Last night the stars were out, the air cool, and the lights from the Lansing (Iowa) bridge were聽reflected on the tranquil surface of the river as we camped about . 聽The students have been studying for their first exam, sitting around a campfire on the sandy beach, poring over the readings and working together to learn the material. 聽Having crammed as much in as they could for the聽evening, they transitioned to guitar and singing, and it felt聽like the end of a good day. 聽The strains of their improvised “Campfire Blues” (and accompanying laughter) lulled the rest of us聽to sleep.
We began yesterday at a very muddy landing on the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin, clambering up the bank to visit the Genoa National Fish Hatchery, where they raise tens of thousands of trout, sturgeon, walleye, and now fresh water mussels. 聽It is an elaborate operation, all made necessary by overfishing and radical alterations of the river and floodplain. 聽But like a fish-producing factory, they crank out fish to restock rivers and lakes all over the country. 聽This is also the site of the Massacre of Bad Axe, where Chief Blackhawk was finally defeated and hundreds of Sauk Indians died. 聽We have certainly changed this land, with great energy, emptying if of people, fish, mussels, and old growth forests, and replacing them with new settlers, cities, corn fields, and power plants. 聽The restless energy of the European settlers is present everywhere.
In contrast, at the end of a long day of paddling we are nothing if not keenly aware of the energy we have expended. Students sprawl on the sand, arms aching, and stomachs growling.
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The motor boats speed by us and huge barges lumber past carrying thousands of tons of cargo, but paddling as hard as we can we travel the river at no more than聽four聽miles an聽hour. 聽But it is a satisfying feeling to know you have put in a good hard day鈥檚 work, and it makes us think about how much energy we use back home.
We have become so used to living in a world of fossil-fuel powered labor-saving devices that we have largely lost touch with our own bodies and what they are for. 聽On the trip we are healthy, happy, sleeping well, and having a minimal impact on the world around us. 聽With our solar panels to power these laptops and cell phones, a canoe, paddle, and locally grown fresh food, we are good to go (with some exceptions). 聽We in general consume very little electricity, but still when we get to a source of shore power, the available outlets are swarmed with electronic devices of all sorts, hungrily drinking up the free flow of electrons.
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Our solar panels can power us most days, but only when the sun shines and we have time to set everything up.
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Back home we struggle to find time to get exercise, bounce from one diet to the next, experience ennui, and seek numerous distractions. 聽It raises the question of what exactly we are getting from all this energy we use. 聽Certainly we want some help and machines to avoid extreme or dangerous labor, but beyond that we need to embrace the value, the joy, the deep satisfaction of a good day鈥檚 work accomplished with our bodies and hands.
And power production is plainly evident along the river. 聽The Dairyland Power Genoa # 3 coal-fired power plant, a towering facility on the river, is one of the 29 located in the Upper River. 聽It includes one small nuclear reactor built in the 1960s, and shut down in 1987. 聽It is being slowly dismantled, with some of the low-level waste being shipped off to a storage site in South Carolina. 聽The high-level waste is still stored on site, still waiting a national decision on where to store these long-lived toxins. 聽The answer so far has been NIMBY.
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We have passed one nuclear plant so far, at Prairie Island, venturing close enough to be caught in the outflow from the power plant, where the water temperature spiked briefly. 聽As we paddled by,聽a聽security guard came out and got on the megaphone to tell聽us to move along, as we were too close to the shore and their security zone. 聽The plants constitute a major presence along the river, located in areas with little political clout, such as聽the Prairie Island Indian Community. 聽One needs a great faith in the engineers that this pile of radioactive material, located in the upper reaches of the largest river in North America, will not at some point come spilling south. 聽The implications of such an event are hard to imagine, but still somehow during the 1970s we saw fit to locate all these nuclear power plants along rivers from which millions of people draw their drinking water. 聽For the Dakota and Mdewaketon on Prairie Island the plants are just another in the long line of affronts their people have suffered, and they have found health and environmental problems that appear to be linked to the presence of the plant. 聽There are聽21 nuclear power plants in the Mississippi River watershed, five of them located on the main stem itself, using the steady water supply for steam and the huge heat capacity of the water to cool the steam down. 聽In addition to the power plants, we see the steady flow of coal and crude oil shipped by rail, barge, and pipeline along the river, and聽several聽oil refineries as well. 聽While traveling in Egypt I was struck by the centrality of water to their economy; 聽here the nexus between water and power聽generation is聽at the heart of our way of life.
We have such a great restlessness, this hunger for power, and need to tinker with the world. 聽Never content just to leave things be, humans need to arrange the world around them, often with mixed results. 聽We dam the rivers, kill off the fish, and then busily proceed to go about producing new ones. 聽Not content to spend a solid day of working with our hands, we invent steam engines, and drive cars, but are left with this vague sense of聽dissatisfaction. 聽We can鈥檛 seem to learn that lesson from the river, which just diligently does its work of erosion, transport, and deposition; its slow, relentless flowing, driven endlessly by the rain falling on the land.