“SHARE THE ROAD” read the sign. But there was no road to share.
Mark and I had paddled my canoe between lampposts and trees, over the street we were being told to share. That had been swallowed up by the high water just like the islands we’d been unable to camp on the night before.
We’d made it 50 miles downstream of Minneapolis and pulled right into Red Wing, Minnesota’s Levee Park. His train would leave that evening from the station a hundred yards away. In the meantime, he offered to stay in the park and near my canoe as I went to a local grocery store to resupply my food for the trip ahead.
As I pulled tortillas, granola, and peanut butter off the shelves, I thought about the simplicity of my life on the river. As apples, green peppers, and hummus entered the cart, I thought about the half-dozen meals I’d been fortunate to receive from river angels. Stuffing mix, mashed potato mix, and pasta joined my collection and I thought about the half-dozen more meals I’d enjoyed at restaurants as I passed through towns. In came oil, a bag of pretzels, trail mix, and thoughts of my meals with friends and family on my short trip back through the Twin Cities.
Pita bread and soup, beans and rice, this and that. A salad mix for dinner in a few hours, a donut for the moment I stepped out of the store.
Most of my meals consisted of foods I brought with me in my canoe, which I’d resolved to fit into a pair of 20-liter dry bags. That way I could use a cord to hoist these over a tree branch and out of the reach of any potential bears in Minnesota. Four weeks in, this was only my second time needing a full resupply of my food.
I ate my donut and returned to the park. Mark and I talked about his work as a luthier, a builder or repairer of string instruments, and the school where he’d learned the trade, right there in Red Wing. The town was especially known for the similarly named company, which made and distributed boots and other equipment across the world. Perhaps Red Wing’s most recognizable product is one that is not for sale: a 20-foot-tall boot, the world’s largest, which sits inside its flagship store. Fitting for the land of Paul Bunyan.
As one legend goes, the Mississippi River was created by Paul Bunyan’s giant ox, Babe, slipping on difficult terrain and knocking over a water tank. Like the Grand Canyon resulting from the gargantuan man dragging his axe behind him as he walked. Stories like these are used to make sense of mind-boggling natural phenomena, giving them an origin that feels more familiar, more relatable, more human. Perhaps all of this is done to give the impression that humans have the right to forever alter these spaces in the name of meeting their desires, which soon becomes shorthand for progress.
But I’d rather have the mystery. Places not carved by anyone like me or anything that I can really understand. Places not meant for me, that I approach like a weary traveler. With wonder, awe, perhaps even reverence. That I adapt to rather than seeking to adapt them to me.
I thanked Mark for his company the last two days and paddled back into this world where life is simple:
1. Keep eating.
2. Keep drinking water.
3. Keep paddling in the direction of the current.
4. Don’t hit anything.
5. Find an open patch of flat, dry ground before dark.
Simple, except in times of high water.
I traveled for several hours after Red Wing, eventually paddling a mile off the main channel to a campground in Bay City, Wisconsin. Though the high water had receded, signs of its recent presence were everywhere in the way of damp soil, huge logs, and an empty campground. I found the hosts with two friends, gathered around a fire. Their RVs, perched on a hill, had avoided the floodwaters.
They insisted that I pay nothing for the night and offered me a beer and plate of food. We sat around the fire and talked about the campground, about the high water, about my journey up to that point, about my journey beyond. I looked toward the river in the waning light and saw a sign that one of them had made:
If You’re Lucky Enough To Be At The River, You’re Lucky Enough.
I set up my tent on the sand which had accumulated beneath the picnic shelter and slept soundly through the rain later that night. Feeling lucky enough.
The next day, the current seemed to shut off in Lake Pepin, a 20-mile-long stretch of the river that has been pushed back, in a way naturally dammed, by sediment pooling up from the Chippewa River. Sailboats kept me company as I fought my way across, eventually reaching an island with a huge, human-made sand dune.
The Upper Mississippi River today is not the same section of river that existed a hundred years ago. During times of high water in the 1920s, it moved fast, contained many sets of rapids, and hid obstacles of all kinds. That’s why there are towns along the Mississippi with names like Grand Rapids, in which there are now no rapids, and Little Falls, in which there are now no waterfalls. These defining features have been eaten up by the era of dam building that began in the 1930s. In that decade, the Army Corps of Engineers created a system of locks and dams to maintain a channel of at least nine feet in depth and four hundred feet in width for the stretch of the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Louis.*
This occurs through a system of nearly 30 locks and dams, plus innumerable wing dams and levees. Needless to say, this system dramatically altered the existing environment, industries, and towns. For this reason, it was highly controversial when it was first proposed. But as the pools above each dam have taken some of the dynamic characteristics of a (mostly) free-flowing river, species have adapted. As some fish have seen their habitat diminish, others now thrive in backwaters that previously didn’t exist. As some birds have seen their habitat diminish, others now find safe havens on migration routes. And as the Army Corps of Engineers patrols the river and scours sections where sediment has shrunk the overall depth, concentrating this sand and soil on islands, I seek these out as a place to stop on my own southern migration.
The primary purpose of this nine-foot channel project is not to reduce or control flooding, as is often believed, but rather to make the river steady, predictable, navigable. And regardless of its effects, this project will remain because a single barge can carry as much as 1,750 tons. The result is that 15 barges—the maximum allowed—bound together do the work of 1050 semi-trucks and trailers.**
But the river still retains the power to burst forth and bring this whole system to a halt. As I travel downstream each day, I pass empty and full barges moored to shore. I make it 250 miles south of the Twin Cities before I pass a single active barge and towboat. I feel thankful for this as I seek out high ground each night. I also feel thankful when I see occasional canoe-sized trees floating down river and know that I am behind the worst of the flooding.
Hundreds of miles downstream, other source-to-sea paddlers have been forced to end their trips early due to hazardous conditions. Hazardous conditions that caused the US Coast Guard to prohibit recreational vessels from roughly 300 miles of the river between the Twin Cities and the Missouri-Iowa border. Prohibitions that seemed to lift within a day of my little boat’s arrival.
I passed through this water world as if in a dream. Stopping off at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minnesota to learn about the bald eagles I’d been continually seeing. An extremely enthusiastic presenter informed us that bald eagles can exert 400 pounds of pressure per square inch (psi) with their talons, whereas an average human might exert 70 psi. Stopping off for a beer and to charge my phone in Fountain City, Wisconsin where the high water allowed me to lock directly to their fence. The owner who was outside painting joked that he’d considered putting a “Canoe Parking Only” sign up and the bartender paid for my drink. The same thing happened the next day in Trembealeau (pronounced trem-blow), Wisconsin.
I got a root beer float in La Crosse and picked up a used copy of Huck Finn, the book from which Ernest Hemingway said “all modern American literature” is derived, and three other books, because I couldn’t resist. I stayed at a boat landing and watched a man drive down late and cast a line into the water. It was clearly something he did a lot and, in that moment, I felt like the act could have temporarily healed all emotional turmoil, all mental anguish, all manner of ills in the world. The world was quiet.
I met John, a river angel and long-time river paddler, and he brought me fresh fruit and took me for groceries. I made it to a marina and campground where I treated myself to a catfish dinner.
The next day, I passed through Lock and Dam 8 and stopped off on the very last island in Minnesota waters. As I sat in the warm sand and looked out over the golden-brown waters, I thought about my trip to that point. The narrow headwaters. The swollen lakes. The clear streambeds. The stillness of herons and kindness of angels. The slap of a beaver’s tail and whip of a fishing line. The moments in which I’d laugh to myself, just struck by the beauty of an island sunset. A Mississippi River island sunset.
The meaning that we attach to places is often arbitrary. So it would be as I crossed the state boundary from Minnesota, a place I once lived and the place that I’d spent the past month paddling through, to Iowa, the place where I’m from and the place that I’d spend the next month. I knew this. I knew not to expect a welcome sign.
But as I passed that point and looked to my right to see two bald eagles perched on a branch, I took it as a sign anyway.
NOTES:
*This doesn’t actually include the aforementioned towns, as they are north of Minneapolis, but they have been altered by dams. The section after St. Louis, coming just after the entrance of the Missouri River, is generally deep and wide enough, especially with a system of levees on either side of the river.
**National Mississippi River Museum. Dubuque, IA. July 18, 2024.
I love your writing! I’d like to request an autographed copy of your book about your trip when you publish! Not being pushy, I just think you should write it.