Sand

The thing about sand is that it’s everywhere. It crawls under fingernails, into hair, in between teeth. Sand finds its way into every meal. It sticks to the rims of water bottles. In the mornings, it slinks into the pools of sunscreen we pour into our open palms, then travels over faces and shoulders and knees. At night, sand ducks into the corners of our tents and never leaves.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are troubled by sand, too. On a stretch of the Upper Mississippi just south of Minneapolis, we canoe by a hydrographic survey boat used by the Corps. It’s a black and white vessel, with thin metal arms on either side that drop down into the water, taking measurements of the river’s bottom. Another time, we see one of their dredging boats, slowly scraping away to clear the channel of sediment.

On a normal day, the mighty alluvial river carries an average 400 million tons of silt, sand, gravel, and clay downstream. In June 2019, intense flooding brought even more sediment than usual into the mix. The Corps are constantly working to fulfill their constitutional mandate to keep the nine-foot channel clear, so that barge traffic can continue unabated.

The barges provoke a kind of fearful awe: the industrial sublime. From a safe distance, we watch them churn the water as they pass by, transporting goods up and down the channel. Sometimes we try to guess at what’s inside. Grain is usually a good bet. Coal is an easy one; it’s left uncovered, exposed to the elements. Oil, chemicals, and liquid fertilizer are contained in pipes and barrels. We pass one carrying long, glistening metal blades, laid flat and packed side by side. They look like fangs taken from the mouth of a giant animal. We can’t figure out what they could be. Finally someone hits on it: “Wind turbines!”

Another day, out of curiosity, we try contacting the captain of one of the tugboats lumbering down the river near us. We’re near Lock and Dam 8, near Genoa, Wisconsin. Joe calls on the radio: “Captain, what’s your cargo?” The captain is not much of a talker. Through the crackly radio waves, he tells us plainly: “Salt.” The twang in his voice tells us he’s from down south. The salt’s going up river, where it will likely be stored until winter, mixed with sand, then spread over the icy roads of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

That’s what it’s like living on the Mississippi. Things that you don’t expect to find there keep showing up.

Buoy

My first day on the river, before launching near Winona, Minnesota, I receive a quick lesson in river navigation. Jaunty red buoys are a familiar sight, called “nuns” because of their pointy tops that look like habits. The green buoys, which have flat tops, have the more perfunctory nickname of “cans.” The key phrase to remember, I’m told, is “red, right, returning.” When the nuns are on your right side, it means you are headed upriver, returning to the headwaters. Together, these navigational buoys form the boundary lines demarcating either side of the 9 foot channel.

Or at least that’s the idea. But, as it turns out, the Corps has to constantly wrangle the buoys to keep them in place. When it floods, they can cut loose entirely, drifting and bobbing their way into places where they shouldn’t be. On one of the islands where we camp near Prairie Du Rocher, Illinois, we find a green can that has run aground and gotten stuck in a pile of driftwood. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be part of a shelter for a snapping turtle.

While we’re camping, we use the rusty green can as a navigational marker, too, although it provides a different kind of direction than originally intended. For us, it becomes a marker that we’re getting close to the “bathroom”—the large hole in the ground with a portable plastic toilet seat teetering on top.

Another time, we’re camping on Richmond Island in Wisconsin and have a rare free afternoon with no activities planned. About half the group stays on the island, while the rest of us go out to explore. We canoe across the main channel until we find an opening onto some side channels, then make our way through the brackish waters, careful to avoid fallen logs or large stones poking up through the water. At the dead end of one of the side channels, we find a red buoy stuck in the low-hanging branches of a silver maple tree. “A rogue nun!” we joke. The small dents and scratches covering the nun’s body suggest a rough escape from her former life of drudgery.

It must feel like she has wandered into an entirely different waterway. The mile-wide main channel, where she came from, is broad, straight, and unobstructed. The lock and dam system that controls the Upper Mississippi essentially cuts the flow of water up into a series of interconnected pools. At times, it can feel more like moving through a lake than a river. But in side channels like these, narrow streams braid together and come apart in unpredictable patterns. A thick layer of duckweed swirls over the surface of the water, casting a warm green glow into the surrounding humid air. Not far away, clumps of wild rice shoot up, waving in the breeze. In another side channel, we find a beaver lodge carefully constructed from sticks. Pausing near the rogue nun, we take our oars out of the water, rest them on our laps, and let the canoe float for a while. Insects buzz thick in the air.

That’s when we notice a grayish object next to our boat. It is triangular and completely covered in twigs, leaves, and bits of vegetation. It looks like stone, but that wouldn’t make much sense floating on top of the water. As we get closer, we realize that it’s a piece of Styrofoam. Small aquatic plants have taken root in it, claiming the strange material as their own.

Pearl

Confluence: “An act or process of merging.” It’s a word you hear a lot in relation to the Mississippi, the great artery that drains so much of the North American watershed into the ocean. But things that come into the river do not merge into a singular, stable entity. Some dissolve or get eaten. Others fall to the bottom and settle into a new home. Some carry on or adapt. Others transform so much that they become unrecognizable.

In Wisconsin, at the Genoa National Fish Hatchery run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services, we learn about efforts to restore endangered freshwater mussels, such as the Higgins’ eye pearlymussel. This was one of the species native to the Upper Mississippi that was prized by settler colonialists around the turn of the twentieth century, who heavily harvested the bivalves to make mother-of-pearl buttons and pins. Higgins’ eyes thrive in free-flowing, deep, clean water. The constant dredging, plus the lock and dam system, have made it difficult for the mussels to bed, to reproduce, and to grow. And because mussels are filter-feeders, they are especially sensitive to the municipal, industrial, and agriculture runoff that pollutes the river. Ironically, if their numbers were greater, mussels could help to reverse these exact processes that make it impossible for them to thrive. Not only do they clean water of chemicals and heavy metals, but they help to maintain the integrity of the riverbed by forming a kind of coral system, which in turn supports microorganisms that feed fish, otters, turtles, and other creatures.

As we canoe down the river, I think about the ghosts of these past ecosystems. I think about a future where they are thriving. I think about how, when a grain of sand or other rogue element makes its way inside the shell of a freshwater mussel, the mollusk goes into defense mode. It starts to coat the intruder with a mineral-rich, iridescent liquid called nacre. Layer upon layer of nacre is what forms a pearl.

Dune

The sand dredged by the Corps gets dumped onto artificial islands, where we camp at night. One of the islands where we stop, somewhere in between Minnesota and Wisconsin, is piled so high and so steep with fresh sand that it’s become a dune. After we set up our tents for the night and have dinner, we scramble up the dune. Our bodies are tired from a long day of rowing, and it feels good to sit once we’ve reached the top. We have a bird’s-eye view of the river valley, which is not-quite-land and not-quite-water. The braided channels and small ponds surrounding us are bracketed by sandstone bluffs, characteristic of the Driftless Area.

It’s beautiful, especially at dusk, with the sky awash in pinks and purples. But the sand on this island should not be here. They need this sand in Louisiana. There, land is disappearing at a rate of nearly 11,000 acres per year, or roughly a football field every hour. The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has submitted a proposal to the Corps to divert the flow of the Mississippi, in order to reconnect the river with the marshes and allow more sediment to accumulate. They claim it’s the best chance of preventing additional coastal erosion and rebuilding the wetlands.

Others aren’t so sure. The Gulf Coast Resource Coalition argues that this plan will have devastating effects on fisheries and tourism. “Dredge, Don’t Divert” has become their rallying cry. Instead of allowing the flow of freshwater from the river into the marshes, which would disrupt the salinity of the water, they want to bring in dredged sand from upriver to fill in the areas of the delta that are vanishing. They want the sand, too—but only if they can control where it goes. 

Remeander

Among the things I bring with me as a Traveler on the River Journey are a pair of green rubber wading boots from Japan. I initially bought them in preparation for a different fieldwork trip, to visit the Kushiro River in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. The river runs through the Kushiro-Shitsugen National Park, one of the largest wetland areas in Japan.

Starting in the early 1980s, the Kushiro, like so many waterways, was straightened out. Levees were put in place to prevent flooding in the nearby farmlands. Similar to the Mississippi, once the Kushiro River was channelized, unintended consequences quickly followed: the wetlands started to dry up. Nutrient and sediment loads were no longer being filtered through the marshes, so populations of native fish and bird species started to decline as their downstream habitats disappeared or became unlivable.

One of the most disturbing losses was the decline of the tancho, the graceful red-crowned crane, an auspicious symbol of wisdom and longevity in Japanese art and literature and a sacred god for the Indigenous Ainu people. This wasn’t the first time that the tancho had seen a devastating decline. Once found all over the archipelago, by the early twentieth century, the non-migratory population of tancho was thought to have gone extinct in Japan, due to overhunting and habitat loss. 11Yoshiyuki Masatomi and Yoshiyuki Masatomi, “Ecology of the Red-crowned Crane and Conservation Activities in Japan,” in Biodiversity Conservation Using Umbrella Species: Blakiston’s Fish Owl and the Red-Crowned Crane, edited by Futoshi Nakamura (Springer: Singapore, 2018). Then, in the 1920s, a group of around twenty birds was found living in the Kushiro marshlands. The small population held on until the 1950s, when the cranes and their habitat were declared a “special natural monument” of Japan and conservation efforts were put in place. Nearby farmers were enlisted to feed the cranes, using corn subsidized by the government. The plan worked; the population of tancho grew to over 1,000.

When I first visited Hokkaido, I remember being struck by how different the landscape was from mainland Japan, where my father is from, and how similar it was to the Midwest, where he and my mother live now. I grew up near the Wabash River—a tributary to the Ohio River, which meets the Mississippi just south of St. Louis. The resemblances between Hokkaido and the Midwestern United States are intentional; when the Japanese state colonized Hokkaido in 1869, they followed settler colonial tactics that they learned on visits to the United States. They dispossessed Indigenous Ainu communities of their land and hired American experts in agriculture, engineering, and botany to form the Sapporo Agricultural College. Instead of crops like rice and sweet potato, which are grown in other parts of Japan, Hokkaido became known for milk, cheese, and corn. I’m surprised to find myself thinking of this history so often during my time on the Upper Mississippi. But it’s because they are the same settler colonial landscapes, recreated by the same violent, extractive processes. As we leave the Driftless region and get closer to the Quad Cities, it’s all cornfields and dairy farms, stretching out as far as the eye can see.

In Kushiro, we met with officials from the Ministry of Environment. They were trying to undo some of the damage they had done to the wetlands, by “remeandering” the river—the first project of its kind in Asia. Following new legislation passed in 2003, the government had restored a back channel that had been cut off and reconnected it to the main channel. The officials told us that they were on the way to recreating floodplain conditions and restoring the wetlands.22 Futoshi Nakamura et al., “The Significance of Meander Restoration for the Hydrogeomorphology and Recovery of Wetland Organisms in the Kushiro River, a Lowland River in Japan,” Restoration Ecology 22, 4 (2014): 544-554. Crane populations were holding steady, but they remained critically endangered. Even with the remeandering efforts, their overall habitat was still shrinking, due to continued deforestation and urban development. The cattle and corn farmers still came out every day to throw handfuls of grain into the fields for them to eat.

What does it mean to belong in or to a river system like the Kushiro, or the Mississippi? Processes of settler colonialism, hydrologic engineering, resource extraction, and industrial agriculture have irrevocably changed the course and character of these rivers—hemming them in on all sides, directing where and how they flow, enabling certain forms of life while rendering others precarious or impossible. In places layered with violent histories of dispossession, relocation, and contamination, it’s not always clear what counts as a rogue element.

Postscript

At the very start of the trip, before I even stepped into a canoe, I came to Wita Tanka, or Pike Island, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers. This area, known as Bdote, is sacred land for the Dakota people: the place where the world began. It is also a place of great suffering, where Dakota people were rounded up and held in a concentration camp by U.S. military forces at Fort Snelling during the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, before being forcibly removed from Minnesota.

That day when we visited, the ground was still soft from the water that inundated the island earlier in the year. Some sections were covered in new growth, while other areas remained thick with mud, the roots of upturned, water-logged trees hanging in the air. I was still getting to know everyone who was making the journey. As we chatted and made our way along the trail, we stopped to look at graffiti and to collect bits of trash that had washed ashore.

Someone noticed a peculiar piece of wood resting along the shoreline. Entirely stripped of bark, it looked like an oversized, naked coconut. Upon closer inspection, the wood was covered in long, thin gnash marks, making it rough and slightly damp to the touch. There was no doubt about it: It was the work of a beaver. There was more evidence of their work nearby—tree trunks gnawed at a height of two to three feet from the ground.

It’s not uncommon to find felled logs that have been chewed to a point on one end in the area. But there was something unusual about this particular piece of wood. It was pointed on both ends. Why would a beaver create something like that? “It’s a sculpture,” someone declared. We all laughed at the thought. But why couldn’t a beaver be an artist? I picked up the piece of wood and cradled it in the crook of my arm. The trash we collected that day got thrown away once we returned to the Twin Cities. But I kept the sculpture as a companion for the rest of the trip. We named her “The Wild.”

As I write these words, The Wild sits near me on a shelf in my living room in Western Pennsylvania. Who knew that the time we spent together on the Mississippi River would seem so impossible just a few months later? All of that close contact, in canoes and tents and around campfires. All of those hours spent together: Eating, sleeping, talking, cooking, sloshing, carrying, observing, singing, rowing.

Looking back, I’m nostalgic not only for the specific people and places, but the feeling of safety in being together, in close proximity with other human bodies. Imagine what it would have been like to wear masks that whole time—how grimy they would have gotten, with rain and sweat and sand. I suppose we could have rinsed them out every night in the river, then hung them up on branches to dry, hoping they would not blow away by morning.

COVID-19 is a rogue element. Jumping from body to body in tiny droplets of spit, the virus has completely disrupted normal patterns of life. Who knows what it will be like when the dust settles? People want to know: “Are handshakes a thing of the past?” “What will it be like to kiss someone unfamiliar?” “Can I pet this dog?” All of these are the same question: “How do I trust the world again?” And within that, there’s another one: “How do I trust that which is outside of myself?”

How did we ever? Our bodies have always been porous—open to germs, to contaminants, to allergens, to parasites. This porosity is something that I have thought about a lot in my research, mostly in the context of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster. Like the virus, radioactive contaminants are invisible. In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear explosions in Japan, the threat of radiation made people afraid of everyday objects that they had taken for granted before. The fruits, vegetables, and fish in the grocery store were suddenly threatening sponges for cesium in the soil. Even the air outside became suspect; people started to dry their laundry indoors, just in case.

In the midst of a global pandemic, openness to the world can feel like a weakness. For those in power—the state, the wealthy, the corporate giants—uncertainty is threatening. This anxiety has been made all the more apparent in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the United States, after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, not too far from the sacred confluence of waters at Bdote. These recent events remind us once again that the goal of those in power is maintenance of the status quo: the continuous flow of capital and the preservation of white supremacy. It is those in power who are clamoring for a return to normalcy. It is the same with the Mississippi River: retain the channel at its current depth of nine feet. Make sure the barges can keep moving their goods. Do not rock the boat.

What if some rogue elements offer other possibilities, more just—and more joyful—ways of coexisting? The writer Rebecca Solnit, in A Paradise Built in Hell, contends that although our narratives of disasters tend to emphasize moments of chaos and grief, many people also express an exaggerated sense of well-being, meaningfulness, and connection in the trying times that follow a catastrophe. Solnit’s point is not to romanticize disasters, but to understand how moments of disorder might allow us to see potentialities that are already there. “The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay,” she writes. “If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”33 Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 7. Or, as the poet Masahide Mizuta, a disciple of the haiku master Basho, put it, after a devastating fire in 1688 that destroyed his home:44In Lucien Stryk, ed., Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, ed. and trans. Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto (New York: Grove Press, 1995).

Barn’s burnt down –
now
I can see the moon

Towards the end of my month on the river, after carrying The Wild with me the entire way, I finally saw a beaver in the flesh. We had been seeing signs of them ever since we reached the St. Louis area and got past the lock and dams, where the river starts to flow more freely. The islands around there, thick with willow trees, are a beaver paradise. All night long, we heard them slapping their stiff tails on the surface of the water, making their disdain for our presence known. Then, late one night, we were sitting on the shore when we noticed something small bobbing out in the water, maybe ten feet away. It was the head of a beaver. He was floating on his back, enjoying the moonlight.