Rolling on the River

By Jon R. Luoma

Riding a wave of concern for the Mississippi's future, the Audubon Ark keeps paddling downstream. At each stop on its colorful journey, the boat rallies another river town to the cause.

Just after dawn on a September morning, a soupy fog settles in over the Mississippi River at La Crosse, Wisconsin. From the levee here on the river's eastern bank, visibility approaches zero. We can't see the opposite shore, or even the green and red buoys that mark the main navigation channel, where—just maybe—a tug working by radar is plowing its way downriver, pushing a giant barge. It hardly looks like promising weather to be out in a 62-foot boat.

Ike Hastings, designer, builder, and skipper of the paddle wheeler he calls the Lilly Belle, surveys the murk from the window of the boat's living room. Shirtless and tan in the morning chill, the 78-year-old Hastings, who sports a white beard and a ponytail, has spent enough time on the river to say with confidence that the fog will lift by midmorning.

"This little stern-wheeler doesn't move real fast," he says, aptly enough, since even in a good current the bright-red stern wheel propels the Lilly Belle downstream at just 10 miles an hour. "But if we can get this fog to go away pretty soon, we'll make Lansing by late afternoon." In fact, Lansing, Iowa, our next stop, lies downriver a mere 45 leisurely minutes by car. But on the meandering Mississippi, 32 river miles and maybe five hours of slow but steady stern-wheeling lie ahead of the Lilly Belle, with a possible wait for a lock to clear if there happens to be a big barge moving through when we get there.

Sure enough, the fog dissipates an hour later, and Captain Ike, a retired art teacher and a master river pilot, revs up the stern-wheeler's diesel engine, nimbly climbs the ladder into the upper-deck pilothouse, and orders his crew to cast off. Dan McGuiness, director of Audubon's Upper Mississippi River Campaign, and research coordinator Jon "Hawk" Stravers (so-named for his expertise on raptors in general and on the Mississippi's red-shouldered hawks in particular) quickly comply. With a jaunty Dixieland version of "Down by the Riverside" blaring from its loudspeakers, the Lilly Belle, also known as the Audubon Ark, is rolling on the river.

The Ark is on a mission: to introduce schoolkids, birders, anglers, farmers, business owners, local politicians—anyone who's willing to listen—to the story of the 1,400-mile Upper Mississippi River. In 1999, for the Ark's first year, McGuiness told the story from an ordinary houseboat. Since 2000 Hastings's handmade paddle wheeler has metamorphosed for a month each autumn into the Audubon Ark, and since then it has visited more than 90 communities. "Kids grow up within a mile of the Mississippi and never get a chance to get out on the river, much less learn why it's important to their lives and to their communities," says McGuiness. "Adults here drive along the river every day and never really learn just how vital a natural resource this is. We want to change that by using the Ark to help tell the river's story."

The Lilly Belle splashes generally southward down the planet's third longest river, a watery giant that begins as a small brook a few hundred miles to the north, at Minnesota's Lake Itasca. Here, where you can cross the river on stepping-stones, the Mississippi begins a 2,350-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico, a trip that sees it turn from a trickle into a flowing sea a mile and a half across.

The long stretch called the Upper Mississippi consists of roughly the first half of the river. It is smaller, friendlier water than the stupendous lower portion. And for 261 river miles, both north and south of La Crosse, it's a place of especially striking beauty: the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge. Created in 1924 by a landmark act of Congress, the 233,000-acre refuge includes wild shoreline, soaring bluffs, rock outcrops, wooded islands, wetlands, and backwaters. For this entire day, we will remain within its confines.

Here in the refuge, it's still easy to see why Mark Twain once marveled from the deck of a steamboat at the region's "enchanting scenery—there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi." Certainly there are signs of modern life here, including diesel tugs pushing great barges filled with everything from wheat to coal, and high-speed bass boats, glittering wedges that spew wake as anglers dash from hot spot to hot spot. But most of the riparian land, all the way over the tops of the bluffs in most cases, remains preserved and undeveloped. And despite the commotion of speedboats and barges, birds abound. At one point, in a 30-minute period, we sight a half-dozen bald eagles drifting on thermals over a side channel; moments later we see great flocks of white pelicans lumbering low, just off the river's surface. It is a tad too early in the fall to marvel at the tundra swans that linger here each autumn, taking a long migratory rest before continuing south to the Gulf of Mexico, but within weeks thousands of these magnificent birds will arrive. Hawks are already moving south along the bluffs, and great rafts of ducks are on their way, too. The Upper Mississippi River is the migratory flyway for 60 percent of all bird species in the United States, and for 40 percent of its ducks.

Yet troubling changes have come to the Upper Mississippi since Twain's time. Late this morning, McGuiness and Stravers take me on an excursion. As the Lilly Belle plugs its way downriver, we shoot off to the west in one of two speedy outboard runabouts we're towing. We race beyond the buoys that mark the main channel, through a meandering side channel, and then into a mosaic of backwaters, islands, swamps, marshes, and floodplain forests that McGuiness calls "the real magic of the river."

Here, outside the current of the main channel, lies the river's hottest bed of biological diversity, where fish spawn in the spring and their fry feed and find protection as they mature through the summer; where waterfowl nest; and where an abundance of plants adapted to this unique environment thrive—if given a chance. Each spring, for all the millennia of its existence, as snows in its upper reaches melt, the river has naturally flooded, inundating the riverbanks. Those flooded banks tend to dry out in late summer and into the autumn. Key aquatic plant species that evolved in this aquatic-terrestrial transition zone need those cycles in order to survive; they can only set seed on drying, nutrient-rich sediments the floods have left behind. The annual natural cycle of flooding and drying also once helped the river to reshape, renew, and refresh itself continuously, building new islands, carving out new side channels, allowing old ones to fill and become dry land—an ongoing process of disturbance and recovery that assured the existence of an astonishingly rich mix of habitats.

And there's the rub. When Stravers and McGuiness and I took off down the side channel, the Lilly Belle had just passed through a lock, one of 29 such structures that lower or raise boats and barges as they ply the Upper Mississippi. In the days of the steamboats, Mark Twain or anyone else journeying as far north as, say, Minneapolis, would have to repeatedly abandon their boats, walk around the rapids, shallows, or waterfalls that blocked their way, and then board a new boat on the other side. But since the 1930s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has maintained an elaborate system of locks that enable barges and boats to move up and down the river as if climbing or descending steps. Dams beside the locks regulate water levels in each of the miles-long artificial "pools" that form behind them, maintaining nine-foot-deep navigation channels. And because the entire arrangement causes the buildup of sediment in the river behind each dam, the Corps operates an extensive dredging program to keep the navigation channels clear.

That all works well enough for barges and boats. The dams and dikes and dredging, along with riverside levees, have brought a once ever-changing, wandering, even seemingly chaotic natural river under engineered control. But the loss of its normal dynamism has wreaked ecological havoc on the Upper Mississippi, particularly in the lower reaches of each pool.

We had been able to take our excursion into the maze of side channels only because we were in the upper end of a pool. Back aboard the Lilly Belle, rolling downstream, we saw the river transformed before our eyes. About five miles from the upstream lock and dam, near the middle of the pool, we saw far more open water, fewer islands, and less evidence of side channels or wetlands. Many of the side channels that remained were, in fact, choked with silt. The bottom third resembled what the name "pool" implies—little more than an open lake, with almost all of the upstream habitat diversity vanished under a flood of deep water.

"That's what the locks and dams have given us," says McGuiness-"a progression from a semblance of the old river and pretty good habitat, to declining habitat, to very little habitat. Then we go through a lock and get old river again, until we reach another zone of declining habitat."

Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, some of the creatures of the Upper Mississippi may be serving as sentinels, warning that loss of habitat means long-term trouble ahead. The river's once-thriving mussel populations have plummeted as silt has smothered suitable bottom habitat. Researchers have found that migrating flocks of tundra swans are being forced to feed in ever-shrinking areas. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is currently in the midst of a controversial navigation study that could lead to the construction of larger locks, which environmentalists fear could lead to more damage to habitat and species. Which is precisely why the Ark rolls on.

Lansing, Iowa, is a pretty little town that seems to be straight out of the River City of Music Man fame. The Lilly Belle docks just below a downtown of solid turn-of-the-century limestone buildings, right beside Grumpy's Bait Shop and only dozens of feet down a hill from Paul Horsfall Jr.'s eccentric general store, a local landmark crammed to the rafters with dry goods. The Audubon Ark's arrival is a big event for many of the town's 1,007 residents. On cue, the entire junior varsity football team has raced from the top of a nearby bluff with flaming Tiki torches to greet the boat. And a sizable crowd of adults gathers at dockside, too, including the mayor, Vernon Blietz, who is on hand to present a key to the city to Ike Hastings. Doug Sharp, president of the local chamber of commerce, awards McGuiness a small statue of a bald eagle; the bird's population on the Upper Mississippi has soared from one nesting pair in 1970 to 100 pairs today.

The next morning, there's an Audubon breakfast at Sweeney's on the River restaurant. The main dining room, high windowed and perched almost over the river, quickly fills with a couple of dozen local officials and generally curious citizens. Talk revolves about how the river ecosystem has changed in some ways for the better, and about how continued improvements can help a small town like this one economically. McGuiness, his eggs going cold on his plate, stands up and reflects on some of the good news, like the booming eagle population. Here, in a region whose largely farm-based economy did not benefit greatly from the urban prosperity of the roaring 1990s, he reminds his audience that there is great potential for ecotourism in this profoundly beautiful but too-little-known part of America. A 1999 study for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that tourism already provides $6.6 billion to the region, thus bolstering McGuiness's vision for an Upper Mississippi "where people prosper and birds and fish and wildlife thrive."

Later that morning, Mayor Blietz joins the Ark on a trip downriver to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. The mayor, a fisherman who has logged plenty of hours on the Mississippi, points out some of the river's unseen secrets: a favorite fishing hole, where walleyes tend to lurk, and calmer water downstream, where the absence of chop indicates that an old stone wing dam, designed to aim and shape the river's current, lies beneath the surface. We've timed the next lock well. A tug pushing a giant barge has just come through, its pilot responding to a couple of toots of the Lilly Belle's whistle with a grin and a wave from his own pilothouse.

"It's a good day on the river," McGuiness announces, then he and Stravers, in unison, call out the practiced response: "But even a bad day on the river is better than a good day in the office." Which launches them directly into the verse of a favorite song: "Why do I live by the river / With all the skeeters and flies? / I love it. I love it. I love the Mississippi!" The mayor chuckles.

The reason for the Ark's big reception in Lansing, Blietz says, is that "local people are really beginning to appreciate the value of the river. Some of it's economic: We've got more and more people coming in with big bass boats, buying gas, staying at motels, and eating at restaurants. But we also hear the message about some of the problems. And we've seen a lot of that ourselves. Silting has increased so much in the last 30 years it's unbelievable."

With a billion-dollar navigation industry now dependent on them, the locks and dams aren't going anywhere. In fact, they may soon be getting bigger. In August 2001 the staff of the Army Corps was charged by Major General Robert H. Griffin with studying anew the navigation needs of the river, "in a manner that will achieve environmental sustainability." Conservationists, however, are skeptical that such an old dog can unlearn new accounting tricks. After the Corps fudged data in 2000 to inflate the benefits of lock-and-dam expansion and thus justify construction costs, the former lead economist of the study blew the whistle, leading to the plan's temporary suspension (see "Trouble on the Mississippi," Incite, July-August 2000 Audubon).

"The Mississippi scandal was just so outrageously outrageous—a deliberate manipulation of data," says Melissa Samet, senior director of water resources for American Rivers, an environmental organization dedicated to river restoration. "The findings made people open their eyes to take a good look at projects around the country. And the more they look, the more flaws they reveal." Last March, President George W. Bush dismissed Michael Parker, the Corps' civilian appointee, for inviting the Senate to lard the federal budget with projects that the administration intended to cut. And legislation aimed at modernizing and improving the Corps has been introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

"It's not a question of reforming the Corps," counters Paul Rody, vice president of the Midwest Area River Coalition 2000, a consortium of waterway transportation and agricultural groups. It boils down to the river's infrastructure, which he views as "pretty antiquated and deteriorating. I give the Corps the Golden Duct Tape Award for how it keeps this thing moving," Rody says, referring to technology like the 600-foot locks that, because of their limited size, force barges to uncouple and pass through in pieces. Rody maintains that streamlining the process with a $1.2 billion expansion of seven locks would be an "environmentally sensitive alternative" to shipping bulk commodities by carbon-spewing trucks. "Not an option is products not moving," he says. "If we don't do it by river, it must be done another way."

But environmentalists argue that there are cheaper alternatives to lock expansion, such as guide walls to line boats and barges up to the locks more smoothly; mooring buoys where barges can wait to enter the locks without fighting the current; and better scheduling, to simply avoid congestion on the river. "The Corps has already invested over a billion dollars in the rehabilitation of locks and dams," says Mark Beorkrem, of the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, a coalition of 150 organizations from the headwaters to the gulf. "It's not a matter of concrete falling into the river. These things were built to last indefinitely.

"There is only so much money to go around," he continues. Spending more than a billion dollars to double the size of locks would divert money from ecosystem restoration in places already significantly degraded.

Rebuilding eroded islands and shorelines, restoring wetlands, and—over time—finding private or public funds and willing sellers to preserve land in the vast Upper Mississippi watershed should be part of the long-term plan for the river, says McGuiness. Ideally, the purchased land would be primarily agricultural and would be restored to wild forest, wetlands, and prairie; this would help abate erosion and sedimentation and reduce fertilizer and pesticide pollution. More extensive attempts to mimic seasonal flooding and drying are also on the Upper Mississippi River Campaign's wish list.

Last summer and fall, the Corps reduced flows on one stretch of the Upper Mississippi to try to simulate a natural summer and autumn low-flow period. Although only preliminary data from that drawdown are in, Gretchen Benjamin, Mississippi River planner at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, reports that the efforts appear to have been successful, boosting the growth of emergent plants like arrowhead, a favorite food of swans, and annuals like smartweed and chufa that provide food for waterfowl.

The price tag for all the needed restoration and habitat protection could end up being $1 billion a year over 50 years—almost seven times the $7.8 billion committed to the massive restoration effort now under way in Florida's Everglades. But that prospect isn't slowing down the Lilly Belle—well, at least not any slower than she already paddles, that is. The Audubon Ark seems destined to keep the river's story alive, in whatever incarnation. McGuiness is already raising funds—with more than one-third of a hoped-for $3 million already in hand—for a permanent Audubon Ark, a floating nature center that can take visitors not merely onto the river but on a journey of discovery into the Upper Mississippi's history and ecology.

Ric Zarwell, Important Bird Area coordinator for Audubon Iowa, and his wife, Betty, both longtime Audubon members from Lansing, showed up at the breakfast there and later appeared again downriver, at Iowa's Effigy Mounds National Monument, where the Ark is cosponsoring a hawk watch. Betty speaks of what an Audubon Ark of the future can offer: "For those of us who've spent a lot of our lives around and on the river, there's a deep, deep sense of the sacred. I hope the Audubon Ark can help make people here, in the communities, feel a connection to the river that too many have lost."

Contributing editor Jon R. Luoma wrote "Blueprint for the Future," in July-August 2001.