BOATHOUSE LIFE: MEMOIR FROM A FLOATING HOME

LITTLE GRAY BOATHOUSE ON THE BIG MUDDY RIVER

(Copyright 2024 by Richie Swanson)

 

DUCK PLANK

The night before I started to write this memoir, I dreamt I lost the boathouse on the upper Mississippi River where I have lived for 37 years. A cargo ship larger than an oceangoing freighter somehow steamed beneath the old “Wagon Bridge” a half mile downriver from my boathouse. The huge ship dipped beneath the bridge and bobbed up, scraping trees from the bank on the back channel’s north shore. The huge ship kept coming. It scraped the shore directly opposite my boathouse and smashed people to pieces. Body parts and trees tumbled down a hill, though the opposite shore is actually flat. People screamed and fell helplessly, and emergency vehicles filled the parking lot above the boathouse on the south shore. I went up to the lot, and flashing lights blocked me from reaching the portable toilet across the lot, the kind used at outdoor concerts and festivals. A policeman told me I must move my boathouse across the river, so the people could gather on my shoreline rather than the north bank, which continued to collapse into the water.

I went inside and lay on my boathouse floor, exhausted and sleepy. A big black poodle shoved through my front door, followed by its master. I looked outside my door, and people crowded on the deck around my boathouse, waiting to rush in. I stood opposite the poodle’s master and told him he had to leave. He pulled out a pistol, a black automatic, and I drew one too. I stared across the tiny boathouse, 14-feet by 22-feet inside, and realized one of us had to shoot.

I woke harried, distraught. But as I descended the ladder from my loft, Tundra swans hooted high in the sky, sounding like children crying out with joy, playing up in a celestial playground. They were migrating from eastern Alaska and northern Canada as they did every November, and a flock of mallards waited as usual outside the boathouse–dark shapes on a dim gray flow in the indigo dawn.

I felt blessed, still witnessing daybreak on the river at 70-years-old. I poured corn kernels for the mallards onto a plank, and the ducks watched cautiously, keeping their distance as a muskrat slipped onto the plank, pointing its snout at the ducks, ready to snap and claw. It hunched above the corn, and its fur gleamed coppery-red, and I saw pelts stretched on the drying racks of Indian women…pelts pressed flat and piled into bales…bales loaded into canoes paddled by French-Indians and Native Americans to Yankee clerks at the nation’s first trading posts on the upper river.

After the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812 placed the Mississippi into the hands of the United States, the American Fur and other companies eagerly pursued the rich beaver resource on the upper Mississippi. But beavers had previously been overhunted by the French and British, and by 1836 muskrats comprised 95 percent of pelts traded on the river.[1] Muskrats also became a means of currency more trusted than government script and bank notes. Twelve “rats” (muskrat pelts) could buy a pouch of Venetian beads; 20 rats, 100 pounds of lead for musket balls; 40 rats, a rifle with a percussion cap.[2]

So, the muskrat deserved to eat first—its ancestors had helped fuel the economic development of the nation that eventually included the State of Minnesota and city of Winona, whose laws allowed me my floating home. The muskrat fingered corn from my plank into its mouth, and its tiny black paws also spoke an ancient story of the Anishinaabe, Native Americans who have for centuries called the “greatest river” the Michi-zee-bee.[3]

I don’t claim any inside or direct knowledge of Anishinaabe or any other Native culture. I don’t claim any indigenous birthright to American soil, and I recognize the colonial thefts of North America and other continents. I admire Native stories greatly, since they inspire me to see beyond the Eurocentric and anthropocentric traditions I learned in school and from Hollywood and television westerns. The appreciation can be a problem, I admit. I currently have so many Indian books in my boathouse I can hardly keep it afloat.

Edward Benton-Banai in The Mishomis Book, The Voice of the Ojibway celebrates the muskrat’s crucial sacrifice. When the first people of the Earth quarreled and killed one another too much, the Creator flooded the land to purify it. Waynaboozhoo–a culture hero, a spirit with human attributes—survived the flood by floating on a huge log. Some birds and animals joined him, and Waynaboozho decided to create a new land. He dove down into the flood, hoping to find a handful of Earth. The flood was too deep, he failed. A loon, merganser, otter and other creatures also tried and failed, and then Muskrat said he would try. Muskrat was riddled and teased. He dove down, remained under a long time. He floated up dead yet held a little ball of Earth in his paw. A turtle volunteered to bear the weight of Earth on its back. The Four Winds blew the dirt in all directions. Waynaboozho sang, the animals danced in a circle. The land grew into “Turtle Island,” and the Creator “made it so that muskrats will always be with us because of the sacrifice that our little brother made for all of us.”[4]

These days the Michi-zee-bee also sacrifices herself for the nation’s economy. I feed the muskrat corn produced by industrialized agriculture that deposits such an overload of sediment and fertilizer into the river that it helps create a zone of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico below her mouth, where ocean water becomes so deprived of oxygen that clams, mussels, snails and other natural life cannot survive. Most years this “dead zone” is the size of Massachusetts.[5]

When I buy the corn for my little brother the muskrat, I help create a market for the shipment of the grain in barges that require a navigation channel dredged unnaturally deep—nine feet, mandated by Congress. The river is currently squeezed between dikes from St. Paul to St. Louis, cut off from her adjacent backwaters and tributaries. Locks and dams maintain her water levels and create lake-like conditions that inundate floodplain forests and other wetlands in some locations, and that dry up marshes and fish-breeding sloughs in others.

Yet muskrats haven’t abandoned their role of sacrifice. One April morning I heard mews and thumps from the water—a male mink swam atop a female, biting her nape, pushing her down through flood sludge wedged against the house (flood sludge=logs, beaver clippings, mats of last year’s wild celery and bulrush, wine-red maple flowers, fish tackle, bait cups, beer cans, sudsy-brown flood-foam). The male mink dragged the female screeching onto the duck log I had tied to the bank to provide a basking refuge for waterfowl and turtles. The female mink hissed, bit and wriggled free. She dove and disappeared in the water and popped out of a hole beneath the woodpile, just above flood-line. The male caught her by the nape and dragged her mewing down to the foot of my plank. He mounted her fiercely. He paused once, and she wagged her rodent-nose, gawking tiny-eyed, looking stunned. She lunged to escape, and he tightened his forepaws around her chest, yanked her closer and banged away for 45 minutes, the plank shaking so violently my floor shook.

Several weeks later, the flood dropped below the level of an old brick sidewalk on the bank, and a mink raced on it in a driving rain and disappeared upriver in riprap. She returned with a muskrat kit, holding it by its nape like a mama cat carries a kitten. She brought the kit into the hole below the woodpile, feeding her own young. She made six trips, probably taking the entire litter, if not the mother too. Such had been the muskrat’s sacrifice this time around.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Now my plank rattled as thirty “greenheads” rapped bills against wood, eating corn. The mallards swam to the duck log, shuffled onto it. They fluffed, preened and quacked for more.

 

 

LEARNING THE ROPES, NOVEMBER 1, 1987

 

The day I moved into the boathouse, its owner Mickey directed my gaze to the sleepy-cold current creeping downriver. “It’s easy now, hardly moving at all,” she said, and led me to two ropes tied from the house to a silver maple a few feet upstream. She stepped on the lower rope, and the house slid readily toward us, nearer shore. She was a long-distance jogger, her foot held the lower rope and house easily in place. Mickey untied the top rope, took out the slack, showed me the knot that kept the house moored tight to shore. She untied the lower rope, and I mimicked her knot, understanding the gravity of the situation. Mickey had moved in during the spring of 1982 and had recurring dreams of “waking up in the boathouse, and finding it was floating unmoored in the middle of the channel.” The following year she had pulled into the parking lot during the flood, and her headlights had “shown on an empty space over dark water” where her house should have been. “A large tree floating in the floodwaters had hit the most upstream house tied together with those of us on a shared walkway,” said Mickey. That house and Mickey’s broke loose and floated downstream with the current. The first house ended up lodged against the Wagon Bridge, but Mickey’s passed under one of its arches. Neighbors rescued both with motorboats and tied Mickey’s to a boathouse that was “gin-poled,” attached to a steel spud in the water. Mickey was renting from an owner named Penny at the time but needed a boat to get to its emergency location and had none. “The whole time, I’m sure I pestered Penny about getting the boathouse back to its spot.” Mickey offered to buy the boathouse. “Maybe the whole episode was enough of a pain in the neck for her (Penny), she was happy when I offered to buy the house from her,” said Mickey. “I think I got a bank loan for $700 to pay for it. Oddly, I never had another dream about waking up in an unmoored boathouse.”[6]

The rent I would pay Mickey would be river-rat cheap, 90 dollars per month, but I would also have to heed a second flood problem. I would have to prepare for the spring flood in November. “You have to push the house out before the ice floes come, and the river freezes,” said Mickey. She shared her adventure from the spring of 1984. “Not knowing that the ice froze deeper close to the shore, I’d snugged my house within about four feet of the rocks in the fall and let it freeze in place. In spring, as the ice melted and the river started rising, the ice around the riverside of the house cleared. But the shore-side of the house and its barrels were still locked in ice almost a foot thick. “The river flowed over that ice and began to lap at the carpet at the front door. Meanwhile the house was beginning to tilt toward shore, and I was afraid I’d start losing barrels from the river end of the house.

“I bought an ice chopper and waders and got to work. With a borrowed ice augur and axes and choppers, Phil (future fiancé) and I worked steadily for a few hours. We’d made deep cuts and broken through in some places, yet there were some areas where the ice was still thick. Finally, Phil went home to get his chain-saw. He was able to cut through the remaining ice binding the house, somehow without flooding his machine. What a relief to watch the shore-side of the house rise up! There was still ice frozen to barrels and floor’s frame, but it was it was now clinging to the house ABOVE the water.”[7]

Mickey laughed about the incident and continued my boathouse lesson. She lifted the near end of the walking plank, a sagging oak board about 12-feet long and 18-inches wide. She pushed its far end against the boathouse, and the house slid farther into the river. “You live back in the Stone Age now,” she said, and got down in riprap and wrestled boulders around until they held the plank in place. She gave me the skinny on the neighbors. “Bonnie’s a deer,” she said of the single mother who lived two boathouses up the row of seven. “She moves quiet like a deer, holds herself quiet like a deer.” Two bachelors and two parents and young boy also lived in boathouses above Bonnie’s, their structures single-storied, each with small floor spaces, only about 20-by-20 feet. “They live here because it’s what they can afford,” said Mickey.

I soon learned all islanders wanted to help one another, but no one knew how long they’d keep their boathouse. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had disallowed boathouses on the river years ago. The State of Minnesota did not allow habitation on public waterways, which was clearly happening here on Latsch Island. The city of Winona owned the island and rented about 100 license spots where boathouses, docks and boat garages were moored. When I first moved to Winona in 1979, I attended a city council meeting, a discussion about the fate of Latsch Island boathouses. I recall that some folks complained that boathouse owners were living too easy on city land, using city services like the library and streets without paying taxes. Indeed, a boathouse resident called Crow walked buck naked through the public woods and eventually landed in prison after placing a bomb in a judge’s mailbox. But a county judge, teachers, nurses, potters and other professionals also lived in boathouses. So did a fortune teller who worked at Renaissance Fairs, free-spirit carpenters who wanted to build beautiful boathouses forever, a gay man who educated Winona about HIV prevention, an entrepreneur who owned a gutter service, a river advocate who founded an effective environmental organization, seasonal tree planters and apple pickers, and even a jealous boyfriend who islanders claimed had untied the boathouse owned by his girlfriend’s ex and let it go down the river through the dam at Trempealeau. The press loved to feature boathouse residents, but many boathouses were owned by people who also owned houses in town, who used boathouses recreationally, to boat, fish and gather with friends and family. No matter the owner, the future was iffy. Most of the boathouses in “my row” had already been removed from a shore farther upriver and had been squeezed into the state’s legal right-of-way downriver from a highway bridge.

Old-timers in Winona claimed boathouses were once “everywhere on the river,” and that babies had been born and raised in boathouses during the Great Depression. But by now every islander had attended or heard about a government meeting where the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources had expressed displeasure about the increase of boathouses and additions of sleeping lofts. Latsch Island had become the last place where people lived in boathouses on the upper river, despite the state law that forbid it.

Mickey gave me a vote of confidence before she left. “We handpick who’s going to stay in our houses down here,” she said.

 

* * *

 

I slept easy that night in my sleeping bag on the floor and woke in the morning to a fog that swallowed the entire river valley. The blue river hissed lazily beneath the gray soup, and Taoist phrases floated through my head. “The sound of water says what I think.”[8] I wanted to receive the river’s gifts, by acquiescing to my own adaptation of Chapter Fifteen of the Tao Te Ching.

 

As careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream.

          As fluid as melting ice.

          As receptive as a valley.

          As clear as a glass of water.

          As murky as a troubled stream.

 

I lived by bicycle and foot, had to borrow a car to haul six-gallon jugs of drinking water home. One evening a carpenter-friend dropped off scraps of pine, and after dark I kindled a crackling fire in the black belly of the old coal stove inside. I filled the stove with two-by-fours, happy as a cat about the sudden and radiant heat. The stovepipe glowed orange, then pulsed red. I stepped outside, and now the roar of flames, not water, said what I thought. A chimney fire! The whole place—the new side decks that Mickey had built while swimming in deep water, hanging by an elbow from a board—the phone line connected to a trench she had dug by hand—the sleeping loft she had added—the stove and LP gas tank—waited below flames leaping above the stove cap, firebrands dancing above the roof. I called Barbi my sweetie in town, who had heated with wood in an isolated farmhouse the first winter after her son Jonah had been born. “Close the damper,” she said.

The fire quieted, but thin sheets of ice scraped against the floatation barrels beneath the house, frost shaving off, tinkling delicately like crystal. The sheets came down the river cavern-black, shining like glass, flashing a fluid white light from a moon hidden by clouds. Come morning, goblets of ice jangled against one another and knocked hard against the barrels. I heeded Mickey’s warning. I untied ropes, pushed out the house and set the plank in place from the downriver corner of the house. I did the same with the “standout,” a four-by-four, from the upriver corner. The boathouse had no front deck yet, only steel mounts for the plank and standout. I secured the plank and standout with steel pins, and then a southeast wind gusted, and the house swung upriver, crashing against the neighbor’s. The plank and standout climbed the bank, and the front barrels scraped bottom.

If the house froze in where it was, it would remain locked in ice as water rose in the spring. So, I pushed the house out again—into whitecaps rolling backward up the Mississippi. Gusts kept blowing. The house kept swaying and banging the neighbor’s, luckily vacant. I felt like Sisyphus who the Greek god Zeus had sentenced to endlessly push an immense boulder nearly to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down. Yet Albert Camus envisioned Sisyphus happy at the bottom of the mountain, about to push the boulder again. “If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny…The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”[9]

Besides, “Wind” had become my big brother years ago. I had quit college in Ohio in 1977 and had headed west on my bicycle, so I could gather material and become a writer. When I had crossed Kansas and other Great Plains states, he had battered me until I had retreated into cafés and had scrawled in my journal with wrists so sore I could hardly print.

Nonetheless I continued taking bicycle trips, and Wind had blown me into ditches where I’d laid face-down as hail pounded my back, and face-up as dust, pebbles and bits of sage had screamed above me as if chased by a tornado. Headwinds had met me at mountain summits and had forced me to pedal as strenuously downhill as up. Crosswinds had nearly blown me from my bike as the Thunders had hurled lightning bolts all around me.

So, sometimes I’d retreated from Wind, sometimes I muscled against him. Now I sat on a side deck, set my feet against my neighbor’s house, pushed it upstream with leg-muscle. I let an extra barrel roll between the two houses—a buffer. I tied an extra rope on the front, sat in the riprap, pushed boulders with my feet and buried the standout in place with the rocks. I was Sisyphus indeed, if not Fred Flintstone. But the little gray boathouse now floated in its place, far enough out, so it would float safely free in spring.

 

WINTER 1987-1988

 

The wind turned north, throwing waves for days across the back dock, covering deck boards with glare ice. The full moon approached, and a parade of ice floes descended the river, white forms shaped like continents, some so thick that islanders were known to skate on them. The floes gleamed pearly and silver amid white vapor, crowding from bank-to-bank, and smashed the house’s upriver corner and spun off heavily and slowly, denting barrels. Geese and swans flew furiously south beneath the stars, honking and hooting a desperate-sounding commotion. I lay in my sleeping bag beside the fire and hoped the floes would not bang the house loose or shake the stack from the woodstove. I finally fell asleep, and I woke suddenly to silence. The house no longer rocked, and the pearly gray continents stood motionless, locked together by crooked white borders.

The cold collapsed upon the entire valley like a leaden inhalation. I stepped on snow, it squeaked through brittle air and echoed crisply from the bank. The ice growled and sang, and two mythical brothers belched beneath the frozen river. G-a-a-a-a Loop burped in a slow and lazy voice, and G-a-a-a-a Lunk responded in guttural baritones. Each sounded as if he tried to belch longer and louder, and then Mama Mississippi readied herself to thunder. She rumbled, wailed and whined, and then she twanged like an enormous saw-blade. BOOM! BANG! The elbow of the stove’s stack clanged, and the whole house shook as if wall-studs would snap apart.

Barbi brought nine-year-old Jonah and his best friend Matt to the boathouse for a sleep-over. The two boys bedded down in the sleeping loft and discovered a knothole in the floor that allowed them to spy on Barbi and me below. They whispered and giggled all night. We ate all-you-can eat pancakes for breakfast, walked across the back channel and witnessed funnels of frozen white bubbles suspended in clear black ice below a highway bridge–indisputable evidence of G-a-a-a-a Loop and G-a-a-a-a Lunk.

We walked an old dirt road through frozen bottomlands, and Jonah and Matt discovered Batman’s “Bat Cave” amid dense shrubs. We dared to walk on the Main Channel, where crusts of ice angled up where floes had collided. Jonah and Matt broke off sheets and smashed them into pieces across their heads—sheer joy—instant gratification–no Sisyphean struggle necessary–just snow suits that allowed them to make snow angels oblivious to the cold.

 

* * *

 

Winter storms blew roaring clouds of snow downriver, and sometimes little white sprites spun past, snow devils jumping and skipping like tumbleweed. I learned to use pine only as kindling, and I bought oak from an old Swede who delivered it in a crooked green pickup with gray-wood sideboards. Carl always wore bib coveralls, whether he was eating a steak at the greasy spoon where I cooked, or if he was dropping logs from the bed of his truck. He charged me 60 or 70 dollars per load, about 20 dollars shy of what I earned in a week. After he finished eating at the café, he would lean back in his booth, smile sidewise, flash a gold tooth or two. After he finished unloading his wood, he’d sit in the wicker chair in the boathouse, cup his hands together on his bibs and cock his head with great pleasure. “Ricky!” he said, needing only to stare at the flames and feel the heat, not to speak anymore. I couldn’t imagine how long and hard he’d worked, chain-sawing my wood, or how many years he’d run his farm at the bottom of a hollow outside town. “Yah,” he would say, “long time.”

Carl was the first of several tight-tongued old-timers who “got up wood” for me into their seventies and eighties, some Swedes, some Norwegians. They stacked logs so densely in their trucks a spider could hardly squeeze between the pieces. They said more with the firmness with which they clutched wood than with their words. They took pride they could still get up a cord for whomever needed it, and always climbed back behind their steering wheels, sitting straighter than their sagging sideboards, looking grateful they could help a young fellow who wanted to live simply, close to the critters and birds.

I split wood with a six-pound mall, and as pieces fell around the chopping block, chickadees flew over from tube feeders and pecked into freshly-open larvae holes. Nuthatches and downy and hairy woodpeckers scoured the new stacks, flapping from log to log, yet sometimes they clung terrified and motionless against tree trunks, bills pointed skyward. They hoped to hide from a hungry predator perched ten feet away. Nuthatches froze upside-down. Scores of sparrows vanished inside bushes. Cardinals perched stock-still in brown tangles. One day a black-capped chickadee made a dash from one feeder to another, and a sharp-shinned hawk snatched it into its talons in midair. Another day a starling lay on the ground in the grips of a Cooper’s hawk, and raised and snapped its bill uselessly, and surrendered its vitals in a flurry of blowing feathers as the Cooper’s slurped its intestines like vermicelli.

I wrote every day at the rear window, working on a novel on a Commodore 64 computer, and stopped once when a strange weeping came from outside the front window. A gray squirrel lay sprawled in sunflower seeds littered on the ice, crying a plaintive squeal–a barred owl stared at it from a treetop, its head slung sidewise, dead calm. I cracked open the front door to see better, and the owl flushed—not far. I would come home after closing the greasy spoon, and the owl would soar silently from the same tree, probably attracted to the rabbits and rodents that scrounged through the sunflower seeds at night.

I’d enter the boathouse at night and turn on the light, and a deer mouse would somersault from the coffee maker, or a gray house mouse would shoot like a shrew-shadow along a wall. I’d grab a piece of wood from the stack outside, and a fuzzy dark bulk would lie motionless in a gap in the stack. Shine a flashlight, it didn’t budge, seemed not to breathe–a possum playing possum.

When the river finally thawed, I made my first duck feeder, a square of plywood framed by two-by-fours. I floated it outside the front window, and a great blue heron landed on it. It raised and depressed its head plumes, looking like a perturbed old gentleman, a dignitary clearly annoyed by the allocation of fish at a fisheries meeting.  Old Man Heron thrust his head sidewise and held a gangly, reptilian eye parallel to the coffee-colored current. He turned into a gray-wood statue, the breeze wafting the tips of his belly plumes. He stabbed the river and instantly squeezed a mooneye longwise in his pterodactyl-bill. Both the yellowish eye rings of the mooneye and the golden eye rings of the heron seemed about to burst with primal intensity. The heron shuffled his bill, and down the throat went the mooneye. The heron stabbed the water three more times, never missed, and suddenly a song sparrow trumpeted, perched in red osier above dwindling patches of snow. I yipped inside, my own primal intensity set afire. First song sparrow of the year!

Mickey also had spring pastimes at the boathouse. “One afternoon, the sun was strong, quickly melting the trailing edge of the ice as the river flowed out from under it,” she said. “A couple neighbors and I entertained ourselves, curling stones out onto the ice, trying to get our missiles as close to the melt-edge as we could. Then we’d wager how long it would take for the ice under a stone to disappear.”[10]

“I can still remember the way the light in spring filtered down through the new maple and cottonwood leaves,” says Mickey. “I’d be hiking around on the rip-rap, yanking on lines, fighting with stubborn knots, feeling the warm breeze full of promises.”[11]

 

SPRING 1988, MOM VISITS

 

Indeed, spring brought me the same optimism, even when my mother visited from Connecticut. Mom never knew who her father was. She told me she’d been given away at birth. She said her grandmother had come to visit her and had found her unattended, howling in her own vomit in her crib. Grandma Mimi had taken Mom home and raised her, and Mom did not learn the identity of her biological mother until a half-sister visited and taunted her with the fact. Mom lived enraged, the pain of abandonment always boiling below the surface.

As a boy, I never knew when Mom would “blow her stack.” A cash register girl at the A & P would glance at her the wrong way, Mom would launch into a tirade, and I’d feel everyone in the store staring at our family in disbelief.

Mom threw things at my father and ranted about his inabilities. She cried while she cooked meals, afraid they wouldn’t work out. She cooked bacon with fingers in her ears, afraid the grease would pop, and the noise would terrify her. But she loved nature, especially the beach in Norwalk, Connecticut, the city where she’d been born, where we lived. She loved to turn horseshoe crabs upside-down and marvel at their prehistoric legs amid the “rotten-egg smell” of low tide. She loved the way gulls screamed when she tossed pieces of bread to them, and loved to bait her own hook and catch blowfish on Long Island Sound.

She visited the boathouse in April and lit up when two sandhill cranes bugled, flying above the river. “Listen to that! Just listen! Listen to it!” We sought out the sound. We camped an hour away in a state forest, and Mom, Barbi, Jonah, Matt and I climbed a viewing tower in pre-dawn darkness, and the calls of cranes exploded in a wet meadow below us. Cranes danced without inhibition. They arched red-caps backward, pointed bills skyward. Tossed weed-stems and other debris from their bills into the air. Opened wings, leapt, bowed to one another. Twirled, circled. Hopped daintily up and down, flapping enormous wings.

The cranes blasted their calls and shook the air with a success so loud it vibrated through my bones. By the 1930s, sandhills no longer bred in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana and South Dakota and were down to 25 pairs in Wisconsin.[12] By 1944, only 10-25 nesting pairs remained in Minnesota.[13] But the restoration of wetlands (breeding grounds), hunting bans, reformed hunting laws, habitat protection on farms and other measures have led to the sandhill’s recovery. “Now, the Midwest is home to more than 15,000 cranes. And the eastern population has grown to about 90,000.”[14]

Mom bonded naturally with Jonah and Matt, since each boy suffered a parent who had vanished from their lives. Mom grew up in Connecticut a couple blocks from a village green and a colonial-style church, shaped by a Puritan heritage that would judge Jonah and Matt as “illegitimate,” born out of sin. She told me old high-school acquaintances still looked at her as if she were a “bastard,” yet now she camped in the free air where neither Barbi nor I regarded the boys with any such vicious judgement. She cheered the way Jonah threw a tennis ball against a park shelter. “With a vengeance! An absolute vengeance!” She clapped when Matt and Jonah showed up with an uncanny amount of firewood: they had “beat the system,” crawling through a gap at the bottom of a fence of a bin of wood for sale that was still closed for the season.

We returned to the boathouse, she continued to play hooky from her past, just fished with the boys on the back dock, just watched the spring flood rise, the river grow brighter as the sun climbed higher in the sky every day. She passed in 1996, but cranes still bugle from the sky every spring, and I still hear her cheer, and thanks to an Ojibwe story, I also hear the “pretty voice” of a loon inside her heart.

The crane clan was one of the original seven clans for the Ojibwe, and the loon clan was another, says Anton Treuer in The Cultural Toolbox: Traditional Living in the Modern World. The two clans once “dominated the civil chieftainships across the country.” The loon with a pretty voice would speak first and do most of the talking at councils, and the crane with a commanding voice would deliver the last word.[15]

Treuer’s story reminds me that Mom had the pretty voice of a loon inside her as well as the commanding voice of crane. She played the piano magnificently and read stories to her children beautifully. But rage constantly ignited her commanding voice. She screamed, and I hid inside my bedroom, wrapping my pillow around my ears. She screamed, and her rage sank into the entire family. She screamed, and her voice commanded that we hear the rage and fear that wracked her.

She died in fear, terrified to undergo a cataract surgery, afraid to see a doctor about a growth she believed was growing inside her. She died of heart failure alone on her sofa, unattended in her house, afraid to seek or accept medical help. She remained inside the tragedy of her origins, but these days sandhill cranes can be heard from the boathouse during breeding season as well as migration. They remind me that nature, if given the right conditions, can heal herself.

 

SACRED BUSH, SACRED TREE

 

I did not know it when Mom visited in 1988, but a Lakota constellation that speaks powerfully of natural renewal can be seen from the boathouse shortly after sunset on the Spring Solstice. It’s formed of stars in Triangulum and Aries and looks like “a branch with the bark stripped off,” says Ronald Goodman in Lakota Star Knowledge. Oral traditions called it Caŋasa Ipuyse or “Dried Willow” after red-osier dogwood, a species of shrub that grows on my bank as well in the Lakota homeland.[16]

The inner bark of the red osier “is the principal ingredient in the smoking mixture used while praying with the Sacred Pipe. Caŋasa Ipuyse stands for “the whole Sacred Pipe” which is used in a ritual by both the powers in the sky and people in their winter camps to “rekindle the sacred fire of life on earth.” The “Dried Willow” enters the Zodiac, the sun’s path, during the time of the vernal equinox. Its bowl is lit by the Big Dipper, the “ritual spoon” employed by the Wakaŋ Waste, “the sacred above powers of good,” to carry “the live coal of the sun” to the Sacred Pipe.[17]

The constellation marked the end of winter, the start of spring. It told ancient Lakota to leave their winter camps and perform “a celestial Pipe ceremony to regenerate the earth.”[18] It also told them to stop harvesting their sacred tobacco, to let the red-osier grow until the autumn equinox, when the plant was dormant.[19]

When I read this story, I planted red osier in pots on the docks beside my boathouse, thinking of Mom. She was not allowed to grow undisturbed, her demons haunted her entire life.

I applied the moral of the Dried Willow story to my boathouse life: when grape vines or a red-osier or indigo shrub grew luxuriantly and blocked the path to my plank, I tied the vegetation out of my way rather than cut it, and I told friends that I had added a sacred bush to the sacred tree I grew in pots on my docks, the cottonwood.

The cottonwood’s the granddaddy tree of in the upper Mississippi River floodplain forest. It grows the tallest and harbors massive nests of bald eagles as well as the delicate nests of a tiny, endangered warbler who once bred high in cottonwoods across the channel from the boathouse, the cerulean.

In late May cottonwoods release “snowstorms” of seeds above the river, white puffballs like dandelion seeds that float dreamily through the entire valley, filling the sky. The puffballs also create fluffy white borders along the shores of the river’s sloughs and channels and beside the river’s highways. But when I search the floodplain forest here for a cottonwood sapling, I can’t find one.

The red buds of silver maple also rain down in spring, forming rafts in sloughs so thick that migrating warblers and larger birds like the disappearing rusty blackbird swarm and walk across the burgundy-colored mats, feeding on insects. Later in spring the maple’s helicopter seeds—keys—twirl down from treetops and float so densely against boathouses that some of my neighbors mount outboard motors to docks and loosen the mats with a churning engine rather than try to send them downstream with a canoe paddle, as I do.

Before the locks and dams, the river dropped so low in late summer and early fall that people walked across her. Mudflats emerged. Cottonwoods, river birches and other trees pioneered the muck, roots held soil, and islands formed. Now the historic forest of the slow sinuous river is gone. Floods last longer and crest higher in the channelized river than in the old natural river. Silver maples thrive in the wetter conditions. They create a closed canopy that shades out young cottonwoods and also swamp white oaks, black willows and river birch.[20] When the canopy opens and sunlight reaches the forest floor, the exotic Reed’s Canary grass usually moves in like an army of European settlers on Native ground, choking out tree growth altogether.

But cottonwood seedlings sprout between sidewalk cracks and in gravel lots and lawns in town. I transplant them in pots on my docks, and when they grow five or six feet high, Barbi and I move them to parks.

I surround my house with cottonwood saplings and evoke a cottonwood chant shared by the Dakota writer Ella Cara Deloria in her description of a Sundance Ceremony in her novel Waterlily:

 

“You! You living ones, who sing the hillsides of the clouds!

Give ear to me!

You, called the red woodpecker!

You, the flicker!

You, the robin!

You, the crested woodpecker:

This is your tree; your home.

Here you raise your young…”[21]

 

Barbi had similar thoughts about a boathouse. The son of Bonnie who held herself “quiet like a deer” had reached walking age and was apt to fall in the river. In the spring of 1988 Bonnie sold Barbi her boathouse, which floated just one boathouse upriver from mine. One single mother provided for another. Barbi bought her first home, a place to raise Jonah. She paid a whopping 5000 dollars for it.

We borrowed money from my dad, so she could buy the place, and she still remembers coming down to the boathouse the first night, going out on the deck, looking up and thinking, “Wow, we have a house. We have a home.”

 

JONAH’S BIRTHDAY, JUNE 12, 1978

 

The day Barbi gave birth to Jonah in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, I was 350 miles away in Minnesota, finishing my first visit to the Mississippi’s headwaters at Itasca State Park. I didn’t know Barbi, was on my first bicycle tour to the west coast. I’d left Ohio May 15 and had reached my first major destination ten days later, the birthplace of Mark Twain, Hannibal, Missouri. On June 7, I waded across my second major destination, the stream that drains the lake that’s considered the Mississippi’s source, and spent the next four days canoeing and reading Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I lit out on the bicycle again June 12, entered the first Indian reservation I’d ever visited, the White Earth. I grew quiet and anxious, didn’t know what to expect. I passed dirt driveways, fallen sheds, sagging barns, boarded windows, abandoned foundations and windmills surrounded by weeds. I saw no Indians, only real estate signs. I stopped at a café at a resort, sat in a booth, and after a while noticed a small Ojibwe boy on a stool, playing pinball in a corner by the door. He had wide cheeks, wide chocolate eyes and a shy but bright white grin. He wore a sweat shirt, plain-colored trousers and bargain-rate sneakers. I had not heard or seen him at the machine when I had come in, but evidently, he had been there.

Two white teenage boys came in wearing ball caps, nylon jackets and Adidas sneakers. They sat at the counter by the proprietor, a white woman in her forties sorting bills and chain-smoking. One of the teenagers tilted his head toward broad windows that looked out to a softball field scarred by all kinds of tire ruts. Most of the home run fence, a snow fence, lay on the ground, and trash blew beneath the bleachers, and bottles and cans overflowed from barrels. “What the heck went on?”

“The grand, old, Indian tournament,” said the woman.

“Dad don’t even call it baseball,” said the other teenager. “He calls it the skunk drunk.”

“There were more than I could count,” said the woman. “They really crawled out from everywhere.”

“I’m so sorry I missed it,” said the tall boy.

“This time they run over one another.”

“What kind of car?”

“Dodge pickup.”

“They can’t work, but they gotta have a good truck.”

“The guy was sleeping it off right in the middle of the road, and some fat little squaw didn’t even feel him under her tire.”

“I see they left the bases.”

“But not their brains,” said the woman. “You can’t leave what you don’t bring.”

The white teenagers laughed, and I watched in disbelief as the woman shook her head merrily, walking into the kitchen.

The Ojibwe boy pulled out the spring handle of the pinball machine, let it go and watched his ball. He pressed the flipper buttons, leaning softly into the machine, flexing his shoulders silently. The machine did not shake from his weight. He did not look up. During the entire hour I was in the cafe, he did not speak.

I pedaled out of there, very discouraged. It was the first time I encountered white racism on an Indian reservation, and would hardly be the last. I rode past an overgrown thicket, and an Ojibwe man called out beside the road. “Where you from and where you going?” The man stood beside a red-plank trough, his thin-framed glasses reflecting white flashes from the sun.

I jammed on my brakes and blurted my next-known destination. “Glacier National Park! The Rockies!”

The man smiled matter-of-factly, eyeing me directly. “You have a long way to go, I can tell you. I been that way many times. It’s Blackfoot country. I know it like I know my own reservation.”

The man was stocky, dressed in faded farm bibs. His biceps were brown and beefy, and his hair was gray, a thin crew cut. His face was round, and his skin, smooth. He looked younger than his hair indicated. He spoke more softly than his size suggested, slowly. He put down a hammer and held out a hand for a shake.    “Glacier Park!” he said, smiling again. “Montana!” He gazed all along my bike and gear and met my eyes again. “I got a brother that way, and I go Route Two. You going Route Two?”

I didn’t have a Montana map yet. I didn’t know.

“You’ll go Route Two,” he said. “You’ll see. That road goes all the way across North Dakota, all the way across Montana. You go through Browning, and then the road makes a big, sweeping curve, and you climb like you never climbed before. Then you’ll be in the mountains, and you’ll be going over Logan Pass.”

I had never been to the Rockies, but the man’s face as he talked filled me with so much expectation, I could hardly keep my feet out of my toe-clips.

“Then you’ll be in beautiful country,” he said.

I believed him explicitly, straddling my bike in the middle of the road. But I saw no house, only the thicket and then larger trees behind him. “You live here?”

“No, this is my rice mill.” He ran a palm along the inside of the trough. “I’m fixing it.” He peered west down the road. “You know the next town, Mahnomen? It means wild rice. My people are the Wild Rice People.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen any rice.”

“It’s off the highway. Back on the lakes.”

“Or Indian homes. I’ve only seen white homes.”

“A lot of us live back by the lakes by the rice.”

“The resort back there–”

I told the man what I had seen, and he shrugged. He frowned and then smiled as if he were resigned.

“The resort was probably started by us, but later it got sold to whites,” he said. “A lot of the land’s been sold off for a long time. We got it, but we didn’t get so many jobs, and a lot of people couldn’t keep it.” He reached down and touched his mill again. “It became that way.”

“Don’t you get mad?”

The man smiled matter-of-factly again, breathing easy. “There’s only three states and one province where the wild rice grows,” he said. “Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Manitoba. It grows on its own. You don’t have to plant it.” He looked at my bike again, the pedals, crank and chain. The sun shone on his glasses again. “Some people use motors, but not many. I don’t. The rice gets ripe in August, and I only go for it in a canoe, not a motor boat. I go with my cousin or nephew, and sometimes I stand up in back, and I pole through the marsh. Other times I sit in the middle and sweep the grains off the plant with a wood baton. I knock it into the bottom of the canoe, and we hull it here. My parents lived here.”

The man knelt down and picked up his hammer. “You coming back?” he said.

“I wanna make the ocean,” I said, “Seattle, Vancouver. I don’t know how I’m coming back.”

“If you come back, start before August. Those Rockies in Canada will snow on you if you don’t.”

The man lifted his hammer and gave it a short, single shake. He smiled his easy smile one more time, and I went on, his voice singing inside my head. Where you from and where you going?

 

* * *

 

Before I’d ridden through the White Earth Reservation, I’d sent Tom Sawyer home, so I could read it again. I was charmed by its 19^th century river setting and Tom and Huck’s playing hooky on an island (which I still do), and by Tom and Becky’s adventure in McDougal’s cave and the boys’ triumph over the “murderin’ half-breed” Injun Joe.

I had after all just visited Twain’s childhood home (Hannibal, Missouri) two weeks ago. I’d bought Tom Sawyer in the Becky Thatcher Bookstore, had drunk a 58-cent milkshake in the Becky Thatcher Dinette, had daydreamed my way along a cobblestone street that included Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence and the window he had leapt from whenever Huck had meowed for him after dark.

Dioramas in at least three different museums had drawn me into a history and innocence I craved, and a bronze statue of Samuel Clemens high on a river bluff had allowed me to feel the writer’s genius as he and I gazed upon the mighty Mississippi below. But as I left the White Earth, I suspected Twain had drawn Injun Joe with the same bigotry I’d just witnessed in the resort’s café. While Twain had created the most famous Indian villain in American literature, he’d characterized him as a savage thief who had killed a grave-robbing doctor because the “Injun blood” wasn’t “in him for nothing.”[22]

But not their brains. You can’t leave what you didn’t bring.

Ultimately Twain placed Injun Joe where much of his white audience supposed Indians belonged: punished due to their un-Christian and non-white nature, gone forever (inside McDougal’s cave) from the newly settled white world that would be redeemed only by their own presence and religions.

 

* * *

 

Ten days after I left the White Earth, the incident repeated itself on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, 550 miles west in eastern Montana. I turned out of the wind on Highway Two and sought a grocery store amid a sorry-looking Main Street, all its buildings badly in need of paint, with signs too faded to read. The grocery was boarded up, its door padlocked. The only way in through was via the post office next door, which had iron bars on its windows. The town’s café, gas station and Lion’s club were boarded, closed and padlocked, but Hank’s Bar was open, and I went in and headed for the john, and the white proprietor stopped me, “The pipes got busted during the Indian celebration last weekend.”

“How long has everything been closed here?” I asked.

“Two years. Ever since the Indians took over. The businesses were run by whites, and the Indians started raising hell, and everybody sold their goods and packed up and left.”

“Everybody?”

“Except me and the guy who owns the elevator, and we’re about ready to go too.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, the Indians think they’re making progress. Look at it! It took them two years to tear down what it took the whites sixty to build. They have their own laws, you see. They could rob this place every night and spend two days in the tribal jail, and if I rob something, I get twenty years in the federal penitentiary. And they don’t pay taxes, but I have to!”

In another town I painstakingly avoided broken glass strewn all over Main Street and leaned my bike against the dirty, drab wall of a tiny grocery. A white woman coming out the door gave me a warning look. “Watch your stuff, so they don’t steal it.”

I bought bananas inside, sat on a crumbling sidewalk, and a native voice cooed above me. “O-o-o-o-o, you must be traveling?” A 62-year-old Assiniboine woman stood in a roaring gust of dust, her old Indian clothes wrapped tightly against the wind and boiling-hot sun. Her face looked ancient and wrinkled to me, and her eyes, kind and motherly. “Where?” she asked.

“From Ohio to Vancouver.”

“O-o-o-o-o. You’re halfway.”

“And it’s been a good half, but I meant to get here by five before the museum and Indian headquarters closed. Is the next town still on the reservation?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I can learn something there.”

She mumbled to herself. “I don’t trust my own people. Some are all right, but the young ones…” She shook her head. “They’re no good. No one follows the old ways here.”

“Who owns most of the land?”

“The whites, that’s the problem, the trouble here.”

I asked her about the next town, where whites had told me not to dare camp.

“They don’t like us in Wolf Point,” she said. “There’s discrimination against Indians there.”

I reached Wolf Point while that last bit of sunshine flooded the Missouri River bluffs, and I camped with two teenaged Indians at a roadside table across from an old grain elevator. I don’t remember the teenagers as vividly as the elderly Ojibwe man and Assiniboine woman, but my bicycle journal claims they worked at the concession stand at Red Bottom Celebration Grounds and disdained the tribal rituals performed at the powwow. “Taking an hour to drop a feather,” said one.

“To pray to have patience with the white man who has always robbed them, and still is,” said the other.

I kept riding against the hard western wind, getting physically and spiritually stronger every day. I got to know my country firsthand, discovered a lot of what hungered for—a new, larger truth about America, which I desperately needed after coming of age during the Vietnam War.

 

COLONIAL WAR HISTORY

 

Japan took control of France’s old historic colony of Vietnam during World War Two, and when it surrendered in 1945, Allied leaders might have allowed the Vietnamese to hold elections and choose their own government. Ho Chi Minh had been asking Western powers to grant Indochina its independence from France since World War One, and he had also helped form the League for the Independence of Vietnam—also known as the Vietminh—in 1941.[23]

The Far East division of the U.S. State Department warned President Truman in 1945 that if France did not grant Indochina “true autonomous self-government” that there’d be “bloodshed and unrest for years.” Nonetheless Truman feared the Vietminh would increase the spread of Asian Communism and assured France that the U.S. supported its old claim to Indochina, including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.[24]

Several weeks before the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered to General MacArthur on the USS Missouri, the Allied leaders divided Vietnam at the 16^th parallel. They temporarily put England in charge of South Vietnam, and Chinese Nationalists (allies against Japan) in charge of North Vietnam. Each was to administer the removal of the Japanese.[25] But by the time Japan surrendered, the Vietminh controlled Hanoi, the capital of the North.[26] It also vied for control of Saigon, the capital of the South, and unfortunately the British general in charge of the South believed that “natives” should not defy Europeans.”[27] He exceeded his orders, declared martial law, freed and armed French troops who had been interned by Japanese.[28] The next day the French troops went on a “rampage,” killing Vietnamese citizens, hanging Communists, ousting Vietminh from government buildings and hoisting the French flag over Saigon again.[29]

Three short weeks after Japan had surrendered to the Allied forces, a new war to control Vietnam had begun, fueled by Western concerns about Communism but also by colonial blindness and arrogance. France and the U.S. had just fought a terrible war against the horrors of Nazi occupation, yet neither could recognize Vietnam’s right to be free of foreign occupation. Instead, they enacted the same abuse that colonial powers had wielded for centuries. They denied self-determination to a non-white, native population thousands of miles from their homelands.

The U.S. spent 2.5 billion dollars—more “assistance than France received in Marshall Plan aid from America”—to finance France while the Vietnamese fought their “War of Resistance” against the French.[30] The Eisenhower Administration considered but rejected using tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Vietminh troops while they were decisively defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.[31] After peace accords in Geneva, Eisenhower supported and funded a repressive regime in South Vietnam led by a former colonial official, President Ngo Dinh Diem.[32]

Diem’s secret police executed and imprisoned Communists and other political opponents. Diem also refused to hold elections scheduled for 1956 because he, Eisenhower and others believed Ho Chi Minh and Communists would win.[33] The Kennedy Administration helped plan the coup of Diem in 1963, when he was murdered.[34]

Presidents Johnson and Nixon continued the war against North Vietnam, and before the U.S. was driven from the country in 1975, it dropped four times as many bombs upon the land it was supposedly saving, the South, than the North (four million tons versus one million ton). By the war’s end, the U.S. drove five million South Vietnamese, roughly one-third of the population, off their land. The U.S., in effect, destroyed the South in order to save it.[35]

 

* * *

 

As I bicycled through Indian reservations in Montana, I didn’t consciously realize that the U.S. had also displaced and destroyed Native Americans to supposedly save them—had forced them from their non-white world into white civilization from the 1700s to the 1900s, as it would later try to force Vietnamese Communists into capitalism favored by white Euro-Americans. I could not have articulated the correlation in 1978, but my impressions were colored by the Vietnam War. I was fourteen in 1968 and haunted by the prospect of being drafted and ordered to take part in killing both citizens and soldiers in Vietnam, or of being killed or maimed myself. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were objecting to the war, each was shot, and the My Lai massacre also hit the news.

When I was fifteen, National Guard soldiers opened fire on student protestors at Kent State University while Nixon waged secret war in Cambodia. Mostly I wore my hair long, coped with my parent’s tumultuous marriage. But my country’s atrocities repulsed me, and as I witnessed bigotry and dirt-poor conditions on Indian reservations in 1978, I was repulsed again. I felt and recognized ugliness. I needed more dignity than American triumph could provide—needed to love and respect nature and humanity rather than bomb them. I knew, at least, that reservations did not reflect a democracy that treated all people as created equal.

 

SUMMER 1988

 

Ten years after the White Earth incident (to the day), Jonah celebrated his birthday by leaping off second-story deck of my boathouse and swimming up the lazy brown current with friends to Barbi’s house. He and his pals floated on inner tubes, clinging to ropes tied to Barbi’s flower dock while she sank her watering can into the river and pulled it up by a rope. She watered potted petunias and zinnias. She watered potted geraniums and impatiens. She watered sunflowers, morning glories, basil, coleus and succulents.

“New Orleans is gonna run out of water,” I warned. “The barges down there aren’t gonna have deep enough water to float.”

Jonah took a dive under the dock and came up on the other side. “I’ll be the only guy in my class who can swim under his bedroom,” he said.

Though the state and city didn’t necessarily allow it, we planned to expand Barbi’s house and add a room of his own for him.

The owner of the boathouse between us swapped places with Barbi, and we pulled the houses by ropes, so we floated side-by-side. Then we built the bedroom’s foundation of two-by-sixes right out in the open where anyone could see it, on the side of the island that faced the main channel of boat traffic patrolled by county and state officials. Denny who designed and captained the project had already dared to add a loft to his boathouse down-island, and to build an exquisitely peaked roof and a beautiful interior with cherry floors. And Jon who lived in a munchkin-like boathouse with an arched loft fit for a gumdrop forest helped pound the foundation together, and his wife Ellen, a nurse, also played a vital role.

Barn swallows raised a brood that summer behind my boathouse and seemed to provide a perfect example of how a guy and girl could communicate while parenting a young boy. They built a nest atop an old electrical junction box that had a million-dollar view the river, and that risked full exposure to the northwest wind. One night a thunderstorm roared with 80-mile-per hour gusts and knocked down the biggest cottonwood on our bank; nonetheless the nest, parents and young survived—probably because a parent hunkered flat on it while the storm raged.

When chicks begged from the nest, Mom and Dad took turns flying in alacritous loops above the river, catching bugs for them. They also took what appeared to be commiseration breaks. They would perch side-by-side on an eave and would jabber, twitter and warble to each other. They’d go on and on, garbling and gurgling. They’d twist, turn and nod their blue-hooded heads, pulse and puff their chestnut throats. They’d air it all out, whatever they needed to say, whether it pertained to the bug harvest, predators, their young–or their fitness as reflected by the complexity and length of their song, as ornithologists suggest.[36] And then whoosh! They’d zoom off to catch more bugs.

So, I acted like a good barn swallow. I aired out my concerns to Barbi about having Jonah present on the day we attached the floating foundation of his bedroom to her house–it had no floor yet, only the two-inch edge of two-by-sixes to walk on, and if someone fell through, they’d get a good knock on the way down, cut themselves on joists and bolts, and maybe get a hand or leg squeezed between a barrel and a board. Barbi agreed, and we sent Jonah to Matt’s for the day. But a couple hours into the job the two boys biked down from the Interstate Bridge, arriving at the boathouses with all the aplomb of the kids sailing into the air on BMXs in E.T. A few minutes later Jonah fell through his room’s foundation and caught a calf on the point of a framing nail—a three or four-inch gash in need of stitches to stop the bleeding, I thought. But Jon and Ellen were helping that day, and Ellen cleaned the wound, pinched it closed with an expert hand and warned Barbi about tetanus—Ellen who in a couple years would have to drive hurriedly on the frozen Mississippi and then to the delivery room after her water broke unexpectedly in her and Jon’s boathouse.

“Yes, indeed on February 20th 1990, at 6:00 am, I did lose my water in the boathouse loft,” says Ellen. “That wasn’t supposed to happen until March 17, Riise’s due date. The ice was in strong that winter though, so we were able to drive right on down “Ice Road” to the Interstate bridge, then onto Highway 61 and on down the river to Gundersen Clinic in La Crosse. Just like in the suburbs.

“Riise was four pounds, five ounces and a month early. I recall that I was quite reluctant to discuss the living situation with the nurses and staff, even though I was already working there, on staff in Pediatrics. Everyone down there from the midwife to the pediatrician were considered friends. I didn’t want them to mount an intervention! She was so small and we were taking her to live in a boathouse in the winter! My trusty mate however, kept that little place all warmed up and lo and behold, she survived. She slept in a little basket in a hammock until we moved into our farmhouse June 1990. Despite her inauspicious start, she is getting married October 19!” [37]

Jon and Ellen followed the pattern of several other young couples on the island—while they fell in love with each other, they also fell for the romance of living in a boathouse. But as babies came along, hot running water and bathrooms won out, and new parents moved into houses on land. Barbi and I couldn’t afford a real house anyway, and Jonah was older and a joyful swimmer, so we gave island life our best shot.

 

DAD

 

A little isolated from town, we connected Jonah to friends as much as possible, and while I tried to parent, I drew on my dad’s fatherly gifts. Dad was my rock of love, stability and humor amid my Mom’s turmoil. He came home from work, and my brothers, sister and I rushed to the door. “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” He’d hand out sticks of gum, tell jokes, and we’d dash out to the backyard to play whiffle ball with him.

Dad was the all-time pitcher, and he tossed the ball patiently, never allowing anyone to strike out, always waiting for us to hit the ball. He chain-smoked while he pitched, a couple cans of beer at his feet. First base was the milk box at the foot of the kitchen steps; second, a dogwood sapling; third, a rock; home, a bare spot in grass. Hit the ball to right field, you’d hit the rabbit pen; to left, the swing set; to center, into a creek, and Happy the cocker spaniel would fetch it. Hit a pop-up, Dad would raise his glove with a cigarette in his lips and pretend to misjudge it, let you reach base.

Mom would be inside, cooking dinner, struggling with her fear that the meal wouldn’t work out. I had no understanding of her fear at the time, just felt it. Likewise, I just felt Dad’s buoyant mood, his joy of playing with his kids.

I first played whiffle ball with Jonah three years before Barbi bought her boathouse, in a quiet dead-end street. I wouldn’t let him strike out, and I automatically spoke a commentary during the game. “You sound like the Twins announcer!” said Jonah.

Kids came out of houses, waiting to be invited into the game, and soon we graduated to soft-pitch hardball at a nearby park, and more kids came, slipping out of houses that surrounded our make-shift field. Everyone was welcome, girls as well as boys–nobody well-off enough to have fancy equipment. None would strike out, I made sure of it, I was the all-time pitcher like Dad.

But the island had virtually no other kids living there, no instant playmates. Yet the phone line in the trench Mickey had dug by hand still worked, and we’d gather buddies and sometimes drive to “fields of dream” in rural towns or hike out to cow pastures and play as new grass sprouted in spring.

I always wanted us to host a big softball game on river-ice in backwaters, where ice remained safely frozen in March and early April. I always envisioned Dad there, but he never saw the boathouses we lived in. He visited a couple years earlier while we still lived in town—after a lung-cancer surgery. He swam in the Mississippi for his first time, smiling as he had in the backyard, tossing a Nerf football and Frisbee in the water with Jonah, Matt, Barbi and me.

A ball ended up in a tangle of tree roots onshore, and Matt splashed to it. “I’m stuck!” he said. He twisted and turned, his foot caught. Neither Barbi nor I could get it loose, but Dad somehow extricated it, and I relived my childhood wonder. Whenever I faced an insurmountable problem, Dad would muse to himself, “Hmmm, looks like a job for Super Dad.” He would mimic a routine from the Superman comic books of his era, knowing I loved the television show from my era. “Clark Kent ducks into a nearby phone booth and turns into…” Presto! He’d demonstrate how to solve whatever puzzle perplexed me.

The second winter Barbi and Jonah lived in the boathouse, Dad called and said he had lung cancer again, inoperable this time. I went home to Connecticut rather than host ballgames on ice. Barbi and Jonah, however, shoveled an ice rink behind their house, along with a maze of loops, and they helped neighbors shovel paths that connected rinks from the north to the south end of the island. Everyone skated to their heart’s delight.

Meanwhile I sat in the oncologist’s office with Dad when he learned his cancer had metastasized. “Gee,” he said, “I hoped it hadn’t.” I took him to chemo appointments, and we played a dice baseball game (Strat-o-Matic) that we’d played together since I was ten. I watched late-night comedy with him and his new partner, a kind-hearted woman who shared his laughter and did not battle and berate him as my mother had. I recorded a cassette for Barbi and Jonah after shopping with Dad in a supermarket where I had shopped with him as a kid. “I realized there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in that giant store that could ease Dad’s pain or help him live longer.”

I drove him to a McDonald’s to meet the personnel manager of the company where he had worked 35 years, so he could sign for a pittance of money he received after being forced into retirement. I drove him to New Jersey, so he could spend his last Christmas with grandchildren, and a couple weeks later I helped him get ready for a chemo appointment. We were on our way out the door, and the phone rang. The hospital had no bed for him. His treatment was delayed at least a couple weeks. “Hey,” he said. “I want you to go home and be with Barbi and Jonah.”

We drove to the train station a few days later. Amtrak pulled in. We clumsily, quickly loaded the boxes that held my Commodore 64 and dot matrix printer through the door, then my backpack of clothes. Dad looked up at me from the platform, ashen and forlorn, his loving gaze arching up. “Yeah, good-bye,” he said, and the door closed. I found a seat and secured my luggage, worried as hell that he would get in a car accident driving home on the Connecticut Turnpike, as his reflexes had slowed. I sat, the train lurched. It hit me. The nature of his good-bye. The finality of his tone.

I went back to work at the greasy spoon, came home late one night and shoveled the rink behind our houses while Barbi and Jonah slept. They had adopted a stray cat, a black longhair with a white bib and white slippers, “Boots.” He climbed down the ladder from Barbi’s bedroom in the loft and waited at the edge of the rink, sitting up straight, flashing yellow eyes, his feet tucked primly together. Once the rink was perfectly clean, I rolled a ping-pong ball across the moonlit ice, and Boots gave chase, batted the ball to the farthest corner. I retrieved it, knelt on my knees, imitated Dad–when he played dice baseball when I was ten, he would pick up the three die and rattle them next to his ear to warn me that one of his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella—would get a lucky roll.

I rattled ping-pong balls in my hand beside my ear while Boots listened and crouched. I let two go at once, and he ran at the first, batted it, slid triumphantly, pranced to his feet, charged and slapped the second, slid some more, jumped and fluffed himself up magnificently. Fifteen hundred miles from Dad under the stars on the frozen Mississippi, I shared the gift of play he had so tenderly bequeathed me.

His new partner called one afternoon while I got ready for work. “Your father, Richie, your father.”

He’d had a coughing fit in his chemo room, had ruptured an artery in his throat. I waited in despair until Jonah got home from school, and Barbi, from her job teaching early childhood family education. I cried while we packed the car and drove toward Connecticut.

“How you doing, Rich?” asked young Jonah.

Then Barbi the same.

I kept crying, and after my siblings and I made arrangements, we met with a minister who would speak part of the eulogy. He’d never met Dad. “Tell me about him,” he said.

“We moved to Ohio once,” I said. “We had this dog Binky who would climb ladders to get in and out of our bedrooms. The first day we moved into our new house, he got hit by a car on the highway and euthanized. I hugged Dad at his belt, cried into his stomach. `Go ahead, Rich, cry,’ said Dad. `Go ahead and cry.’”

“A man of his generation?” said the minister. “He was years ahead of his time!”

I spoke at the service too, about how creating goodness in the world was the defining purpose of Dad’s life. I paused at his open coffin before leaving the chapel and slid Strat-o-Matic cards of his beloved 1953 Dodgers in his shirt pocket. When I visited with relatives in the parking lot, I realized we had left vases of flowers in the church. Jonah and I rushed back into the altar and were greeted by another man staring at us. A new corpse in a new open casket had replaced my father immediately.

It scared the dickens out of me, but it also gave me the chance to carry on his sense of humor, sharing the story with you.

 

HEATING, THAWING, CHAIN-SAWING

Barbi didn’t heat with wood. She came home from work every day, put on her fuel-oil clothes and took a funnel up to a 55-gallon drum mounted on a two-by-four frame on the bank and patiently filled a plastic gas can. She didn’t let Jonah or me near the fuel, less a single drop fall on the ground or into the river. She went down to the upstream deck of her boathouse and poured the fuel into another drum, which fed the fussiest old bastard on the island, a used Junger stove, through a copper pipe.

We could see the flames of tubular heat flues inside the stove through a little smoky window, and watched them sputter on a November day as the temperature fell toward ten degrees. We opened the little door, peered at the parts inside, and I got the needle-nosed pliers from my traveling bag of bicycle tools. We worked and worked on the stove while Jonah watched a tiny black-and-white television with a six-inch screen, wrapped with sleeping bags.

The house’s only heat now poured out from a gas cooking stove in Barbi’s “kitchen corner,” which consisted of the stove less than two-feet wide, a half-sized fridge 20-inches wide, a counter, and a closet of food shelves squeezed beside an incinerating toilet salvaged from an old Coast Guard boat. We got nowhere with the stove, argued about how much hot chocolate Jonah should drink, bristled at each other for hours. We finally did something very difficult. We were both broke but super-determined to master the self-sufficiency of boathouse life. But we called a repair man—liberation!

I went home to my boathouse and got back to writing my novel—a story inspired by a book by a nuclear-weapons engineer who quit his job during a crisis of conscience, First Strike: the Pentagon’s Strategy for Nuclear War. Robert C. Aldridge worked on nuclear weapons design for Polaris, Poseidon and Trident submarines until his children challenged him to stop, and he realized the U.S. was developing nuclear weapons in violation of international arms treaties, that it was secretly creating “a capability to inflict a disarming or unanswerable first strike against a rival nation.”[1]

I created a fictional family, and my protagonist was a heroine-daughter who confronted a father and brother who worked on MX missiles and Star Wars. She kidnapped a newborn niece and would return her only when her family quit their nuclear-weapon jobs. The trouble was the same as with the Junger stove. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

One agent in particular encouraged me, a woman in Maine who wrote me that she took up hitchhiking at age forty-two and continued for a couple decades, “living as if I had no other life, moving from place to place, with no reservations or appointments or commitments, just wandering, working occasionally, sleeping on beaches, in haystacks, in Youth Hostels, on benches in RR stations, etc.” She saw all of Great Britian, was “taken in by peasants and lords, shared the edge of the highway with young people and other eccentrics, felt at home everywhere.” She visited the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Faroes, Tahiti and other islands. She found the lifestyle as glorious as I did my bicycle adventures, but she lost the muscular strength in her left leg and decided to bring the world to her doorstep. She opened a second-hand book shop in her barn and a literary agency. She wrote me letters 2500-words long! And after I wrote her that I was moving into a boathouse, she sent me a blanket she wove me and a handwritten note: “Richie—Made this for you with affection. Greater Love hath no agent! Your picture of boathouse sparsely furnished inspired the effort.”[2] The blanket has lovely bands of earthy tones of brown, green and blue and still hangs in my sleeping loft today.

Ms. Yedlin corrected my grammar line-by-line, told me why an earlier novel I had submitted was not a novel. Told me she believed in me as a person but I had a lot to learn about novel-writing that I had not even considered yet. Told me my earlier novel lacked a plot and suspense, and its main character lacked a challenge and emotional connections to other characters, and so flopped.[3]

I was already 33-years-old. I had been producing book-length manuscripts for nine years—one about bike trips, another about my spiritual love of nature, another about losing a cycling friend to a drunk driver, and another about working at a rough-and-tumble fish cannery in Alaska. I took Ms. Yedlin’s advice to heart, taught myself grammar, triple-checked every sentence, threw my characters into conflicts and emotional involvements, heated up themes.

As Easter approached, I was writing like crazy and didn’t want to stop to take part in the annual egg hunt in the Twin Cities at Barbi’s folks, who lived 150 miles upriver on the Mississippi (in a suburban house). The Mississippi also seemed against it. A narrow channel had opened beneath the snow-packed river behind the boathouses, and Barbi’s house remained frozen in—and couldn’t be moved by ropes like mine. It was fixed in place by iron gin poles (spuds) that were attached to exterior walls and were sunken deep in the river’s frozen mud.

A few weeks later, Jonah would pound the ice around the boathouse every morning before school, smashing cracks in it with a baseball bat, a board, rake, or whatever was handy. He pounded it at high-speed, pushing and jabbing it away again and again as it sloshed back. He wasn’t the only one who suffered the affliction. A couple days before we left for Easter, I asked a friend to help me open cracks in the ice around Barbi’s house—Paul (P.K.) was one of my oldest friends in Winona, a baseball buddy who played Strat-o-Matic and slow-pitch with Jonah and me. We butted the ice with ax-heads and a five-foot pry bar, black iron, sharply tipped. We opened cracks in the downriver side, sat on Barbi’s deck, pushed the excess ice under with our waterproof boots. We smashed cracks in the upriver side and returned to the downriver side—frozen solid again. P.K. was willing to keep at it, but I knew when the river beat me. “Let’s get warm,” I said. “Let’s play Strat-o-Matic.”

We went up to my loft, loaded a DOS program disc into my Commodore 64 and played the 1965 Twins against the 1964 Yankees. P.K. looked at my old board game on a shelf and then at the screen. He shook his head, “There’s no going back, is there?” Each of us believed in living simply with nature (he picked apples and citrus crops for a living). But there we were, sitting one-story high above the beautiful snowy Mississippi, absorbed in a computer game.

Barbi, Jonah and I drove up to the cities on Good Friday, passing snow-packed river bluffs beside Highway 61 that were slowly thawing in 50-degree temperatures. Barbi’s dad and I hid 100+ eggs around the yard on Easter Sunday while the temperature climbed toward 70, and patches of green grass emerged amid shrinking snow. We hid eggs in an old stone barbecue down on the bank, and when Jonah found them a couple hours later, he shouted, “Look, Mom! Look, Rich!” Water gushed from beneath snow and ran six-inches deep on the frozen channel, heading for Latsch Island.

It was still tee-shirt weather when we got home. The snowmelt ran a few inches from Barbi’s front deck and front door, and we called another Paul (P.O.), also an old friend. He earned his living fishing for salmon in Prince William Sound in remote wilderness in Alaska. He could do anything with a power tool. He revved up a chainsaw and knelt from Barbi’s deck to the ice. A wild spray of snowmelt drenched his rain gear as the blade spun and whined. He walked on the ice around Barbi’s entire boathouse, cutting a square, his goggles dripping down to his triumphant smile as if he were standing in the middle of Niagara Falls.

P.O. also played slow-pitch with us, and Jonah had seen him hit many towering home runs. Jonah had also watched him once, after we had locked keys in a car at a trailhead, somehow remove the car’s hatchback window with a pocket knife, get the keys, and put the window perfectly back in place. As the boathouse popped up out of the ice, Jonah pumped his fist amid the roar of Paul’s saw, “Yes! Yes! Yes! I knew he would do it!”

Ten years later, P.O. helped me rebuild a wall and install a picture window behind my writing desk. He put a table saw right behind the house and stood on ice, making the precise cuts necessary to square the window in the always-lopsided boathouse. We finished on a Saturday afternoon and loaded the table saw back into his truck. Sunday morning, the river behind the boathouse was wide open–no ice whatsoever to stand upon. Such are the hazards of being a kind-hearted friend to a boathouse resident.

POPPING BARRELS, LOSING MIRACLES

In July heat we stood 55-gallon drums in a line along my bank—plastic, not metal. The city and state no longer allowed metal barrels beneath docks and boathouses—metal rusted, leeched pollutants into the river, sank into mud and created razor-sharp edges that threatened cuts and tetanus.

Mickey’s husband Phil opened a barrel’s bungs with a twist of an open-ended pliers, and a heady whiff of cinnamon rose in the sultry air—Mickey had wrangled the barrels from the shipping and receiving department of the J.R. Watkins Company, which had been producing spices in Winona since 1858. Barbi wiped the threads inside the bung with an old tee shirt, cleaning out all debris, including duckweed, gnats and mosquitoes. Mickey with the hands of a potter pressed a ring of biodegradable plumber’s goop inside the bungs’ threads. I closed one bung, and Mickey dipped a tongs into a cooler and lifted a chunk of dry ice. She dropped it through the other bung, and Jonah quickly closed the cooler as the dry ice’s ghostly steam drifted out. I quickly closed the second bung, twisting it with open-ended pliers like Phil.  Mickey smiled–the barrel bulged at the sides and ends, thanks to the tight seals and dry ice. Both were crucial—if a bung leaked, the barrel would fill with water and roll and bang beneath the boathouse—if we left out the dry ice, the plastic barrel would cave in during winter.

Before we started popping, Mickey floated a barrel into the water beside the boathouse and climbed onto it. She straddled it with her legs, grabbed the front rim and rode the barrel as if it were a bronc at a rodeo, bobbing and swaying. She challenged us to do the same. Only Jonah joined her, then Phil and I got down to business. We waded in wearing tennis shoes, hoping to protect our feet against humanity’s “reverence” for the river—old timers claimed this area of the island had once been a dump, and we knew floods could deposit anything–broken bottles, decayed cans, rusted rods, machine parts, corroding barrels etc. I followed Phil’s lead. We swam to the front row of barrels, and Phil pushed down on the bottom rim of a rusted relic. I did the same, the barrel sank toward us. We pulled the rim slowly, coaxing it, and got the hell out of the way. But this barrel was easy, relatively un-dangerous. It floated sluggishly out from beneath the boathouse, and Phil and I wrestled it up to the edge of riprap.

A 55-gallon barrel full of water weighs more than 400 pounds. We heaved together, rolling it onto dry rock. We smashed holes in it with my mall and five-foot pry bar. We let it drain, and Jonah and Mickey rolled it up to parking lot, where it awaited its destiny at the scrapyard.

Phil and I swam into the empty space the barrel left behind and peered through the gray shadow beneath the house. We spotted a plastic barrel caved in at the top, tilted against a two-by-four that 1.) supported the floor above it, and 2.) was part of a row or “rack” that held the barrel in place. Mickey swam beneath the house, hung onto the rack with her hands and turned the barrel with her feet. I cleared out again, a damned good thing. The barrel had no water in it, and when she and Phil kicked it out, it flew up with a force that could crush you.

Now she and Phil floated the “barrel popper” into the water and hooked the curved ends of its two “popper arms” beneath the front edge of the house. Phil lifted the opposite end of the popper, standing in the water near shore. Mickey slid a barrel beneath the popper’s cradle, and Phil pulled down. A sudden thump! A bang like wood cracking! A splash of ecstasy! The barrel popped beneath the house, the house rose visibly. We cheered like we’d just won the World Series. The old waterline of fuzzy brown and green scum on the rest of barrels was irrefutably higher, and nobody’s ankle or arm had been smashed. Phil and I hung onto the house’s front edge and kicked the barrel farther in. Thump! Bang! Splash! Yes, yes, yes! It landed where we wanted! There was room for another barrel, we popped it in, and all it meant that the wood beneath the house would rest well above the river and wouldn’t rot. Meant that a derelict tree could knock out a barrel, but the house would still float high and safe. Meant that I had a home and would sell my novel, that Jonah and Barbi had a home, that we were a happy family working together, that Phil and Mickey knew how to meet the river on its own terms, that we all were wonderful friends.

We swam to the house’s back deck, kicked and rolled out bad barrels, took stock. Theoretically, the house had nine barrels in ten neat rows beneath it. But in reality, ice floes, leaks, boat wakes, bent boards, storm waves and even boathouse residents doing barrel maintenance pushed them into a bit of a helter-skelter. Mickey jumped in, and we hung in the current, holding onto nuts, bolts and boards beneath the back dock, making a plan. Barbi and Jonah hung their heads over the dock, adding to the plan—someday we might point our phones under the house, and an app might tell us the best way a particular chaos of barrels can be rearranged for optimum floatation with the least trouble. But for now, we knew the first step. We lined up a barrel as precisely as possible—it was 34 inches wide, we had 35 ½ inches of space. Mickey positioned the popper straight up against the back dock, I slid a barrel beneath the cradle. We eased the arms down to Phil who waded/waited in water more than 20-feet deep–Phil a happy-go-lucky Irish boy in 35-year-old body, red-haired, freckled, blue eyes gleaming a hearty ho-ho-ho. He pulled the popper down. The barrel pushed against the dock’s edge and resisted. Phil walked up the crossbars of the popper, increasing the pressure. The barrel squirted out sideways, flew past Phil, fled downriver. Jonah jumped in after it, and Phil swam after the popper. We lined up the barrel again, got it in perfect the second try.

We finished in back and went around to the upriver side of the house, where there wasn’t enough room to pull the popper down into the water. Mickey and Phil laid the popper between her house and Barbi’s, resting it on opposite decks, and I took a turn sitting on it, pressing my feet against a barrel beneath it. This seemed as good a place to die as any other. But I pushed with my mountain-climbing legs, the barrel went in, the popper didn’t collapse or fall into the river, didn’t snap back or knock me in the head. I pounded my chest—not like King Kong. I was every-inch a gorilla, grunting, growling, screaming, hooting.

We filled in a couple more empty spaces, then Phil and I plunged in feet-first from Barbi’s deck. We went down below the barrels, let the current push us toward the middle of Mickey’s house. A narrow yellow shaft shone dimly above the watery brown murk, and we surfaced–one dark metal barrel inches from our noses, others scraping the backs of our heads and our shoulders. The underside of the floor brushed our hair, and the air tasted like decomposing turtles, muskrat musk, sour cinnamon fumes, corroding metal, wet-rotten wood, fish piss, dead mussels, sordid black mud. Wolf spiders larger than your hand and water snakes as thick as your arm lurked beneath boathouses, any islander would tell you. Phil and I looked at each other. All the Robin Williams and Lucille Balls of the world put together couldn’t have unleashed such a flood of ha-ha-ha’s, ho-ho-ho’s. This was our choice—to have our heads stuck up beneath a boathouse in an airspace less than three-feet wide and ten-inches high, the result of being in love with river girls, of the can-do spirit no matter the absurdity.

When we re-emerged between the houses, Barbi and Mickey stared, and Jonah popped the question. “What was so funny down there?” We kept laughing, and after we tried to explain, I thought Phil would say, “That’s it, done for the day.” But he pointed at a barrel and said, “You know, I think if we shove this one a little this way, and that one a little that way, we can make a new path and get more barrels under there.”

* * *

No matter how hot the day got, the river remained well below body temperature, and so at the day’s end I sat with Barbi and her flowers and let the last of the sun warm my aches and pains. I rested passively as the day’s rewards–nature’s miracles—swarmed all around us. A steady stream of great blue herons flew by, evoking pterodactyls as they grunted and tucked their gangly necks. One passed close behind the house, raising its head-plume as if put off by our presence, and another landed on a rock pile 75 yards away and stepped deliberately through boulders, settling itself to fish while others headed to a rookery one-half mile upriver. A steady stream of great egrets, gracefully white, and double-breasted cormorants, densely black with serpentine necks, also headed to the rookery. A flycatcher rasped its name (phoebe phoebe phoebe) nonstop from its nest beneath an upstream neighbor’s overhang. The barn swallows jabbered and lit out from my house, and joined hundreds of tree and cliff swallows in a midair dance of aerial insectivores–birds who forage primarily on the wing, flashing gravity-defying maneuvers every millisecond or so. Purple martins and chimney swifts zoomed zany circles high above us, and black terns brought fledglings from backwater nests and flew circles around the piles of the abandoned railroad bridge, crying Eek-eek! Eek-eek! Eek-eek! They hovered, dove cockeyed, stabbed gizzard shad with lightning thrusts of sharp bills, and then the first peent rang high in the dusk, a nasal call drier than sawdust—another aerial insectivore, the common nighthawk. Their wings boomed, sounded like wind fluttering through feathers, and then clapped as they dove in herky-jerky motions, catching insects.  Their dark wings popped open with white bands and then closed, and the birds dropped so abruptly my stomach dropped too. The nighthawks rose crookedly up into the darkness above the river, plummeted crookedly back down. They buzzed and boomed across the entire river, above the bottomland woods and bluffs in Wisconsin, all the way to sunset colors upriver, to darkness downriver, above and around the streetlights of the entire town of Winona. And then the first bat slipped out of the twilight and danced lightly past our heads, then what seemed like thousands flew past, breezing and squeaking our ears. We sat very still, felt the first mosquito bites, went inside.

* * *

When Jonah was 15, a barrel-popping day nearly ended much less peacefully. We had to move Barbi’s house downriver to clear the state’s right-of-way for a bridge replacement. I cranked her gin poles out of the river with come-a-longs, and a skillful neighbor tied the house snug against the bow of his johnboat and guided it safely into its new mooring site. I cranked the gin poles down into river mud again, but the front of her house floated very low, and we wanted to get barrels beneath it right away. Barbi waded in to take a look and came out of the river with a shin bleeding from a nasty gouge from a rusted barrel buried deep in mud. We resolved to get that fucker out of there. We dug around the barrel but couldn’t budge it, and the boathouse owner next door suggested we attach a steel cable to its rim and pull it out with his pickup truck. Clarence was a competent, white-haired man who owned a successful auto parts store in Rochester for decades—full of good nature, humor and the typical can-do spirit of the island. I took the 3/8-inch galvanized cable from him willingly, we attached both ends, and he pulled the cable taut with his truck and stepped on the gas. The air around us screamed–the cable had snapped and whipped through the air so fast I didn’t see it until lay on the ground. It hadn’t decapitated or cut anyone in half, but that wasn’t because we’d been smart about things, just lucky we’d been out of its way.

By the time Jonah was 20, Barbi lived in town, and Jonah lived independently in the boathouse. He and I popped about 25 additional barrels beneath the house one day in 1998, and most remain there today, bulging from dry ice, bungs holding tight. During Jonah’s bachelor days, his buddies helped add more barrels under his house and mine, all catching the “fever,” seeing how best to get one last barrel under the houses. These days, Jonah lives in the house with his wife Mara, and she’s inherited Barbi and Mickey’s job. She stands up the popper and lines it up while Jonah and I tread water and slide the barrel in place. Years ago, I could pull down on the popper myself and send barrels thumping reliably beneath the houses. Now I pull down the popper, the barrel won’t go under. I climb the popper’s crossbars, the barrel laughs at me! Neither my legs nor arms are strong enough anymore, the barrel continues to float buoyantly beneath the popper. So, Jonah and I pull down together, and the houses still float high—except the center of the little gray boathouse, which sags a little, since I’ve never been brave or crazy enough to swim all the way under the floor since the day Phil and I did.

We still whoop and cheer when a barrel goes in, and I still feel gorilla-strong, at least in spirit. But one evening we sat together after popping barrels beneath a new dock, and my spirit caved. I generally did not sit by the river at dusk anymore, because the summer sky stings my heart too sharply. The rewards–

nature’s miracles—are gone. Except for shrunken colonies of cliff swallows on two bridges, a handful of tree and barn swallows, a few red-winged blackbirds and grackles, the graying sky was empty. No nighthawks, herons, egrets or cormorants. No phoebes, martins or swifts. No bats. The great abundance of miracles during reproductive season had been replaced by a mostly empty sky.

* * *

The steady streams of great egrets and double-breasted cormorants I once witnessed were, like the sandhill cranes, the result of successful conservation measures, laws enacted. Plume hunters shot great egrets in rookeries for breeding feathers during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, nearly causing their extinction. Egrets were gone from Minnesota by the early 1900s,[4] and were “reduced to virtually none” in the state across the river, Wisconsin, through the 1920s.[5] The Migratory Treaty Act passed in 1913, protecting egrets from shooting.[6] The species returned to breed in both states during the 1930s, and was found in a colony with great blue herons and double-crested cormorants near Winona in 1939.[7] The great egret has “now nearly recovered to former levels” throughout its range.[8]

Double-crested cormorants were considered a “menace to local fish populations” and were routinely shot during the 1800s and early 1900s.[9] The species was “greatly reduced” by the early 20^th century,[10] and was not federally protected until 1972.[11] Meanwhile pesticides and other contaminants, ingested through the fish cormorants ate, crippled the species’ biology in similar ways that they devastated peregrine falcons, ospreys, bald eagles and other top-of-the-food-chain birds during the 1950s through the early 1970s. DDT and other contaminants caused egg-shell thinning, embryonic abnormalities and death, egg death and adult death.[12] As pesticides were controlled, contamination levels decreased in cormorants. Actions related to conflicts with fish populations—including shooting cormorants and oiling (destroying) eggs at breeding colonies–are now regulated by federal, state and tribal authorities.[13] Double-crested cormorants have bounced back, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates their North American population might be as many as a million birds.[14]

The steady streams of herons, egrets and cormorants were also the result of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which was created by Congress in 1924,[15] thanks to years of lobbying by hunting, fishing and other conservation groups.[16] The rookery that generated the “Heron Highway” behind Latsch Island’s boathouses was protected inside the refuge’s boundary and had been monitored since the 1970s. More than 400 active nests had been recorded every year,[17] and I lived in the middle of the birds’ supermarket. I stayed out of the rookery during breeding season, but while I wrote at the boathouse, herons flew above the woods on the opposite shore, carrying nest-sticks in bills in early spring. When they had nestlings to feed, they were apt to seen anywhere along shore, including at the fish pond my neighbor tried to stock. One day, a heron strutted past my back window and cocked its head outside the back screen door while a two-month-old kitten yowled and fluffed herself up like a Halloween cat just inside the screen.

Double-crested cormorants dove for fish directly behind the boathouse and especially around the abandoned railroad bridge, storing prey in their throat pouches for young at the rookery. They perched on the bridge, spread their black wings, raised their hooked orange bills and maintained a motionless silence that seemed to belong to a primal state-of-being. Many believe the pose dries out feathers, but when I’m in a dreamy mood, it evokes the mystic in me, and a deep bond. The cormorant’s pose epitomizes the stillness I love to conjure in myself while I bird and open my senses wide, receiving nature.

Great egrets were generally shy of the boathouses, but used to be common in local backwaters. When I wrote a bird blog in 2007, I waited at dawn on May 25 at a backwater marsh downriver from the rookery, and 160 of the White Elegant Ones passed overhead. Three weeks later, 85 descended through a gray heat haze into a corner of the same marsh, growling like the pterodactyl-herons. Great egrets usually forage while wading, but now they fluttered like giant white butterflies in a gusting wind, dipped bills like swallows into shallow water and scooped prey with dangling bills.

I call this marsh “Osprey Marsh” because in the summer of 1990 I watched an osprey place a stick on the crossbar of a power pole in the middle of the wetlands. Somehow the stick and three others remained balanced on the crossbar throughout the next winter, and the following spring, the species built the first osprey nest (to my knowledge) in these particular backwaters since DDT and other pesticides had virtually eliminated them from the upper Mississippi. I birded Osprey Marsh intensively every spring, and suddenly in 2020 neither herons nor egrets foraged there, nor any other place immediately up and downriver from the 50-year-old rookery. When officials visited the breeding grounds, they found no nests. The herons, egrets and cormorants had abandoned the rookery.

Strange as it seems, this gave me a little hope. Rookeries don’t last forever. Sooner or later the birds leave old locations for new ones, so I thought maybe the absence of herons and egrets was just a local phenomenon, not related to larger environmental problems. But I couldn’t forget the flood that happened the year before the rookery was abandoned, 2019. Temperatures that winter had reached 30-below zero and had created extra-deep ice around Latsch Island’s boathouses. As the river thawed in early March, water atop ice threatened all the houses, not just Barbi’s as during Easter 1989. Ice around my house remained eight inches thick, and by March 13 snowmelt from the river and banks seeped over the tops of docks around my house. The Army Corps predicted the river to rise to nine-feet by March 16, three and one-half feet higher than my frozen-in house. Some neighbors moved everything from lower to upper floors and evacuated, fearing water-over-ice would swamp their houses, and ice floes would prevent them from walking or boating out in a day or two. March 15, one neighbor on the lower end of the island walked to her house through shin-deep water at 11:30 and waded out again through water above her knees at 4:30. Another neighbor who lacked a canoe floated through ice floes on an inflated inner tube and told folks later that she did not get cold because she was born in Russia.

My downriver neighbor—another power-tool wizard—doesn’t want to be named. I’ll call him D.S. for downstream. He ran a propane-powered ice auger around his house on March 13. His house popped out the ice and was floating the next morning, so he lent me the auger, and I ran it on my house’s upriver side. The blade stopped abruptly, a blow smashed my hip. I staggered, thought the bone was broken. Another blow smashed my shoulder, it felt broken too. The blade had caught on a log frozen in the ice, and the starter cord had kept spinning, striking me with its handle. If the handle had spun higher and hit my head, I’d been knocked dead in the exact spot I had assumed was a good place to die, popping barrels with Mickey and Phil so many years ago. I hobbled into the house, found myself just bent, not broken, just like the Pink song says.

Before I went to bed that night, the ice was arching steeply from shore like it might break. But it remained solid the next morning, and water lapped across, nearly level with my front deck. Water also flooded the sidewalk on my bank, surrounding firewood. I carried the wood by armloads to higher ground on the parking lot, and the following morning, the river rose to the stage of 11 feet, as measured by a gauge at Lock and Dam 5A three miles upriver. This was two feet higher than the Army Corps’ prediction, and nobody could ever remember the Corps’ prediction being wrong by so much. Everybody had serious problems. Erik the next neighbor past D.S. had a plank locked in ice that kept his house from floating higher, and water around a corner of the front wall. Mike in the next row had at least two-feet of water over a floor, and Pete-next-to-Mike had lost a jet-ski dock, which sheared off when the rest of his house popped out from ice. Pete’s roof was tilted as if jolted by an earthquake, and Matt down-the-island had one gin pole tipped over and another broken loose, their brackets pulled from his house when the frozen enemy shifted. He kayaked through the snowmelt and chain-sawed a standout from his house, so he could winch it against trees, so it would not smash into his neighbor.

Two days later, my boathouse loosened from the ice and was floating, but my side docks remained frozen to ice below and bent sharply downward, pulling down at the house. Fortunately, the river gave Latsch Island a break. It rose to 12 feet, and the ice in back channel bowed visibly from shore to shore—the current lifted the ice from below, and locked-in boathouses seemed to rise too, so maybe water-over-ice would stop swamping them.

D.S. told me the Army Corps predicted Winona might see its worst flood in history, even higher than the 20.77 stage it saw in 1965. “I want it to go to 23, so I can I see Winona’s largest flood ever!” He ran his johnboat through the water-over-the the ice behind our houses, ramming ice debris out of the way, and angled a three-inch barge rope from the back corner of his house to a giant cottonwood upstream, pinning my boathouse against the shore below the parking lot. The frozen river broke open March 19, and ice floes bore down across the entire river. They were so large they looked like they’d been generated in Antarctica, and ever since Barbi’s house and others were relocated for a bridge construction, mine was the first in line to greet them, prone to the first blows.

Floes knocked twelve barrels from D.S.’s back corner overnight. He came down from his house in town and pounded on my door in the morning. “When did that happen!” He laughed euphorically and sped off in his SUV to fetch barrels from a barn in the country. Before he got off the island, he spotted another boathouse owner corralling barrels before the flood swept them away. Ten minutes later, D.S. and the other islander pressed the first barrel between my downstream dock and the lilting boathouse beside it. They sat on my dock’s edge and kicked barrels under in unison, getting them all in.

April Fool’s Day, the river rose to 17 feet, four to eight feet above the island’s roads. At 16 feet, I could walk across the lot in chest waders, but at 17 a cross current raced higher than my waders. Paul, my Alaska-fishing friend, warned me about canoeing. “You’d probably shoot right past your plank and go under your house and die.” A 64-year-old man didn’t need to be warned twice. I was bivouacked at Barbi’s in town, had resigned myself to checking on the boathouse twice a day.

I walked down to the edge of my flooded parking lot and viewed my boathouse through binoculars. I had over-reacted during the temps of 30-below. I had ordered extra firewood, and now I had foolish amount on April’s Fool’s Day. When the lot had flooded, I’d moved the wood down to my downstream dock only, because the upstream dock still hung low against the current, even though the ice had thawed from its base and barrels. Now the downstream dock also hung low too, but why worry? The Army Corps had lowered the crest prediction from 20 to 17.5 feet.

The river crested at about 17.3 on April 3, and after I biked off the Interstate Bridge, I got my island news at the usual place–on high ground where people parked boats and cars. Ernie the gentle, red-haired giant pulled up in an old wooden canoe at the edge of the floodwaters of “No-wake Road,” a dirt lane that led to downstream houses. “Watch, Richie!” said Ernie. He grabbed a rope tied to the bow and stood instantly straight, no need to steady the craft with his hands. “I’m almost 70, and I just learned that!” His lashes flicked bashfully as if modestly, but his blue eyes twinkled with pride. “I lost a whole row of barrels, and I replaced them in ten minutes,” he said. “I wrapped the barrels with rope and fed the rope beneath the house, then pried them in with a two-by-four.”

Ernie had lived on-and-off in boathouses since the 1970s and stored extra barrels on his roof just for such emergencies. He could do anything with rope. He wove three-inch galvanized cable into perfectly spherical globes, and he always claimed he had invented a new musical scale, playing a piano in his boathouse.

A young couple pulled up in a johnboat and pecked good-bye as the pretty-lanky lady hustled to work. I’d heard that ice floes had knocked a dock and miniature greenhouse off their boathouse. I asked the guy about it, and his eyes, his sunburnt tan and whole long-haired being glowed with the thrill of the flood. “We heard it was hung up down by Homer, and we went after it,” he said. “I started to tow it back, and we got to the first wing dam, and the dock dipped, and the greenhouse took on water. The rope got tangled in my propeller, and I had to cut the dock loose and tie it up over by the KOA campground. I think we can go back later and load it onto a truck. We want it on land anyway.”

The campground was six miles downriver! I tried to picture boating that far and back through Antarctica-sized ice-floes, and then my old friend Kyle parked his truck and slid a five or six-foot steel pole from its bed. The gin pole at the front of his boathouse had popped loose from the riverbed, which had been scoured by the raging current. Last night, Kyle’s boathouse had started to swing toward shore, where it could smash into trees. He had cranked the house by come-a-longs and tied it safely to trees, working from a boat, since his part of the island—called Lower Latsch or Wolf Spider Island–was nearly 12 feet underwater.

Kyle planned that morning to add an extension to the pole, so it would take hold again in the deeper bed. His old sidekick Tim, who also owned a boathouse on Wolf Spider Island, pulled up in his electric car, and the two started toward Tim’s boat. “Be careful!” I said. “Remember the day we almost died together!” They smiled as grandly as D.S. had when he discovered the river had knocked 12 barrels from his house. Back in the winter of 1997, Tim, Kyle, Ernie, Jonah and I had teamed up with six other guys to mount a gin pole at Barbi’s house the old-fashioned, river-rat way. We lay one end of the pole against Barbi’s back deck and the other end on the frozen river, and all of us heaved it up until we held it like Atlas hoisting the Earth above his head. The pole was about 30-feet long and weighed God-only-knew how many tons. We walked the pole toward the boathouse, raising it, none of us slipping on ice. About halfway, our arms buckled. Everyone flinched, and afterward everyone admitted they thought they’d be crushed. But we gathered our river strength. We raised the pole, and as Kyle and Tim headed down-island, it still did its job, holding Barbi’s house firmly in place.

The river dropped below 16 Sunday, April 7. But lo! The yellow barrels from my upstream dock floated loose against my front corner. The dock itself was rammed halfway beneath the house, and the house’s upstream corner edged down into the river, missing a couple barrels. D.S. motor-boated me across the flooded parking lot, and we saw where the dock’s hinges had been ripped out. “The ice floes are mostly gone,” I said. “I can’t figure out what happened.” “I know exactly!” said D.S. “A big tree came down! It’s still under my house!”

We tied a line to the upside-down dock, and D.S. boated the rope to a locust tree near the giant cottonwood and attached a come-a-long. I pried the upside-down dock with my black iron bar while D.S. cranked. The dock slid out from beneath the house easily, knocking out no more barrels. D.S.’s brother pulled up in his boat and said, “I think we can get barrels under your corner with a come-a-long. I saw a guy do it once.”

D.S. volunteered to thrust his hands in the icy water and tie a rope around a barrel. I offered him a towel, he scoffed. “The water temperature’s up to 43 degrees,” said Brother. “Then we should all be in the water, popping barrels that way!” said D.S. I pried up a deck board, and we fed a rope beneath the back deck and through the open space to a deck above us, which was tied in to my upstairs loft. The two brothers knelt at the lower deck’s edge, the big broad river thundering like cataracts in a mountain stream. They pushed the barrel with their hands, aided by the headstrong current. I cranked. We got two barrels in as an emergency measure.

I waded out, the river down to 15.6. The next day, I carried my bike across the flooded lot, and Kyle and Tim were on high ground, unloading vehicles. They smiled as I braced every step in the stomach-high cross-current. “A luxury!” laughed Tim, and then they boarded Tim’s boat to work some more on securing Kyle’s house.

* * *

That Wednesday, I picked up Barbi at the Minneapolis airport, home from Maui, where Jonah and Mara lived at the time. We white-knuckled it back to Winona, driving her car through blinding snow that blew 30 miles-per-hour from the south, the flakes wet, big and heavy, the temp hovering around 32, the snow compacting instantly beneath tires. I dropped Barbi at her house in town and checked on mine–now it was my place that tilted as if jarred by an earthquake, leaning steeply into a dark gusting rain.

Four inches of snow lay crusted across my plank, and I crawled across it, so I would not slip, and I stood at the edge of the downstream dock loaded with wood, which was no longer counter-balanced by the upstream dock. The two-by-sixes that framed the downstream dock were four-inches underwater, and I shoveled sopping snow from it and moved wood to my upstream deck while the entire boathouse swayed and rocked in the howling storm. My goodness, I was a stubborn, frugal Yankee! I could have tossed the wood overboard and righted my house in minutes. But no, there I was in the exact spot where I knew it was good to die, laying down 18-inch logs on the 32-inch deck, shuffling in 14-inches of foot-space beside a current that would have swept me under the house the moment I fell in. I stacked the wood against the outside wall as tightly as the Swedes who used to deliver it. The sky thundered. Lightning flashed. I went inside to call Barbi—the phone was dead. Internet service came through the same line, but for some reason it still worked. I contacted Barbi online to say I was fine, a message she didn’t read until 1:11 A.M.

Wind and snow pelted the outside of my sleeping loft all night, and I dreamt that all the logs of my woodpile floated in water at the edge of a park, and kids were picking them out, burning them in campfires all over the place. A trusted lawyer walked down a hill to me. “Sorry, you have no case,” he said. “All kinds of other interests are coming in and are going to develop all the land around your boathouses.”

Two more inches of heavy, crusty snow lay on my decks and dock at dawn. I shoveled and shoveled, and I carried firewood from my downstream dock up my plank and up wooden steps that led to electrical meters and platform higher than the level of a 100-year flood. The wind kept battering me, would rock the house at more than 60 miles-per-hour that morning. Every step was through icy slush, had to be slow and sure. Keep going, I told myself, and your house won’t tip over.

The sky darkened the way it did when thunderheads lowered themselves completely across a North Dakota landscape. Thunder rumbled, I retreated inside. No! Kyle’s boathouse came on my desktop’s screen, sinking on its side. Kyle’s downstream neighbor had called him because Kyle’s boathouse was losing barrels and leaning: it had hung up on a gin pole, upriver swells evidently knocked out some barrels, and the wind blew out the rest. Other neighbors had filmed the boathouse from a boat after it had crashed down.

Thankfully no one was inside the boathouse—not Kyle who had rebuilt a wall and put windows in my house—nor his wife Julie who’d served on the boathouse board with me—nor two daughters who’d loved Barbi’s early-childhood classes—the family lived in town. Two weeks later, Kyle told me he planned to climb up into trees, anchor come-a-longs and raise his house upright to a sandbar that would emerge with lower water. A neighbor who’d owned a boathouse since the 1970s thought it could be done. “My house got hung up on a pole and sank the same way years ago,” he said. “I wedged two stumps beneath it, and me and other guys lifted it up from there.” But such a rescue required low water, and 12 days after Kyle’s boathouse fell, the river crested a second time at 17 feet. It took 19 more days to drop five feet back to 12, then rose again and remained at 15 feet on June 2, 50 days after the boathouse fell.[18]

The prolonged flood deposited a constant sludge of muddy sediments and foiled any hope of salvage. It may also have dealt a blow to the great blue herons and great egrets at the rookery. Neither species dives deep for food. Both stab fish, crustaceans, frogs etc. in shallow water, sometimes less than a foot deep, and great blues also take small mammals like voles. Egrets feed their young for about 37 days;[19] herons, more than two months.[20] This happens in late April, May, June, early July here. In 2019, the year before the rookery was abandoned, Osprey Marsh and other foraging spots in the backwaters were mostly six feet and more underwater. Did the parent birds of the rookery struggle to feed young? Did chicks die of starvation? Did the herons, egrets and cormorants abandon the rookery after widespread nest failure? Or did they leave for factors known only to themselves? Or because of tremendous noise from a nearby bridge construction. Or because a slough next door had become a super-popular paddling destination? Or due to all of the above?

Nobody knows. Since the 1990s, rookeries on the Upper Miss have been monitored via aerial photography, which avoids disturbance created by ground counts, and does not document nest success or failure.[21] The rookery became active again in 2024—over 50 nests, according to a refuge biologist, who also mentioned a new rookery discovered in 2018 about 30 miles upriver.[22]

Still, the herons and egrets remain absent or scarce in local backwaters. I spent five months in the field in 2024, volunteering to follow red-headed woodpecker nests five miles downriver at Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge. I constantly visited backwater habitat suitable for herons and egrets, saw very few, and no congregations during breeding season. I found the same dearth in other locations, so a fundamental question nags me. Does the Upper Miss’s trend of higher flows and longer floods[23] degrade heron and egret habitat so they struggle to reproduce, as it also thwarts the regeneration of the silver maples, cottonwoods and swamp white oaks that they use for nests?

I ask the same fundamental question of another floodplain species, the red-shouldered hawk, who are state-endangered in Iowa and state-threatened in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I’d documented red-shoulder nests across the river from the boathouses from 1994 to 2013, and I’d often seen red-shoulders catch frogs and crayfish at Osprey Marsh and other backwaters. During the 2019 flood, I paddled into backed-up backwaters and tied up my canoe to trees near a historic nest site, so I wouldn’t make noise while I listened for it. The red-shoulder screamed its bleating cry, an air-shattering call so loud it always makes me feel totally cussed out, unwelcome. But I found no nest in 2019, nor any since, and I wonder how red-shoulders catch frogs and crayfish in water ten-feet deep. They also eat snakes, rodents and small birds, so maybe they don’t need to?

A little farther south, in a 130-mile stretch of the river that’s been professionally monitored for 40 years, the main stem of the Upper Miss has apparently lost all its red-shoulder nests. Scientists led by the super-dedicated Jon Stravers maintained an inventory of red-shoulder territorial activity at 37 sites on the main stem between 1983 and 2017. Since 2018, they have found no evidence of red-shoulders breeding on the main stem. Apparently, the species has vacated the main stem. A few new nests occur in upland forests, and red-shoulders continue to breed in historic sites along tributaries, except for the lower Wisconsin River, where flooding has caused extensive tree mortality. Stravers and his partners suspect long periods of extreme flooding, a steady increase in bald eagle populations, avian flu and tree mortalities might contribute to the sudden loss.[24]

If the thump of floodwaters against boathouse barrels roars a warning for rookeries and red-shoulders, the drone of industrial seed planters in fields that drain into the river wails a terrible truth for the nighthawks and other aerial insectivores I so scarcely see on the Upper Miss these days. Virtually all the industrial corn and most of the soybeans planted on the ridges above the Upper Miss and along its tributaries grow from seeds coated with neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides that are neurotoxins and systemic, designed to be absorbed by the crop plants to protect them from insect damage. Unfortunately, neonics bind to water and move readily with it, and 94% of the toxins leave the plants and leaches into soil.[25] Neonics inevitably reach wetlands, including the Upper Miss, where scientists have detected a 52% decline of burrowing (Hexagenia) mayflies from 2012 to 2019. [26]

This is no small matter to insect-eating birds who have their fueled their migrations and fed their young on the Upper Miss insects for millennia (or to fish who depend upon mayfly nymphs to convert organic detritus into food they consume all year long).[27] Mayflies and other emergent insects are more nutritious than other insect prey[28] and have been linked to fledgling success in insectivorous birds. Scientists estimate that annual mayfly hatches can provide “12 trillion calories of food resources—enough to meet the energetic demands of over 53 million nestling birds from fledgling to hatchling.”[29]

Nymphs of burrowing mayflies “spend up to a year as filter feeders in U-shaped burrows” in the river’s muddy bed. Subadults emerge from the river and molt into winged adults that fly mating dances in immense numbers and die within two days. Hatches of billions once blinded barge lights on the Upper Miss at night, buried cars in streets, and blocked bridges until snow plows removed them.[30] I used to wake to a fishy stench after a hatch and find heaps of mayflies like autumn-leaf piles on my docks, clogging all the space between barrels. Not anymore. I used to turn on a light in the boathouse at night, and bugs of all shapes and sizes would instantly coat my windows, and when Jonah was seven, he marveled that bugs completely plastered the front of Barbi’s Volkswagen bus when they drove beside the river at night. Not anymore either.

Shawn Giblin, Mississippi River Water Quality Specialist with the Wisconsin DNR, considers mayflies a “no nonsense ecological indicator” of the Upper Miss’s health, a kind “canary in the coal mine.” He and other scientists sampled ten of the Upper Miss’s tributaries and ten of its dam sites in 2021-2023 and found neonics in 95% of the sampling locations. He and other scientists also analyzed mayfly tissue from field five stations on the Upper Miss and one along the Illinois River and found two of the neonics most toxic to mayflies—clothianidin and imidacloprid—in 100% and 59% of the samples, along with atrazine in 100%.[31] Other scientists have found that neonics not only kill mayflies, but sublethal concentrations impair the mobility of mayflies, decreasing the nymphs ability to burrow in their burrows.[32] The neurotoxins in neonics may agitate nymphs, cause them to leave their burrows and suffer high predation rates. And the increased flow on the Upper Miss, on the rise since 1980 and particularly since 2011, may create habitat changes that make the river’s bed less suitable for mayflies.[33]

Neonics are hardly the only troublesome pollutant in our streams and waterways. Giblin and fellow scientists found a mixture of numerous synthetic compounds at levels of chronic and acute toxicity throughout Wisconsin.[34] Neonics alone have not caused the steep decline of insects worldwide. Other culprits include other pesticides, habitat loss and degradation, climate change, light pollution, invasive species and disease.[35] But here in the U.S., the EPA has enabled the neonic devastation. It granted treated seeds an exemption from pesticide regulation in 1988 and still does not even track where they are used today,[36] though the European Union started to impose bans on main neonics in 2018.[37]

Neonics have not solely caused the steep decline of birds in North America, where scientists estimate a loss of nearly three billion birds since 1970, or about 29% of their abundance just five decades ago,[38] with insectivores suffering the worst losses.[39] Common nighthawks, for instance, nest in native grasslands which have been reduced by 60% in North America,[40] much of it replaced by the 90 million acres of corn grown in the U.S. each year,[41] one-third of which goes to the “sustainable” biofuel ethanol.[42] To pitch ethanol as “sustainable” denies reality. As Gretchen Newberry says in The Nighthawk’s Evening, “as native grassland patches became smaller and eventually were plowed over entirely, only to turn into vast tracts of row-crop monoculture, biologists noted the loss of grassland plants, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects.”[43]

Nighthawks nested successfully on gravel roofs in cities for decades, including Winona. But gravel roofs have been largely replaced by rubberized roofs that no longer provide camouflage for eggs and may get too hot for eggs to survive.[44] Predators who readily adapt to cities, such as crows and mourning doves, eat chicks,[45] and insects (nighthawk food) have been reduced by “indiscriminate use of pesticides” in general.[46] Though flocks of thousands of nighthawks are still seen migrating along the Upper Miss in the fall and spring, problems on stopover sites and wintering grounds in Central and South America and even fundamental nighthawk natural history in the southern hemisphere aren’t well known.[47]

Scientists just don’t understand all the factors involved in the nighthawk’s troubles. But they’ve honed in on the hazards of neonics to birds and ecosystems in general. Birds can die outright when they eat coated seeds, and the coating itself can fly off as dust during planting and can impair and kill bees and other pollinators.[48] Neonics can disrupt food webs in wetlands, kill and impair aquatic insects and other bugs, prevent and diminish the emergence of butterflies, moths etc., and so rob birds and their young of food.[49] Neonics have been shown to damage birds’ immune and reproductive capabilities, cause sudden weight loss and can reduce their abilities to navigate and migrate.[50]

These neurotoxins are ubiquitous, remember, the most widely used pesticides in the world. They’re used on cotton, winter wheat and other cereal grains. Millions of people who live in cities apply them to their lawns and gardens. They’re used on golf courses, parks and commercial landscapes. They’re detected in tap water and non-organic apples, strawberries, cherries, potatoes, lettuce, grapes etc.[51] At least half of the U.S. population gets exposed to neonics,[52] which have been linked to “neurological, developmental, and reproductive harms, including birth defects of the heart and brain.”[53]

Unfortunately, the EPA has ensured that vital information about neonics remains inaccessible to farmers, scientists and the general public. When it classified treated seeds as an exempt pesticide, it guaranteed their use went unreported. BioScience describes the consequence tactfully: “…although seed treatments have become an increasingly common pest management strategy, they are not fully captured by publicly federal data.”[54] The lack of reporting may seem a convenience to farmers, but the dearth of info decreases their ability to tailor pesticide use to their own “production and conservation goals.”[55] These days seed manufacturers bundle genetically engineered traits and multiple active pesticides into standardized seed packages that restrict farmers’ choices and increase the chances that they end up with pesticides they do not want or need.[56]

The American Bird Conservancy, American Beekeeping Federation, Natural Resource Defense Council, Xerces Society, Center for Food Safety and other well-meaning organizations have piled science and petitions at the EPA’s door. Still, the EPA does not even require that systemic pesticides prove they are effective before being registered as products for sale.[57]

Alternatives and solutions exist. The Province of Quebec started to require corn and soybean farmers to apply for prescriptions—to show a definite need—to use three especially toxic neonics as seed treatments in 2015. Eight years later, only 0.5% of its corn and no soybeans used neonics, and no shortage of the products has occurred. Large-scale row crops have simply not needed them.[58]

Like the parent barn swallows who commiserated on my back dock, the osprey at Osprey Marsh, the cormorant spreading wings in mystic silence, the bald eagles who now nest all along the Upper Miss, and the peregrine falcons who have produced 37 young[59] on a grain elevator opposite the island since 2009, tell us what to do. All suffered population collapses while DDT poisoned their food chains. All have recovered nicely since the EPA banned DDT in 1972.

The ban also greatly reduced humanity’s exposure to carcinogens.[60]

TO BE CONTINUED…

NOTES

[1] Gilman, Rhoda R. “Last Days of the Upper Mississippi Fur Trade.” Minnesota History, Vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter 1970) pp. 132-140.

[2] Chittenden, Hiram Martin. The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Vol. 1. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, First Bison Book Printing: 1986. p. 8.

[3] Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: the Voice of the Ojibway. University of Minnesota Press. 2010. p. 8.

[4] Benton-Banai. The Mishomis Book: the Voice of the Ojibway. pp. 29-34.

[5] Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force. “Northern Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone: 2020 Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Site.” https://www.epa.gov/ms-htf/northern-gulf-mexico-hypoxic-zone.

[6] Maslowski, Michelle. Boathouse Notes. Message to Richie Swanson. January 18, 2021. Email.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Watts, Alan. Tao: the Watercourse Way. Pantheon Books, New York. 1975. p. 90.

[9] Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. New York. p. 91.

[10] Maslowski, Michelle. Boathouse Notes. Message to Richie Swanson. January 18, 2021. Email.

[11] Maslowski, Michelle. Boathouse Thoughts. Message to Richie Swanson. January 17, 2021. Email.

[12] The Wisconsin Society of Ornithology. Sandhill Crane Hunt (Update). Oct. 25, 2021.

[13] The Breeding Birds of Minnesota. Pfannmuller, Lee A., Niemi, Gerald J., Green, Janet C. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London. 2024. P. 158.

[14] Vinck, Gaby. A “conservation success story:” the first Great Midwest Crane Fest to celebrate the recovery of sandhill cranes. Wisconsin Public Radio. October 26, 2022.

[15] Treuer, Anton. The Cultural Toolbox: Traditional Ojibwe Living in the Modern World. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 2021. pp. 47-48.

[16] Goodman, Ronald. Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Theology. Siŋte Gleska University. Mission, South Dakota. 1992. p. 7.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. p. 50.

[20] Guyon, L., J. Sloan, R. Van Essen, and M. Corcoran July 2016. Floodplain Forests and Water Quality in the Upper Mississippi River System. Report to the Audubon Society. Natural Great Rivers Research and Education Center, Lewis and Clark Community College. p. 9.

[21] Deloria, Ella Cara. Waterlily. University of Nebraska Press. 1998. p. 115.

[22] Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in The Complete Works of Mark Twain. Abner Doubleday, January 1, 1960. pp. 60-61.

[23] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press. 2013. p. 3.

[24] Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: a history. Viking Press 1983. p. 137.

[25] Ibid. p. 147.

[26] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press 2013. p. 32.

[27] Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: a history. Viking Press 1983. p. 148.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press 2013. p. 36.

[30] Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: a history. Viking Press 1983. p. 137.

[31] Ibid. p. 199.

[32] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press 2013. p. 125.

[33] Scheer, Robert. How the United States got involved in the United States. The Fund for the Republic Inc. p. 40.

[34] Appy, Christian G. American Reckoning: the Vietnam War and our National Identity. Viking Penguin 2015. p. 24.

[35] Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. First Vintage Books Edition August 1973. p. 569-570.

[36] Brown, M. B. and C. R. Brown (2020). Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (P. G. Rodewald, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.barswa.01.

[37] Gundersen, Jon. Ott, Ellen. Message to Richie Swanson. Email. March 26, 2024.

NOTES, SECOND SEQUENCE

[1] Aldridge, Robert C. First Strike! The Pentagon’s Strategy for Nuclear War. South End Press. Boston, MA. 1983. pp. 13-25.

[2] Yedlin, Barbara W. Letter to Richie Swanson. Undated.

[3] Yedlin, Barbara W. Letter to Richie Swanson. December 9, 1986.

[4] Pfannmuller et. al. The Breeding Birds of Minnesota. P. 218.

[5] Robbins, Jr., Samuel D. Wisconsin Birdlife: Population & Distribution Past & Present. The University of Wisconsin Press. 1991. P. 134

[6] McCrimmon Jr., D. A., J. C. Ogden, G. T. Bancroft, A. Martínez-Vilalta, A. Motis, G. M. Kirwan, and P. F. D. Boesman 2020. Great Egret (Ardea alba), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.greegr.01

[7] Pfannmuller et. al. The Breeding Birds of Minnesota. P. 218.

[8] McCrimmon Jr., et. al. 2020. Great Egret.

[9] Pfannmuller et. al. The Breeding Birds of Minnesota. P. 206.

[10] Dorr, B. S., J. J. Hatch, and D. V. Weseloh 2021. Double-crested Cormorant (Nannopterum auritum), version 1.1. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.doccor.01.

[11] Pfannmuller et. al. The Breeding Birds of Minnesota. P. 206.

[12] Dorr et. al. 2021. Double-crested Cormorant.

[13] Pfannmuller et. al. The Breeding Birds of Minnesota. P. 208.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Upholt, Boyce. The Great River: the making & unmaking of the Mississippi. W.W. Norton & Company. 2024. P. 138.

[16] Anfinson, John O. The River We Have Wrought. University of Minnesota Press. 2003. P. 145-173.

[17] Stefanski, Mary. Winona District Manager—Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge. Message to Richie Swanson, June 1, 2020. Email.

[18] Swanson, Richie. Unpublished manuscript. Flood Journal 2019.

[19] McCrimmon Jr., et. al. 2020. Great Egret.

[20] Vennesland, R. G. and R. W. Butler 2020) Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.grbher3.01.

[21] Anderson, Brie L. 2015. Accuracy and Precision of Using Aerial Photography to Monitor Great Blue Heron Colonies on the Upper Mississippi River Wildlife and Fish Refuge. Volume 18, Papers in Resource Analysis. 10 pp. Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota Central Services Press. Winona, MN.

[22] Froehly, Jennifer. Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge. Messages to Richie Swanson, November 26, 2024. December 18, 2024. Email.

[23] Upper Mississippi River Basin Association. How Clean Is the River? August 2023. Appendix, P. 21.

[24] Stravers, Jon, Kathleeen Carlyle, and Kate Buss. 2023. Report on Red-shouldered Hawk observations within the Effigy Mounds/Yellow River Forest and the Lower Wisconsin River Bird Conservation Areas – year 2023.

[25] Natural Resource Defense Council (May 2024.) Neonics: The Toxic Truth: Pesticides Kill Bees, Pollute Water, And Threaten Our Health. https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/neonics-toxic-truth-fs.pdf.

[26] Stepanian, P., S. Entrekin, C. Wainwright, D. Mirkovic, J. Tank, and J. Kelly. 2020. Declines in an abundant aquatic insect, the burrowing mayfly, across major North American waterways. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(6):2987–2992.

[27] Fremling, Calvin R. Immortal River: the Upper Mississippi in Ancient and Modern Times. The University of Wisconsin Press. 2005. P. 296.

[28] Schmidt, Travis. Effects of Neonicotinoids on Aquatic Insects: Lab and Field Studies. (Conference Presentation). Wisconsin Neonics Forum. October 30,2024. Madison, Wisconsin.

[29] Stepanian et. al. Ibid. P. 2989.

[30] Ibid. P. 291-297

[31] Giblin, Shawn. Investigation of Declines of Mayfly Populations on the Upper Mississippi River (Conference Presentation). Wisconsin Neonics Forum. October 30,2024. Madison, Wisconsin.

[32] Bartlett, Adrienne J., Hedges, Amanda M., Intini, Kyna D., Brown, Lisa R., Maisonneuve, France J., Robinson, Stacey A., Gillis, Patricia L., de Solla, Shane R. Lethal and sublethal toxicity of neonicotinoid and butenolide insecticides to the mayfly, Hexagenia spp. Environmental Pollution 238 (2018). P. 63-75.

[33] Giblin, Ibid.

[34] Giblin, Ibid.

[35]Forister, M. L., E. M. Pelton, and S. H. Black (2019). Declines in insect abundance and diversity: We know enough to act now. Conservation Science and Practice 2019, 1:e80.

[36] Xerces Society. Protecting Aquatic Ecosystems: Insecticide Seed Treatments Threaten Midwestern Wetlands.  2021. P. 1-5.

[37]Kern 2023, Ibid p. 86.

[38] Rosenberg, Kenneth V., Dokter, Adriaan M., Blancher, Peter J., Sauer, John R., Smith, Adam C., Smith, Paul A., Stanton, Jessica C. Decline of North American avifauna. Science, Sept. 2019, Vol. 366, Issue 6461. pp. 120-124.

[39] Tallamy, D.W., Shriver, W.G., 2021. Are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related? Ornithological Applications 123, duaa059. https://doi.org/10.1093/ornithapp/duaa059.

[40] https://www.audubon.org/our-work/prairies-and-forests/grasslands-report. Accessed 12-15-2024.

[41] Marzluff, John M. In Search of Meadowlarks. Yale University Press. 2020. P. 48.

[42] Dykman, Sara. Bicycling with Butterflies. Timber Press, Inc. 2021. P. 112.

[43] Newberry, Gretchen N. The Nighthawk’s Evening: Notes of a Field Biologist. Oregon State University Press. 2021. P. 28.

[44] Brigham, R. M., J. Ng, R. G. Poulin, and S. D. Grindal (2020). Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.comnig.01.

[45] Newberry, Ibid. P. 59-60.

[46] Brigham, et. al. Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] American Bird Conservancy. Birds & Neonic Coated Seeds: the Hidden Costs of High-risk Pesticides. Fact Sheet.

[49] Kern, Hardy. American Bird Conservancy. Messages to Richie Swanson, October 27-30, 2023. Email.

[50] Kern, Hardy. Mineau, Dr. Pierre. Neonicotinoid Insecticides: Failing to come to grips with a predictable environmental disaster. 2023 American Bird Conservancy report. P. 26-28.

[51] Sass, Jennifer. Neonic Pesticides Pose Serious Risk to Kids. The Defender: Children’s Health Defense News and Views. January 12, 2021.

[52] Maia Ospina et. al. Exposure to Neonicotinoid Insecticides in the U.S. General Population: Data from the 2015-2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Environmental Resources (Sept. 2019.), https://bit.ly/3Ou035i.

[53] Natural Resource Defense Council. Ibid.

[54] Hitaj, Claudia J., Smith, David J., Code, Aimee, Wechsler, Seth, Esker, Paul D., and Douglas, Margaret R. Sowing Uncertainty: What We Do and Don’t Know about the Planting of Pesticide-treated Seed. BioScience. May 2020. Vol. 70 No. 5. P. 401.

[55] Ibid. P. 390.

[56] Ibid. P. 401.

[57] Kern, Mineau 2023, Ibid. 88-90.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Raptor Resource Project 2024 Monitoring Report. P. 14.

[60] Wurst, Charles F. DDT Wars: Rescuing Our National Bird, Preventing Cancer, and Creating the Environmental Defense Fund. Oxford University Press. 2015. P.184-186.