “sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to [her], a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

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Thanks for these resources:

http://www.umbsn.org/news/documents/UMR_Ecological_History.htm
Ecological, Economic, and Institutional History of the Upper Mississippi River
by Calvin Fremling and Barry Drazkowski , Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network

http://www.umbsn.org/stock/UMRdiagram083002.pdf
Upper Mississippi River Management Structure and Major Programs
Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network

http://news.mpr.org/features/200009/29_newsroom_mississippi-m/
Changing Course: The Future of the Mississippi River
Minnesota Public Radio

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/642880.stm
Death of a River
By Emma Batha, BBC News, 02/15/00

http://www.newstabs.com/archive/2001Augbatch/newscribe/issue1/Page3_i1.pdf
Death of a River
By Vivek Gupta, Vikram Gore, Deepa R. Chandran, and Anugya Srivastava
The New Scribe, 02/2002

Calvin R. Fremling and Thomas Claflin, preeminent Upper Mississippi River biologists, educators, and researchers who graciously share their wisdom.

John Gabbert wrote and edited The Upper Basin Chronicles .

Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to the author via (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 57.

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 .