Crossing the Driftless by Lynne Diebel

Author:Lynne Diebel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-299-30293-1
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2014-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

In Their Own Pool

July the first. The day dawns cloudless and cool, and our tailwind still sleeps. Mostly, anyway. On the water by six, and into Lock & Dam 8 without a hitch, we’re glad to be ahead of the big tow that’s lumbering toward the lock from upriver. As we drop the eleven feet to the level of Pool 9, Bob asks the sleepy lockmaster about the best route through the backwater maze to Harpers Ferry, Iowa, some miles downstream of the dam. He shakes his head, tells us he’s not sure where Harpers Ferry is, and apologetically explains, “On the river, pretty much everyone stays in their own pool.”

And it turns out that he is right. A FWS study done in 2006 on boating habits in Pools 4 through 9 revealed that 87 percent of recreational boaters do stay in the pool into which they launch. It’s the barge tows, the tournament fishermen, and the long-distance travelers in canoes and kayaks that lock through. Navigational pools are separated from each other by dams almost as effectively as natural lakes are by land, and the experience of being on a lake that some seek, combined with the extra effort required to lock through because of barge traffic, no doubt persuade many boaters to stay put.

Of course, not everyone stays in one pool. And for a certain breed, the lure of traveling the Mississippi under one’s own power is strong. Written accounts of these adventures abound, and we’ve met a few people who made the journey. In the summer of 1936, soon after reading Eric Sevareid’s iconic Canoeing with the Cree and less than a month after the locks at Trempealeau and Fountain City were first put into operation, my Uncle Harry and his cousin Jim canoed the Mississippi from Jim’s home in Winona, Minnesota, down to Hannibal, Missouri. My uncle told me with a wry smile that they didn’t know they could lock through and portaged those first two dams. In Hannibal, they sold their canoe and camping gear and used the proceeds to take the train to Chicago and then home. Not the whole length of the big river, by any means, but an exciting summer adventure for a couple of teenagers. In 1975, Denny Caneff, now director of the River Alliance of Wisconsin, canoed with a friend the whole length of the river, from Lake Itasca, the Mississippi’s northern Minnesota source, to the Gulf of Mexico. Caneff, who turned twenty-one on the trip, recalls the awe he felt knowing he was floating on the water that drains off almost half the land in the lower forty-eight states. John Sullivan, the water scientist and long-distance canoeist who lives in La Crosse, paddled the length of the river in two stages, from the headwaters to La Crosse in the spring of one year and from Lock & Dam 9 to the Gulf in the fall of the following year. “I did this last trip to make it to an

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