Down the Mississippi #10 

The plaque outside the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis reads, “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg … If you stand in the middle of the lobby, where the ducks waddle and turtles drowse, you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta.” The plaque expresses a fine sentiment, and the waddling ducks represent Americana at its best, but none of the quote is true.

Now that I have experienced the Mississippi Delta a few times and read about it a fair amount, I can say with some confidence that I am more confused than ever. I don’t know where “it” begins or where “it” ends, and I am not at all certain what “it” is. If the “Delta” is the “mouth” of the river, it is south of New Orleans in Plaquemine Parish, about 250 miles south of where I am writing. If “it” is the Mississippi Delta of Blues fame and home to the likes of Robert Johnson, BB King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Leadbelly, Pinetop Perkins, James Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite, Keb Mo, and countless others, “it” probably does start around Memphis and end around Vicksburg, but the boundaries are seriously ill-defined.

If “it” is the vast alluvial plain where the river flattens and sediment has spread across the land for millennia, it begins right around New Madrid, Missouri, more than 100 miles north of Memphis … and probably closer to 200 miles if you count the bends in the river … and ends about 20 miles north of Vicksburg, where forests and bluffs start to reappear.

As Wikipedia sort-of says, the Mississippi Delta is not to be confused with the Mississippi Delta.  That is about as clear as I can make it too.

The Peabody plaque is also wrong in its sentiment about seeing “everybody who is anybody in the Delta” in the hotel lobby.

We did meet Anthony Petrina in the lobby, and he is most assuredly somebody: he is the Peabody’s official “duckmaster,” which must be one of the greatest jobs on earth. He gets to wear a really nifty bright red suit with epaulets and chains instead of buttons and carry a fabulous cane with a golden duck handgrip. He gets to perform like a ringmaster twice a day as he escorts the Peabody’s five ducks from their penthouse suite … the “Duck Palace” … to their lobby pool at 11:00 a.m. and as he escorts them back to the penthouse suite at 5:00 p.m. In between, he stays busy doing all sorts of duck-related things, like duck training and interacting with the Peabody’s own duck breeder. The ducks even stop on cue during their parade to pose for the adoring duck paparazzi.

Most of the folks in the Peabody’s lobby, though, are not the shakers and movers of the Delta. Instead, they are a bunch of tourists, mostly parents with young ‘uns, wondering why in the world they are taking part of their valuable vacation time to watch 5 ducks waddle through a hotel lobby … until they witness the actual spectacle, at which time they know they have just experienced a truly hilarious and perfectly memorable few seconds.

I expect that the “everybody who is anybody in the Delta” folks who David Cohn thought of in 1935 when he came up with his now-immortalized quote were mostly landowners and cotton barons and 100% white. That’s just not my idea of “everybody who is anybody in the Delta.” In fact, I turned down an invitation to spend a day in Jackson with 400 farm owners because farm owners as a group just don’t interest me very much. Farmers interest me; farm owners, not so much.

My idea of “everybody who is anybody in the Delta” started to crystalize in the Visitor Center in Tunica when Miss Katie and Angela, the totally sweet ladies at the counter, told us about a marker dedication in Lyon, just outside of Clarksdale, the following afternoon. The 200th “Mississippi Blues Trail” marker would be unveiled to speeches, live music, and a reception at the Clarksdale Visitor Center featuring none other than Super Chikan himself.

Following a schedule on this trip proved to be a bit of a challenge, but at 4:15, we pulled up to the Lyon Town Offices and joined a crowd of 50 or more dedicated officials and blues folks. Fortunately, we were a tad late: instead of 4:00, the speeches actually began around 3:00. Our experience of the speechifying lasted only about 15 minutes, but the ones we heard were inspiring. The festivities took place next to a bright red 1951 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 in pristine condition. Why? Because the 200th marker commemorated the release of the 1951 hit “Rocket 88,” which is credited as being the first-ever Rock-N-Roll record. (YouTube has a terrific photo array of Rocket 88’s to accompany the Jackie Brenston recording. Check it out.)

After an hour or so of music in Lyon, accompanied by terrific conversations with state officials, tourism officials, scholars, community activists, and blues lovers, we headed back to Clarksdale for the reception and Super Chikan concert. The reception provided a few more hours of booze, munchies, music and chit-chat … a perfect kick-off to our time in the Delta.   (Google “Super Chikan” too. His music is great; his penchant for making and playing one-of-a-kind guitars is even greater. He is an extraordinary folk artist!)

After Super Chikan and a day at the Delta Blues Museum, the muses led us to Red’s, a classic juke joint, where we spent the evening with Bill “Howl N Madd” Perry and a small combo: a phenomenal keyboard player/ vocalist and a drummer from England who started coming to Clarksdale for the blues scene with her father when she was a little girl.

The next morning, we brunched at the Bluesberry Café and spent the morning with Watermelon Slim: great musician, scholar, activist, comedian, and all-around good guy. Phenomenal!

(Howl N Madd and Slim are both on YouTube, so check them out too, and Red’s is about the finest blues juke joint imaginable!)

Our eyes and ears for Clarksdale were Bubba O’Keefe and Roger Stolle. Bubba is a native who has become a nonstop promoter and matchmaker. He develops properties, makes outsiders feel at home, and might be the second-most important reason that Clarksdale has become a destination –– next to Clarksdale native Morgan Freeman, of course. Roger is a transplanted Dayton-ite. Articulate, knowledgeable, kind, creative, and really, really smart, Roger calls himself a promoter, producer, and raconteur. Ahh, but he is so much more … including our source for more great Mississippi music. Folks like Bubba and Roger are the catalysts that can turn a sleepy Delta river town into a really exciting place. I can’t wait to return … hopefully to work with young people trying to carve out a good life in a no-longer sleepy burg.

The Delta: harmonicas, hot tamales, the King Biscuit Hour, southern food, super-kind motel housekeepers, Elvis, cypress trees and brown water (stained by the tannins in the cypress roots), a race-car toilet, racists, a visit to Leland, Mississippi ­– the home of Kermit the Frog, miles upon miles of cotton fields, blues, and so much more.

Stay tuned. Like the entire trip down the river, the Delta is too alive and has too many moving parts to jam into a short blog entry. Months will pass before the elements of this trip turn themselves into discrete stories.

Until that happens, this little tasting plate is all I can muster … but the pantry is bursting with crazily cool shit!

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #9

Every inch of this drive reminds us what a workhorse the Mississippi River is … and that is not just the Mississippi itself; it is the entire system: the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Wisconsin, the Iowa, the Arkansas, the Atchafalaya, and all of the other rivers and tributaries that join the Mississippi along the way. It is among the largest river systems in the world, and it supports an almost unimaginable range of activities, from rice harvesting to soybeans and corn to quarries to barges to grain elevators. Railroad tracks are everywhere; the trains run constantly ­– very, very long trains as a rule … that look a lot like Lionel electric train sets. Bird life thrives along the Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge, which abuts the river from north to south. Fishermen (and fisherwomen) are everywhere. It’s impossible not to see the river’s contribution to commerce, farming, and recreation. It’s incredibly beautiful too.

With that thought in mind, we had a real red-letter day last Friday!

When I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep before a great adventure, like a fishing trip or going to summer camp. I still can’t. Last Friday, I awoke at 4:00 a.m. and then waited a couple of hours before rising. Rebecca calls my behavior “Little Boy-ing.” I’ve been a little boy a lot on this trip and hope to never outgrow it.

Just after 7:00 a.m., I climbed aboard a bona fide Mississippi River Towboat (not a “tugboat,” mind you, a “towboat.” One of the big guys!) A few hours later, I stood on a platform over the Mississippi at the intake for the Chain of Rocks Water Treatment plant watching where St. Louis’ drinking water gets sucked out of the river and made healthy. After a late lunch, I spent the afternoon a few miles down river gasping for clean air at the Bissell Wastewater Treatment Plant, where St. Louis’ sewage and stormwater gets treated before going back into the river.

From St. Paul south, it is hard to see the main channel of the river without seeing a towboat pushing a tow of barges. Grains and minerals have no better way to travel long distances. With the help of a little googling, I learned that barges are somewhere between 2.5 and 5-times more fuel efficient than trains and about 10 or 12-times more than trucks. That all translates to atmospheric carbon: the more cargo we ship by barge, the less we contribute to carbon build-up in the atmosphere.

The amount of cargo and freight we ship is damn-near incomprehensible. Our transportation system moves something between 40 and 55 tons of freight PER PERSON in the U.S. every year. That’s 80,000 to 110,000 pounds of stuff. It’s as high as 8,000,000 pounds for each of us in a lifetime. That’s the fertilizer that grows the grain that feeds the livestock that gets shipped to market over concrete highways and steel bridges in enormous petroleum-powered vehicles made of steel and composites that require solvents and polymers and machinery and then have to be remade into other products or moved to landfills; its all the stuff that goes into making the buildings to manage that other stuff, including the dirt that comes out of the ground to make the hole for the foundations, and all of the furniture, paper and copiers and computers that human beings actually use including our beds, sheets, soap, and cooking utensils, and, I guess, just about everything else. And now that I am thinking about it, how the hell do we get by with moving so little?

Barge traffic is a mainstay of the river’s work. About 100 years ago, the U.S. government committed the river system to transportation when the Corps of Engineers guaranteed shippers a navigable channel in the Upper Mississippi that was at least 9-feet deep. The “Upper Mississippi” extends from the headwaters to St. Louis. In that span, the river drops about 400-feet. Navigation would be impossible without a series of locks and dams that raise and lower the barges, allowing them to avoid shallows and rapids. From St. Louis south, the river flows unimpeded. The last of the lock and dam structures is in Granite City, just a few miles north of St. Louis.

Thus far in our trip, all of the barge tows we have seen have been no larger than 15 barges: three barges wide by five barges long. (And just in case you are a factoid geek like me, each barge is 195′ X 35′ with a capacity of 1,500 tons. Towboats vary in length, but 150′ seems to be a pretty good midpoint. That means that each tow is roughly 1,125-feet long  or slightly under 1/4-mile ­­– and 105-feet wide ­– so it can fit in the locks – and can carry as much as 22,500 tons, or 45-million pounds!)

The crews who operate the towboats are a memorable lot.  If nothing else, they work their butts off … 6-hours on, 6-hours off, 6-hours on, 6-hours off every day … but as my host noted, where else can someone earn as much as they do with a high school diploma or less? Each boat has three crews. Each crew works 28 days and then takes 14 days off, so every 14 days the crew shifts … except for the Captain, and I’m just not sure how that works. Family life has got to be a strain, and that 14-day-off period includes travel time from their home port to wherever the tow happens to be at the time of the shift change … which might be darn-near anywhere. From what I learned, most of the boat owners move the crews around via van, so travel might eat up a day or two on each side of the 14-day “weekend.”

I just bought a book of stories from a towboat captain. (His daughters insisted that he write his stories into a book, so he did.) I haven’t read it yet, so I only know the few stories I learned from Captain Berry during the morning we spent together. He’s been on the river for about 30 years. When I asked about “hairy” moments on the river, he laughed, as if he could start talking and not stop for about 30 more years. The story that stuck with me had to do with the time he had to move a barge perpendicular across the river for a dredging operation. The current caught the barge and lifted it across the bow of the towboat. It finally came to rest on top of the port “tow knee.” (Silly me. I thought he called the vertical contraption on the front of the boat a “tony.”) It turns out that the “tow knees” are structural safety elements: each boat has two tow-knees on its bow, one on the port side and one on the starboard. They are steel upright structures that look out of place. They are there to stop a rogue barge if it comes over the towboat’s bow and threatens to crash into the crew quarters and pilothouse. Captain Berry described how the loaded barge came to rest on top of the tow knee. They needed a giant crane to remove it, but the tow knee itself showed no damage and needed no repair. Damn, that’s amazing!

The little boy in me not only wanted to spend the entire day on the towboat with Captain Berry, I wanted to spend the full 28-day shift plying the river. (Careful, Captain, I may be back in touch before my next adventure to see if you have an opening for a near-septuagenarian deckhand.) But the clock drove me away.

The Chain-of-Rocks Water Treatment plant north of St. Louis was still an hour’s drive away, and the plant superintendent was waiting. Bye Captain Berry, and hello Frank, Pat, and Chain-of-Rocks.

If you look on a map, the Chain of Rocks plant appears to be on the Mississippi, but appearances are only half right. The plant is situated a mile or so south of the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi. In that mile, the waters of the two rivers have not yet fully mixed, so the plant actually treats Missouri River water even though it appears to be sucking it out of the Mississippi. The difference is not insignificant. (“Confluence,” by the way, refers to the joining of two rivers while “convergence” refers to the coming together of ocean currents or air currents.)

Despite the nickname of “Big Muddy,” the Mississippi is actually less muddy than the Missouri. The Missouri’s extra goop ­– known as “Total Suspended Solids,” “TSS,” or “turbidity” in the water business ­– makes treating that water a tad easier than treating water from the Mississippi. Near the beginning of the water treatment process – after all the floating crap has been screened out – the water gets whacked with a polymer that promotes coagulation. In the part of the treatment process with by-far the best name, “flocculation,” the solid material ­– called “floc” – settles to the bottom of a basin or floats to the top and gets scraped away. The coagulant works better on the TSS in the Missouri River water than the TSS in the Mississippi, so the location of the plant is helpful. You might say that the chemistry of the Missouri helps plant operators get the floc out. HaHa.

To know how much chemical to add, the plant operators need to know how much stuff is floating around in the water that needs to be removed. The very first bit of water treatment equipment we encountered was a raggedy bucket with a rope tied to it. High tech indeed. With years of experience under their belts, the operators have learned that the best way to draw a sample of raw river water is simply to drop a bucket from the intake platform and pull it up by hand. It works perfectly every time, needs almost no maintenance, and costs practically nothing.

Another very cool characteristic of Mississippi Valley drinking water is that it is high in minerals such as calcium and magnesium. In fortunate concentrations, the minerals form a protective coating along the inside of pipes, preventing contamination from other stuff, like lead in old solder joints. As long as no changes occur in the chemistry, a Flint, Michigan-like problem is not likely to occur in St. Louis, even though it is an old legacy city with a declining population and tax base and very, very old infrastructure.

(That thought about legacy cities is a really important one that deserves much more time than I am giving it … because legacy cities are of national concern and are in no way unique to the Mississippi River. How will a city’s residents continue to pay the costs of water and wastewater treatment and delivery as the population declines and grows poorer while the affluent flee? Along the river, such towns as Clinton, Iowa, Muscatine, Illinois, and Cairo, Illinois have one of the greatest assets imaginable – direct access to the Mississippi River – yet they are cities in decline that leave this pilgrim with a gut-wrenching sense of sadness and concern.)

As we left Chain-of-Rocks, the talk turned to a conversation that is common among drinking water people: the general disdain for bottled water. The folks who run St. Louis’s Water Department and the Chain of Rocks plant are genuinely proud of the product they deliver. Despite the high cost of maintenance and treatment and infrastructure, treated drinking water is one of the truly great bargains of our society. Seeing the process work along the length of the Muddy Mississip is simply amazing!

From the conversations about clean drinking water and the inanity of people to buy water in outgassing plastic bottles when health is not at risk, we left for the Bissell Wastewater Treatment Plant, a really shitty place if ever there was one. HaHa again.

Our host, plant Superintendent Becca Coyle, spent the rest of the afternoon with Rebecca and me. We had met her brother earlier at Chain of Rocks. They are both engineers, him in drinking water and her in wastewater. He had prepped us for Becca, assuring us that she was nothing more than a “turd herder,” and we should tell her so. We did. She rolled her eyes. Brothers will be brothers, you know.

Becca is a phenomenal spokesperson and representative for wastewater professionals. She sparkles with energy and enthusiasm as she shows off her plant, never showing the slightest response to any part of the process, stinkiness included. She sparkled as she showed off the size of the various settling basins, as she showed us the comminutor (a grinding device for getting rid of some of the solids), and as she showed off the crystal clear water flowing over the weirs that had been sewage only 6 or 8 hours earlier.

As had happened a few weeks earlier in Bemidji, our conversation turned to unregulated contaminants, such as personal care products, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine disrupters. We quickly agreed on a lot of things: Decades-old wastewater treatment methods will have to change. Making the needed changes will be expensive. Few if any plant owners or plant engineers will pay for the changes until clear regulation is in place so the permissible limits of contaminants is known and fully agreed upon. Until then, any investment could go right up in smoke.

The reason that these unregulated contaminants do not get treated is because of emerging science. Nobody really knows what a “safe” limit is. Until there is widespread agreement on how clean is clean enough, nothing is going to happen. The river … and our drinking water … will be the repository of that stuff. Our reproductive systems and waterways will be the victims of the inaction, and the field of oncology will be one of the prime beneficiaries. Just as happened in the past with inaction in the face of science related to seat belts, tobacco, fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon, and climate change, deep pockets will do everything in their power to ensure that we, the public, stay confused and frightened. Those bastards!

As a society, we show deference to the doctors and practitioners who dedicate their lives to keeping us healthy. We show precious little appreciation to the front-line protectors of public health: the folks who treat drinking water and wastewater. We’d be a mess without them. Hats off to you Becca, Frank, and Pat. Thank you for doing what you do. There simply are not any more important jobs.

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #8

 I didn’t read much to prepare for this trip, just a lot of state maps and Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi.” That was all I needed.

“Life on the Mississippi” is a glorious read. If it doesn’t make you yearn for time on the river, there’s something bad wrong with you.

Young Sam Clemens convinced one of the finest pilots on the river, Mr. Horace Bixby, to take him on as a cub. The account, which runs from about Chapter 5 to about Chapter 20, is time very, very well spent. Indulge yourself!

In the 1850s, the river had no lights, no navigation aids, no Corps of Engineers to keep the channel dredged, and nothing to clear the river of debris.  “Knowing” the river wasn’t nearly good enough.  Pilots had to be able to “read” the river since it changed constantly … in daylight and through the darkest of nights.

Not only did Clemens learn the river, he piloted riverboats until the Civil War, when the railroads prompted the demise of riverboats as the primary mode of transportation … and he apparently did so without a single mishap.

His superior intellect obviously helped a lot.  I also attribute much of his success to the remarkable knowledge and teaching style of Mr. Bixby.

In addition to teaching Sam Clemens, Mr. Bixby, also became an ardent opponent of slavery who transported union troops and armaments along the river, and he was instrumental in creating one of the nation’s first labor unions, an “organization” of riverboat pilots.

In planning this trip, we re-named our trusty car, a 2014 Ford Escape compact SUV that has now covered 70,000 miles with nary a hiccup. For the first few years of his life, he was “Barney,” so named because he was just a simple old Ford. He has proved his mettle time and again, and earned a new and powerful name for this journey. We now proudly ride along the river in “Mr. Bixby.”

The human Mr. Bixby is now buried in St. Louis’ famed Bellefontaine (pronounced Belle Fountain) Cemetery just north of downtown only one block from the river. He is planted a few feet from Augustus Busch.  So much about St. Louis is interesting and worth seeing, but nothing drew me to it more than seeing Mr. Bixby’s grave.  It was everything I had hoped for.

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #7

Not infrequently, when we tell people what we are doing, we get peppered with questions about the experience. We figured that since we’re becoming road tripping “experts,” we’d share some of our trial-and-error, exercise-in-patience, and exercise-in-tolerance moments.

Don’t you get exhausted from all of the driving?
Nope. We don’t go very far each day, and we stop at most scenic overlooks and every historical marker, visitor center, and anything else that looks interesting. Plus, we walk 3 – 4 miles every day, mostly along the river.

Who drives?

For the most part we are only on the road for about two hours a day. I drive and Rebecca navigates. The front seat is filled with state maps, tourist guides, and two smart phones, one for the Great River Road map, and the other for Google Maps.

The deal is simple. As long as I do not get tired, I love driving. At any point that Rebecca wants to drive, the wheel is hers. So far, it is working perfectly.

 What do you listen to?

Each other. We have bags of CD’s and lists of podcasts. Instead, we listen to nothing except the sounds of the road and each other’s thoughts and observations.

 Aren’t you sick of each other?

Why would we be? Fact is, we are having an incredibly good time together! (And when we have our moments, we make sure they only last a few seconds.)

 What are your biggest challenges?

1) Remembering what hotel room we are in. 2) Finding healthy food in a world of deep fat fryers. 3) Keeping track of the date.

Where do you stay?

We have made a sort-of pledge not to drive after dark. We start looking for a place sometime between 3:00 and 4:00. The other night, the places we looked at were so shitty that we didn’t find a place until 6:30.

Staying in name-brand places would be easier … if any are nearby, which is pretty seldom. But since we won’t eat at a Friday’s or an Applebee’s … and certainly not at fast food joints … we try to avoid chain motels and look for family-owned privates instead. (That said, we are batting 1.000 so far on this trip with Super 8’s! The one in Bemidji, where we ended up staying for 4 nights, even washed and folded all of our laundry during the night shift for $2!!! But we have also walked out of a couple of Super 8’s too because they were just too crappy.)

Here’s the drill: We try to avoid motel hunting in the bigger cities. They are too expensive. Instead we hunt for smaller towns that we think might have some privates. When possible, we stop at Chamber Visitor Centers to see if they have any recommendations, and we always Google-map the town to see if anything shows up. Most of the privates don’t show up because they have little or no Internet presence. As we drive by, Rebecca checks out the curtains and exterior while I check the parking lot. If the curtains are reasonably straight, the place is reasonably well kept and clean, and the parking lot does not look abandoned, we stop.

Assuming we have cell service, we check Google, Hotels.com, and Bookings.com to get a sense of the going rate for where we are. Then we go into the office, jawbone the desk clerk for a few minutes, and inquire about rates.  As long the desk clerk doesn’t spook us and the place doesn’t stink, we ask to see a room. If the quoted rate is higher than what we found on the Internet, we are shameless.

When we check out a room, we each have our assigned tasks. I check the firmness of the mattress, the condition of the bathroom, and the general cleanliness. Rebecca checks the bed and linens and the general cleanliness. (A number of years ago, we stayed at a Rodeway Inn along I-80 in Davenport, Iowa with Rebecca’s son and daughter-in-law that turned out to be a whorehouse complete with plastic covers on the mattress. We learned a good lesson!)

If the room smells or fails any of our tests, we bolt. Usually, we get lucky pretty quickly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have to break our “don’t drive after dark” rule at least once or twice on this trip if everything we find flunks our tests.

So far, we are doing really, really well, and some of the places we’ve stayed have been red letter … and mostly in the $60 – $70 price range.

What do you eat?

Gaining weight and eating poorly are just not options on this trip!

Rebecca brought about 10 pounds of her world-class, homemade, gluten-free, Vermont-maple-syrup-sweetened granola ($10 per bag if you are interested). She has it almost every morning along with banana, fruit, and kefir. I have it some mornings, and on the others, I generally settle for Kellogg’s raisin bran and fruit from the hotel breakfast nook. Once in a great while, we go out to eat, when we split a breakfast skillet.

We only have lunch when we are visiting people. Otherwise, we have leftovers from the night before or we eat fruit, mostly apples. If we’re starving during the day, Rebecca might eat a Larabar; we always have a few bags of nut/fruit trail mix; and Teddy’s crunchy peanut butter on a rice cake is pretty-much unbeatable.

For supper, we have realized that we are best off eating something ethnic and local. We’ve had some amazing Indian, Thai, and Mexican food, and now that we are getting farther south, we’re anticipating some kick-butt barbecue. We’ve also had some really horrible Mexican (one step below ballpark food). We generally avoid Chinese, mostly because of Rebecca’s gluten intolerance.  Al-in-all, Rebecca’s inability to eat wheat is a wonderful gift for the both of us.

More FAQs as we think of them.

 © 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #6

Just maybe there is some really good juju that comes from having a heart attack. One of the redeeming experiences of spending several months in cardiac rehab at the University of Vermont Medical Center was getting to know the staff at the gym. Tony is a Physical Therapist there who would jawbone with me occasionally as I was enduring an hour on the treadmill. (I much prefer an hour or two of hiking bluffs and Indian Mounds along the Mississippi.)

When I told Tony about this upcoming Mississippi River adventure, he sparkled. He has family roots in McGregor, Iowa. He grew up in Dubuque. His full name is Anthony Orr Ellison. Without Tony, I would have bypassed McGregor altogether and never learned about Ellison Orr ­ –– the ancestor from whom Tony gained a middle name ­–– and the Effigy Indian Mound National Monument.

McGregor is a gem! Greater McGregor is a full adventure in and of itself. For starters, downtown McGregor is not really charming. It’s a little too decrepit to be “charming.” Virtually all of the downtown buildings date from the mid-1800s. It is a seriously old river town. The railroad tracks and a good-sized grain elevator separate the town from the river — sort of. The walk from our Inn to the riverbank took about 90 seconds and entailed no stairs or ramps. The town is literally ON the river.

But before I get ahead of myself, we first had to get to McGregor. Of course, the trip had entailed Minneapolis and all of Minnesota and many days of driving since the headwaters, but that is too big a time horizon for this story. Our experience of McGregor began when we crossed the bridge from Wisconsin to Lansing, Iowa, a tiny spit of a town. For much of the drive south from Lansing, the Great River Road hugs the river. The houses between the road and river, mostly single-wide manufactured homes, sit 10 or 12 feet in the air atop very, very tall posts made of wood or stacked block. When the river floods, those homes might be safe.

A few miles south, in the hamlet of Harper’s Ferry, we passed Mohn’s Fish Market, a nondescript place if ever there was one. Nondescript, maybe, but any place that sports a “smoked fish for sale” sign catches my eye. A lad of about 10 or 12 stood at the raggedy screen door. I went into a room about 12′ X 12′ with a few refrigerators and a counter. Not much else. The youngster went around me, opened the door to the processing room and yelled, “Hey Grandma, there’s someone here.” Before Diane Mohn made her way out to greet me, I took in a mind-blowing scene that we caught again on the other side of Greater McGregor, in Prairie du Chien — a fish processing operation out of the 1920s: lots of buckets of fish and fish guts, and lots of water hosing the floor. Mohn’s Fish Market, we later learned, is the last commercial fish processor along the river in Iowa.

Diane described their different smoked fish: perch, bullhead, catfish, carp, and a few others. When she said the catfish was the saltiest, I opted for the carp. I picked out a good-sized chunk from the refrigerator. She weighed it and wrapped it. “That’ll be $1.04,” she said. When I gave her $1.05, she quietly gave me a penny in change. When I looked at the sign, I saw that smoked carp cost all of $1.50 per pound.

It was phenomenal. Rebecca and I snacked on it for two days.

From Mohn’s and Harper’s Ferry, we made it to Marquette, yet another non-descript spot along the river. We stopped at a motel to check out a possible room. The room was fine, and in most circumstances, we would have taken it, but we put the guy on hold, explaining that we had to check out McGregor first. I felt I owed it to Tony for the great stories he had told me.

We only made it about 100 feet out of the motel parking lot before we got sidetracked yet again, this time by Pinky the Elephant. You may remember Pinky. She once water-skied on the Mississippi to herald a visit by President Carter.

Pinky has a long history of welcoming people to eating establishments in Marquette. In this incarnation, she sits along the highway welcoming folks to the Casino Queen. Oddly, I had been looking forward to meeting Pinky and had read about her in some detail months earlier.

Lest you think I know a lot of shit about really useless stuff, here’s how I first got acquainted with Pinky. My good friend Lynn, with whom we stayed in Minneapolis, sent me some names of people she knew who might be helpful during our travels. Lynn is a serious environmentalist and river advocate, and her friends are too.

While we could have discussed all sorts of heady, important environmental stuff, her friend Lindsay immediately let me know that I would be encountering Pinky in Marquette. I was thrilled, and noted her as a “must see.” (Of course, I neglected to tell Rebecca about Pinky, so when I reacted so boyishly to the sight, she yet once again expressed some doubt about my sanity.)

Pinky’s most mysterious attribute is her address … actually the address of the casino: 100 Anti Monopoly Street. How the hell does a town name a street “Anti Monopoly”? The nice lady at the casino tried out an explanation, something about not wanting to be like the game, but it just didn’t resonate. Somehow the town fathers of Marquette Iowa saw fit to name a street Anti Monopoly because it housed a casino. If any of you have a plausible explanation, I am really interested.

(FYI: For what it is worth, the casino’s website spells the street name just like Parker Brothers. The town’s street sign omits the last “o”. Yet another mystery. We’ll never know the correct spelling!)

Finally, maybe a half an hour after having bought smoked fish, we entered McGregor. It was breathtakingly funky: the river to the east and several blocks of mid-19th century buildings lining the main street. We drove through town, stopped at the library, asked two really sweet librarians about lodging options, learned about the recent tornado, and then started our search.

We spent two nights at the Little Switzerland Inn on the north side of town. We would have stayed longer, but they were booked for the weekend. Despite having to negotiate a very long outside flight of stairs, our “room” consisted of three bedrooms (each with its own toilet from the old boarding house days), a full kitchen (with washer and dryer), a living room and dining room (filled with antiques), and a front deck looking over the river. For this showpiece, we paid $75 per night and received a world-class homemade full breakfast – complete with amazing conversation – both mornings. A+ to you two, Becky and Randy. You made it look easy.

Becky did not ask if we’d like to spend $20 each to take a tour boat ride through the backwaters. Instead, she phoned Robert, told him she had two guests who would be with him that morning, and then told us to be on the dock by about 10:30, ready for an 11:00 departure.

Robert Vavra is a master of his craft. He accurately assured us he was full of “yak yak,” and it was all good, from his knowledge of the region’s and town’s history, the economy, the size and capacity of the barges, the river itself, and especially the birdlife and history of clamming and mother-of-pearl button making. Owning a pontoon tour boat was about Robert’s fourth career. His passion was glorious.

From the boat, we watched bald eagles successfully dive for fish and coot; we watched a mating pair ogle each other from a treetop; we watched pelicans soar overhead; we saw endless signs of beaver and other critters; we learned about button worker strikes in Muscatine and the destruction of the clam beds in the Upper River; we handled his collection of clam shells and the mother-of-pearl orbs used in the cultured pearl trade. We hated for the tour to end and would have spent the afternoon with him if he and his wife had not needed to visit a friend in the hospital.

Instead, he told us about his good friend, Mike Valley, who owns a fish smoking shop across the bridge in Prairie du Chien. He called Mike and told him we’d be over. I would say that Mike was waiting for us, but Mike waits for nothing. He is a whirling dervish of motion.

His shop is one of those places that forces you to pull out your camera and after snapping god-knows-how-many pictures you wonder if you could possibly have gotten everything. Mike was out back in the cleaning room washing big pieces of cut-up carp when we met up with him. He was happy to meet us, but never looked up or broke stride from his work … for a solid minute or two, and then he handed the fish-washing chore off to an assistant and headed to the smoke room next door. Mike has owned the shop for 40 years. He built the smoker himself about 20 years ago. All of his hickory wood comes from a friend who owns a sawmill up the road; Mike gets the scraps. He catches most of the fish himself and smokes 500 pounds every day. He sells to two restaurants, and other than that, everything gets sold from his shop.

The shop is packed with curios, smoked meats of every kind … including smoked alligator, of course. Nothing goes to waste. Mike catches 10 or 20 snapping turtles each week. He smokes the meat, cleans and varnishes the shell, breastplate, and feet, and dries the head with the beak open. Every piece of the turtle gets sold in the shop. (Shells go for $10 to $30 depending on their size.)

Our time in McGregor ended peacefully, first with a fabulous visit to Rivertown Books, a world-class antiquarian bookstore on Main Street, where we bought a print of an early 18th-century map of the Mississippi, and then with a several-mile hike up a bluff and through a portion of the Effigy Mounds National Monument. In other words, we spent the time in a Native American cemetery, paying tribute to the people and the land, while overlooking stunning vistas.

These particular mounds were built over a span of about 650 years, from 1,500 years ago until about 850 years ago. Ellison Orr, Tony’s ancestor and namesake, explored the area, realized its significance and beauty, and lobbied the U.S. government to create an Upper Mississippi Valley National Park. While he failed in that effort, he did succeed in obtaining National Monument status, and the mounds are managed and protected by the U.S. Park Service. They are a holy spot that speak to the complex history of life and conflict in the Mississippi Valley.

Thanks Tony!

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #5

 The Great River Road is not a road. It is a National Scenic Byway. From what we can tell, it includes no Interstates, and minimal US Highways. This far north, it is mostly two-lane county roads and an occasional dirt road, and for these first few hundred miles, we have encountered precious few other cars. Understanding why becomes easy as you drive and observe: the Mississippi River is either on the right or the left. Wherever we go, we are at the dead end of every east-west road. Except for the very occasional bridge, there are no crossroads. There are no stores, no malls, no gas stations, no nothing. Just the river on one side and farms or woods on the other.

For the most part, the road is reasonably well marked with signs. But notice the hedging: “for the most part” and “reasonably.”

We have four ways of determining the route. 1) Great River Road maps. 2) State maps that show the Great River Road icons. 3) The road signs themselves. 4) A totally groovy Great River Road App for our iPhones that shows the road and that glorious blinking blue dot that shows us. Unfortunately, there is not 100% alignment among the four sources.

On the open road, the signage is pretty fair, and with the app, we at least know when we are hugging the river. In the cities … even the very small ones … all of the signage goes straight to hell.

The process of trying to follow the byway started months ago, when we requested state maps from each of the states we are driving through. The state maps tend to have a lot more detail than AAA maps, and most of them have Great River Road icons along the route. Little did we realize early on how tiny some of the roads are, and how far off some of the map icons are.

To help things out a little, we bought a bunch of different-colored highlighters and then pored over the maps, highlighting what we thought might be the Great River Road. The exercise helped.

Staying on the byway, however, is at the very least a two-person job. A third would be helpful! While one of us pores over the map and app … when we have enough cell service … the other drives and tries to keep tabs on the few-and-far-between signs. Fortunately, we are able to reserve some capacity for taking in the sights too, which include everything from dams and bucolic parks with walking trails to fearsome toothed fish that double as entrances to rural restaurants.

Now that we are in Minneapolis, things might change. We are out of the north woods. The river is wide. The Great River Road will be marked on both sides of the Mississippi instead of just one. Maybe following the Byway will get easier; maybe not. For these first 450 miles, it has been a real adventure.

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #4

We’re at the pristine headwaters of the Mississippi in very far northern Minnesota. Why in the world would water quality be something we think about here? Two easy answers come to mind immediately: 1) We are at the source of one of the longest rivers and largest river systems in the world. Contamination that enters the river here stays with the river until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico … and then it becomes Gulf contamination instead of river contamination. 2) Minnesota’s native Ojibwe people rely on wild rice for their diet and livelihood; compromising the ecosystem could have dire consequences on centuries of living sustainably.

In the world of drinking water quality, the idea of treating wastewater and reintroducing it to water supply sources gets a lot of attention. “Potable reuse” some people call it. In moments of serious cynicism, some have called the practice “toilet-to-tap.” Such labeling has not helped the concept get a lot of traction. Astronauts have relied on it since humans have started spending time in space.

On Monday morning, I spent an hour or so at the Bemidji Wastewater Treatment Plant with Al Gorick, Bemidji, Minnesota’s Wastewater Superintendent. Al takes his job very seriously. Bemidji is the first town along the Mississippi to send its treated wastewater back into the river.

A few miles downstream, Grand Rapids is the first town to draw its drinking water from the river. Part of that drinking water used to be Bemidji’s wastewater. Those practices of drawing drinking water and releasing wastewater will continue through hundreds of cities between here and the Gulf of Mexico. If you consider the entire river system ­– the Missouri, the Ohio, the Illinois, the Des Moines, and all of the other rivers that feed the Mississippi ­­– that practice will continue through thousands of cities, and perhaps tens of thousands. To the uninformed, the practice may sound gross, but it’s not. We know a lot about cleaning water, and nature is ridiculously resilient.

Bemidji is a college town with a permanent population of only 15,000. Its wastewater treatment plant is pretty vanilla: a capacity of two million gallons per day (but a daily load of only about one million gallons), and a process that entails “advanced activated sludge treatment” with “anaerobic digestion” of the solids. Here’s what that means: raw sewage flows into the plant. Solid stuff, like paper and debris, gets screened out, and the biological stuff settles to the bottom of big tanks. The solids then move to a digester where they get turned into fertilizer. The liquid moves to a secondary tank where the rest of the solid stuff settles out, and crystal clear water flows from the top. That clear water gets filtered through sand filters, disinfected with ultraviolet radiation, and then released directly into the northernmost waters of the Mississippi River. For all practical purposes, the water that flows from the plant into the river is of roughly the same quality as water from the tap … though Al claims that he would not drink it … and I am not 100% sure I would either.

These pictures show the full process: blackwater in, treatment, and clean, disinfected water out to the river.

For my money, the biggest problem with wastewater treatment has nothing to do with removing poop and the related germs. It has to do with all the stuff that is not regulated and is not easy to remove, like endocrine disrupters that come from pharmaceuticals and other chemicals. The drugs you flush down the sink, the junk you put on your face or skin and then wash down the drain, the drugs that you pee out because your body did not process them fully, and the crap that people put in their bodies to get high do not easily get removed from wastewater. But since no one really knows their toxicity levels or their long-term effects, and since they are not regulated, they must not really be a problem … even as their concentration increases between here and New Orleans. Right?  Here’s a little light reading, if you are interested.

While water in the far north woods may seem to be pristine, it isn’t. As soon as it flows through the woods, it picks up contaminants, the most environmentally serious of which is phosphorous. Controlling the crap that goes into the river and managing water quality is as important in Minnesota as it is in New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. It is particularly important to Minnesota’s native Ojibwe.

The Ojibwe people have been harvesting wild rice in the waters of Minnesota’s north woods for millennia. Europeans have only been living in the north woods for a couple of centuries. We spent some of Monday with Jeff Harper, a fisheries expert who hosted us for a while on the reservation of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.

In a manner that might make Wall Street capitalists cringe, he respectfully described the tribe’s careful management of the wild rice crop and harvesting constraints. Each year, a tribal committee determines the length of the harvesting season and the length of the harvesting day based on the size of that year’s crop. Some days, harvesting can take place from sun up until sun down; on other days, harvesting may be limited to only a few hours. The Ojibwe recognize that some years will be plentiful and others sparse, and it is their responsibility to protect the crop, not for a single season, but forever.

For a few weeks in late summer, Ojibwe canoe to the rice fields with the most primitive ­– and effective – of tools: “rice knockers.” They are nothing more than two straight, debarked sticks, usually made of white cedar, and often carved with simple hand grips. The rice knockers that Jeff gave to us have no hand grips; they are just simple, tapered, straight, lightweight pieces of wood.

Two harvesters work together in a single canoe. The Ojibwe in the stern uses a long pole with a forked end to move the canoe slowly through the rice stalks. The harvester sits in front of the poler and uses the rice knockers to harvest the rice. With a smooth sweeping and knocking motion that does no damage to the rice plants, the harvesters slowly fill the canoe’s bow with rice. (This youtube video gives a taste of the harvesting process.)

Smooth and without damage, yes, but Jeff also described how some of his compadres dress for harvesting: with heavy clothing, eye protection, breathing protection, etc., etc. Smilingly, he noted that he sticks to the simple T-shirt look. The reason for the heavy garb is protective. The rice seeds can fly from the plant at some velocity. Heavy clothing tempers the sting. The eye protection ensures that none of the tiny pieces cause discomfort or get stuck in an eye. The clothing also protects against the critters that share the waterways with the rice: lots and lots of spiders and hellgrammites. A hellgrammite is the larva of the dobsonfly. If you have never encountered one, Google it. For a relatively harmless critter, they are about as ugly and fearsome looking as you can find, with sharp pincers growing from their head and guiding their way. (We fish for bass with them in Vermont; the Ojibwe co-exist with them while harvesting rice.) With a little carelessness, they can be pretty painful even if the related injury isn’t serious.

Jeff’s most colorful and poignant moment came when he described the mound of rice in the front of the canoe at the end of a day of harvesting. With all of the spiders and “worms” that accompany the rice into the canoe, the mound pulses with life. “They are part of nature too,” Jeff said. “They deserve their share just like we deserve ours.”

Jeff described the steps of processing the rice, which include heating the harvest, then crushing the chaff while “dancing” in moccasins inside a special barrel to separate the chaff from the grain, finally leaving nothing except beautiful rice grains.

We now have a suitcase full of bags of hand-harvested, organic wild rice from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. It is delicious, and will be our gift of choice along the route … until we run out and need to find another equally cool gift of choice.

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #3

 After a few days of serious driving, life slowed. We checked into a motel in Bemidji for four nights and spent Saturday at Itasca State Park, exploring and hiking the headwaters. Saturday also happened to be Yom Kippur, a day of fasting, reflection, and seeking of atonement. We didn’t mess with the fasting or atoning, but we doubled down on the reflecting.

The Great Spirit bade us welcome as we approached. So far, we have seen two bald eagles up close in their full black-and-white, broad winged splendor. Both flew directly in front of us from left to right as we approached our first two river crossings. We are in Ojibwe country. Like much of New Mexico, this land feels sacred and holy at a deep and very ancient level. We feel welcome and very, very humble.

The river here is just a tiny stream. The classic tourist rock crossing where it empties out of Lake Itasca was a bit too treacherous for these old legs. Instead, we walked across a log about 20 feet downstream. But that didn’t satisfy my sense of elation. I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants, and waded across the Mississippi River a few times, basking in the feel of the cold, clean holy water.

I envisioned Big Muddy. Ol’ Man River. The Great River. The Gathering of the Waters. The “misi-ziibi.” I felt a part of North America and thousands of years of human history.

The journey has begun in earnest.

Down the Mississippi #2

 For those of you who do not know, Rebecca and I live in paradise … in the northwest corner of Vermont on an island in Lake Champlain –– the “sixth Great Lake” according to the US Congress. A poet once referred to Lake Champlain as “that fairest of inland seas.” She was right. We’ll miss it. For now, though, we are on the road again!

We thought about taking the ferry off our island, but we didn’t, because we wanted to get to Ottawa as fast as we could for lunch with our amazing friends David and Toby, now in their 80s, and just about the cutest, fun-est, smartest, most serious, and most humorous people on the planet. Instead, we took the Rouses Point Bridge into New York. That decision whether or not to take a ferry to where we wanted to be will not be our last. A dozen or more ferries cross the Mississippi. I also suspect we will take as many ferry rides as we can. Just because.

Taking the bridge was a fine decision too. US Highway Route 2 spans our island. We drive it every day. It is not only the northernmost east-west US Highway, it also has the distinction of being the only transcontinental US Highway that doesn’t cross the continent. It stops in Rouses Point and resumes again in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While Interstates 80 and 90 converge at the southern end of Lake Michigan to get around the Great Lakes, US Route 2 just takes a break for a while.

We took Route 2 to Rouses Point, then picked it up again in the U.P., slightly west of its re-starting point. Right now, we are in Bemidji, MN staying on US Route 2 a few miles from the headwaters. I cannot explain why, but I just think stuff like that is cool.

The trip out was perfect! We stopped driving every day by about 3:00, when the sun started getting low in the sky, and we stayed only at little family-owned motels, every one of them clean and quiet.

Upon leaving David and Toby’s in Ottawa and before getting to our first motel, we crossed the Mississippi for the first time. That’s correct. While the U.S. Mississippi  River may be 1,400 miles from Vermont, the Canadian Mississippi is an easy day’s drive, only an hour west of Ottawa. Crossing the Mississippi River on our first day of a four-day drive to the Mississippi River is yet another stupid thing that I just find ridiculously cool.

The Canadian Mississippi empties into the Ottawa River at the town of Arnprior, Ontario. In Arnprior, we 1) stayed in our first (of what we suspect will be many) motels owned and managed by Mr. Patel. In this case, it was Mr. Gary Patel, and he was both a sweetheart and terrific motel operator. 2) Ate at a fantastic Indian restaurant. Who’d-a-thunk to look for Indian food in Arnprior, but there it was (thanks to the nice couple we asked about restaurants as we walked along the Ottawa River). Our goal now is to seek out local ethnic restaurants everywhere we go. 3) Slept in our first-ever active crime scene.

The morning before we arrived, a high-speed car chase across a bunch of Ontario ended in tragedy just down the street from Mr. Patel’s motel, when the speeding car killed a flagperson at a construction site. When we returned from supper, we couldn’t find our motel. The Ontario Provincial Police had expanded the perimeter of the active crime scene to include the Arnprior Motor Inn. We drove in circles until a cop told us what had happened. We parked nearby, negotiated our way around lots of yellow “Do Not Cross” tape, closed the curtains tightly to block the flashing lights, and then slept in the quietest motel ever. All of the traffic was being diverted a few blocks away.

Before leaving Arnprior, we took a fabulous walk up the Mississippi from the mouth. It was gorgeous!

The best we can say about the rest of the drive is that with the exception of Sudbury, most of Ontario is pretty; the next motel we found was quiet, clean, and convenient; and the liquor at the Duty Free Store in Sault Ste. Marie was cheap.

Anyone who describes Sudbury as “pretty” has some very loose screws. Sudbury is in mineral country. From out of nowhere, the stacks of its smelters appear on the horizon. Its industrial plants are immense. Rail lines and long trains seem to appear out of the ether. One of the stacks is more than 1/4-mile high. Fortunately, once it fades away in the rear view mirror, it is gone.

Across the St. Mary River between Lakes Huron and Superior, we re-entered the US of A in the Upper Peninsula, a god-forsaken place of mystery of ever there was one. “Yoopers,” as the people there call themselves, are either the most inexplicable or the strongest people in the US. The U.P. is just freakin’ barren. We found some superb smoked whitefish just west of Sault Ste. Marie, met a couple of super nice waitresses, and that was about it. At one point, we went 100 miles between groceries. When we asked the waitress at the “restaurant” we stopped at for breakfast where we could get some fresh fruit, she shrugged. When nothing is in season, fresh fruit is not a U.P. staple. She knew where a grocery was to the east. To the west, she had no idea. Understandably. It’s a long, long way.

At that same place, I ate my first-ever “cudighi,” a Yooper sausage that was excellent. While eating the cudighi, I suddenly understood the term “Yooper.” They are folks who live on the Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yooper. Get it! That restaurant was also where we channeled Frances McDormand, catching our first “you betcha” of the trip.

My friend Sue Martin in Grand Isle didn’t help matters. She assured me that folks in the U.P. say they live in the Upper U.S. … but she says it with her best Boston accent: Uppah U.S. Say it aloud a few times. You’ll hear it. “Uppah U.S.” became my first ear-worm of the trip. Dammit Sue!!!!!! When I shared that with the guy at one of the Visitor’s Centers in the U.P., he thought it was pretty cute too.

We encountered only two “events” during the journey: the crime scene in Arnprior, and a totally inexplicable moment along the highway in the U.P. Miles rolled by without seeing other vehicles. Then we spotted an area in front of us that must have had 20 pickup trucks stopped along the shoulder. Swarms of Yoopers, all wearing bright orange hats milled around them. One of the Yoopers signaled and hollered for us to stop. When we did, another Yooper with two baying hound dogs pulling hard on their leashes crossed the highway. As the dogs bounded into the woods, the Yooper directing traffic hollered “Go, Go, Go,” and off we went. They might have been hunting a bear or raccoon, but they had no weapons. They might have been chasing some local no-goodnik. It might have been some sort of mysterious Yooper rite of passage. We will never know.

Before leaving Michigan, we hiked gorgeous waterfalls along the eastern edge of Lake Superior, saw stunning rock formations, stayed at the Christmas Motel, ate wonderful fresh fish, and generally had a blast. The Christmas Motel was not so named because of a hokey Christmas theme. It was the only hotel in the hamlet of Christmas, MI, near Munising. The hokey stuff emanated from the shop up the road. The Christmas Motel, on the other hand, sported a photo of a foxy model. The clothing store

 

“Maurice’s,” we learned, once did a photo shoot at the Christmas Motel and presented the owners with one of the prints. Just too inexplicable!

On our last day of the drive west, we took a long walk along the lake in Bob Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, crossed the U.S Mississippi a few times and made it to a damn-near elegant Super 8 in Bemidji, MN. As we approached the river for the first time, driving on Minnesota Route 200 just west of Jacobson, a mature bald eagle took off from the woods in the south, flew in front of us, and soared off to the north. Nothing could have provided a better welcome to the river. Saturday morning, the real adventure begins. Getting here was only the beginning.

ENJOY!

Down the Mississippi #1

 This morning, I woke up thinking of Boston’s sewage. Then I thought about forest-killing air pollution and the almost 9,000-square-mile “hypoxic” zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico that is so oxygen deprived that it cannot support life.

Fortunately, I am an inveterate optimist, so I didn’t find these thoughts particularly depressing. In fact, I found them potentially exciting and encouraging, especially the thought about Boston’s sewage.

In the 1880s, Boston built a state-of-the-art wastewater facility. It mostly consisted of some large holding tanks on Moon Island in Boston Harbor. Twice a day, the plant operators opened those tanks, and the untreated waste “disappeared” to sea on the outgoing tide. Amazing: just let nature take care of the city’s crap. It was brilliant and innovative for its time.

Times changed, and our knowledge of natural processes grew. Only a few decades ago, Boston Harbor was one of the most polluted bodies of water in the US, mostly because of bacterial contamination from untreated sewage flowing into it. Thanks to a court order, a few billion dollars, and a lot of engineering, Boston’s waste now gets “digested” and turned into fertilizer pellets, and the no-longer-contaminated liquid gets pumped far out to sea. As a result of the amazing resilience of nature, Boston Harbor again teems with life.

So what would prompt these weird thoughts on a Monday morning in August? Easy: my wife Rebecca and I are planning our winter adventure: A multi-month, 2,400-mile drive down the length of the Mississippi River along the “Great River Road,” from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

The drive from Vermont to the river’s headwaters in Minnesota will take us through Sudbury, Ontario, home to the 1,250-foot-tall Inco Super Smokestack. (It used to be the world’s tallest, but lost that dubious distinction in 1987.) The logic behind building a smokestack nearly a quarter-mile high was about the same as building a waste facility that released raw sewage on the outgoing tide. The dirty crap miraculously seemed to disappear. At the time, in fact, one of the more bizarre adages of modern history drove a lot of environmental engineering: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” By belching the smoke high into the sky, it dissipated and seemed to vanish before doing any damage. Then large swaths of forest in the eastern US started to die, and scientists discovered that rainfall had about the same level of acidity as Coca Cola. That trick of diluting the pollution didn’t work so well after all. Nature caught up with engineering and forced some more creative thinking. Today, we neutralize a lot of the contaminants in combustion gases through scrubbers and fluidized beds … but way too many of us still deny the habitat-destroying effects of carbon dioxide levels and other greenhouse gases. What a bunch of morons!

Once we get to the Mississippi, we will be following the greatest river in North America from source to mouth. We will also be witnessing one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the century: the “taming” of the river. Locks and levees have made the Mississippi navigable and its path predictable. In the days before the Civil War, when young Samuel Clemens worked as a cub pilot on riverboats alongside his mentor, River Pilot Mr. Horace Bixby, the river changed course regularly. The pilots had to learn to read the river because it seldom followed the same course on any two consecutive trips. As it changed course, the silt from most of a continent settled out and became soil again.

For all practical purposes, the Mississippi River Delta is not where the river empties into the Gulf. It is roughly between Memphis and Vicksburg, where the land flattens and the river’s silt spreads out for miles, creating some of the flattest, darkest land imaginable.

Today, the river’s course no longer shifts. The Army Corps of Engineers sees to that. The silt no longer settles along its banks. Floods generally wipe out towns only when levees fail. The silt and floodwaters … and fertilizers and agricultural wastes … now flow into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, the northern Gulf has a dead zone the size of New Jersey that grows larger every year. The runoff contains silt and nutrients that cause algae to grow. The algae suck up all the oxygen. Life in that part of the Gulf disappears.

Theoretically, fixing the problem is easy: just keep the nutrients out of the water and allow the sediment to settle out over the land instead of the bottom of the Gulf, and nature will take care of the rest. But things that might be easy theoretically are darn-near impossible in the real world where human beings “have dominion” and rarely give a damn about the environmental consequences of their actions.   I am a lot less hopeful about the ecosystems of south Louisiana and the northern Gulf than I am about Boston Harbor and the eastern forests. There’s way too many dollars at stake for people to be sane. The cost of taking the risk of allowing nature to be nature is just too high.

There you have it. Planning a driving route through Ontario triggered these thoughts. I can’t wait to discover what other fun connections this adventure conjures.