Driftless | Part Two - Writer and Poet Rick Jebb Author Mexican Sunset

Dare to Tread Near the Divine

September 13, 2023

A Time to Remember

September 13, 2023

Driftless | Part Two
As Seen In: Ekstasis Magazine

T y Rick Jebb

Late in the summer of 1970, I propose a trip to travel to the northwest corner of Illinois, to visit my great uncle in Galena, and paddle the length of the Upper Iowa River. Of the three friends I invite, only one is allowed to go: Pete Willson, or Wils. He has been a friend since I moved to Hinsdale in third grade. We have the same birthday, only he’s a year older, and despite the fact that he is fifteen, he is already starting to go bald in the front where his red hair hardly grows.

Within a few days, we’re on the move. The train ride to Dubuque is over three hours. Out of the train’s windows we see farms, wooded areas, small towns and lazy rivers. And before we know it, the welcoming hills of the Galena countryside roll into view. Soon we will be on a river.

I had recently learned that some called it the Oneida Flow in reverence to descendants of prehistoric nomadic tribes who once inhabited its valley. The river ran through an ancient limestone canyon, carved by a deluge when an ice dam breaks—when a lake is released from inside a glacier.

Our train finally arrives at the station in Dubuque, Iowa. We step off into our eagerness, greeted by the warm summer air and my great uncle’s butler, Wallace. “Welcome Master Ricky.” He shakes my hand and turns to Pete. “And Master Peter I presume?” Wallace grabs our bags.

Walking toward the car I whisper to Pete, “you’ve just entered a time-warp.” We get into a black Cadillac that tomorrow will transport us through the countryside to our four day canoe trip on the Upper Iowa River—a river I had read so much about but not yet experienced.

The drive to Galena gives us a taste of the majestic scenery of the driftless area. Soon we pull into a gravel driveway that wraps behind a restored Federalist period home to its basement-level garage. Inside, Wallace escorts us past rooms filled with game tables and equipment for hiking and fishing: tents, packs and poles; and that moist musty smell that I remember moving through limestone caves. We climb steep wooden steps to the main level, then walk out onto a black and white checkerboard floor in the center of an impressive main hallway, a second foyer. Immediately to our left is a wide opening to a comfortable living-room-office. There, in the corner, framed by two large windows, sits my great uncle behind a large walnut desk poring over his handwritten ledgers. Elvish and bent over, as we step into the room he looks up, past his reading glasses. “Glad you could make it,” he says. Between tall velvet curtains, sunlight streams through the windows illuminating dust particles moving through air.

He is a small man, about five foot six, with a warm smile and a good strong laugh. A visionary, some say. And to me, a good friend and mentor despite our fifty-three year age difference.

Robert Buehler is Galena’s Mayor, a champion of central planning and thoughtful historic preservation, hoping to restore his iconic town. He is no Communist, just a rich kid who likes to tinker with organizations—things like businesses, factories, towns and charities. An outdoorsman.

He stands, then steps from behind his desk to greet me with a hearty handshake. “Good to see you Ricky.”

“Yeah, thanks for having us Unc. This is my friend Pete Willson.”

“Pleased to meet you Mr. Buehler.”

“Unc, you can call me Unc, everyone does.”

“Unc,” says Pete. “You can call me Wils…” We all laugh.

The bell rings promptly at 6:00 pm, Pete and I gather with my great uncle in the formal dining room.

Wils and I seem underdressed. Mayor Robert Buehler is wearing his typical dark blue blazer, grey flannel slacks, white shirt and maroon tie. He is a bit disheveled as usual. I sit with better posture than back home, where, by distorted comparison to my more affluent friends and neighbors, I felt poor—living with three siblings and a single mom in a small house, before John had come into our lives.

The dinner conversation is stilted at first. But Unc’s curiosity about our trip plans, and Pete’s descriptions of his experience in the woods in response to Unc’s questions warms things up. Pete had spent his summers fishing lakes in northern Wisconsin. Unc declares the out-of-doors is where young men find themselves. He had been big into scouting.

Then Pete asks him, “what brought you here Mr. Buehler?” And the polarity in the room shifts. In the silent brevity that follows, my mind drifts to previous trips, the lure of the countryside, the escape from my regular existence. There was something magical about this place, I had felt it before.

Judith Pavón Sayrach

I t was a feeling I had from the very first time I visited,” he says. “There was something about this place. I just had to come back,” he chuckles… clears his throat, “It reminded me of England’s Lake District, the rolling terrain, deep skies, stacked stone walls and hedgerows, brick, gravel and cobblestone roads. But it was so much more—it felt like home.”

“The history of the town is remarkable,” he says. “I wanted to preserve it, to learn from it,” he pauses. Inside his faraway look, I imagine him thinking about some distant village on a lake in the Scottish Highlands, or the English countryside. “Then it became my sanctuary…” From what I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t ask. “…there was a timelessness, something that called out from a land carved by rivers and streams, the wind—for millions of years. It called to me from the old town too, its succession of human settlement.”

Nancy begins to clear our plates. I look around at the antique furnishings in the elegant dinning room. This room had hosted Mayors, Governors and Cabinet officials—now us. I feel taller here, as if I‘m another person. Unc had accepted us into his world. His world of privilege and adventure. This world I want for my own. A world where everything was in place, where people grew old and rich, and had the power to change people’s lives—to save them.

Dinner with Unc and Pete makes me feel older and wiser, and richer. I see myself in a different light. Throughout the evening, I can feel the anticipation rising within me, the excitement of traveling deeper into the driftless area, and on to an enchanted river. Pete seems excited too, but I want to make sure he’s fully prepared to see the different world we will soon encounter. “Unc, why does the landscape look so different here?” I ask, wanting confirmation of the things I’ve been trying to explain to Pete—things Unc understands better than me.

“Ice giants” he says, “glaciers of the last ice age avoided this whole area.” There are different theories too. The region had been called the Paleozoic Plateau, perhaps one of the first portions of land to emerge from a primordial sea, six to seven hundred million years ago. How the lacerated rock base of the headwalls of the driftless-ness, dewatered the lubrication from beneath the glaciers, diverting their paths. “So, here, the erosion progressed in a more typical fashion. What you see today are the remnants of some of the oldest mountains on earth—Wisconsin’s Lost Mountains.”

“Like some lost world right?” And I look right at Pete as I say this—his eyes open wide. This had been one of my selling points for the trip, though it honestly hadn’t taken much. As I looked into Pete’s wide eyes, I wondered about my own reasons. Why was I here? Maybe I hoped to continue my conversation with God—the one that began with John in a coma and ended with his death. God hadn’t said much since then, and if he had, I hadn’t been listening.

As I sit and listen to Unc and Pete converse, my rambling thoughts overpower my concentration. I think about how Galena had faced death, and how its magisterial landscape, part of the driftless area, had been protected as if by the hand of God—did He turn the glaciers away? Part the Red Sea? I recall how the promised land was preserved and delivered and before that, when the Israelites had been spared the angel of death by the blood of spotless lambs painted on their door frames—the first Passover. And this place of abundance and beauty, passed over by powerful glaciers. Perhaps some new Eden?

Maybe I am here to travel back in time. To the time when God and I were still on speaking terms. Had he forsaken me? I needed to find out.

Wallace and Nancy serve dessert and coffee. I awaken from my daydream.

After dessert, I ask for brandy and cigars. Unc laughs. None are delivered. “What time do you want to leave for the river?”

“Early, around 6:00 am. We want to get a good first day in.” I think about how he was good at sending people out on adventures. He had been a hiker and a fisherman, carrying out his wilderness expeditions all over the world. He was almost seventy and still very active. “Thanks for everything Unc! You should join us.”

He chuckles. “Thank you. I have other fish to fry. I’ll see you when you get back.”

***

The morning comes early, and after a hearty breakfast we’re on the road. Now the man who served dinner last night is driving my great uncle’s glassy black Cadillac past grassy slopes and rocky bluffs, on a road pointing toward the sky. The highway winds up the Mississippi valley toward its tributary where we plan to paddle.

The Beatles’ “Let It Be” is playing in the background. Our chauffeur drives as if racing the wind, his dark eyes tracking the black ribbon that twists through the valley. Driven by purpose, unshackled, as if he was no longer bound to his polished veneer that he was required to maintain around Unc. He chain smokes Chesterfields with the determination to deliver us to the river by 9:00 am.

Watching the landscape whip by, I was trying to forget the gnawing feeling that hit me in the gut a few weeks ago. I still can’t believe my stepfather is dead at a mere thirty-eight years old.

My eyes fixate on the land as we roll through the countryside; I’m grasping for euphoria from cloud shadows that race across the land, and the beams of light that descend upon hillsides through the thunderheads that stream across the sky. The bucolic scenery slips away as we eventually reach the slower cadence of the wild and scenic river.

The Upper Iowa is called a masterpiece; created in a flash of geologic time, it had been defined in a deluge, articulated through centuries. Delicate and perfect as a leaf, another one of nature’s miracles, like the greater driftless area that it is a part of—one piece in a grand mosaic. The landscape is a pristine habitat that supports an abundance of life: brook trout, bass, and a myriad of other creatures—songbirds, badgers, raptors, foxes and wolves, along with creatures and plant species uncommon to the otherwise surrounding Midwestern landscape. Such wildness makes me ponder both the majesty and cruelty of nature.

The river flows through the sleepy town of Dekora, about thirty-five miles as the crow flies from the put-in. Dekora, Iowa is home to Luther College and our river liaison—Dr. George Knutson, a Chemistry professor, and a fastidious fellow—as I learned when I called him to plan our trip. The good doctor is a plain and low-talking naturalist, a part-time outfitter. He offers guidance about the river and descriptions of rare trees, animals and unique geologic characteristics that he mentions while scribbling notes on our map.

“He’s quite the druid, that bloke,” Wallace whispers to us before driving off in a cloud of dust. Without my understanding of God, and with my deep love of the outdoors, I might have become a tree worshipper too, I think.

Knutson is lean and rugged and in a quiet sense very clear about his expectations and instruction. “You boys seem sturdy enough, but make no mistake, this is a wild river. What kind of experience do you have canoeing?” I thought we had covered that on the phone.

Where should I begin? I wonder why he doesn’t notice the canoe that practically grows out of my body, or whether he feels the sharpness of my gaze as a fellow modern-day voyageur. “We have paddled a lot sir. All over southern Ontario, rivers throughout the Midwest—Michigan and Illinois.” And as I ask, “any fish in your river?” I feel the shift the power.

“Lots of ‘em son. The fishing’s pretty darn good. In fact sometimes the bass jump right in your boat!” Now he’s selling it.

“You don’t say” I look at Wils and roll my eyes.

“Right into your boat, happens all the time.”

I had read about ancient speckled trout that still swam in the canyon waters of the Oneida River as they had for fortunate tribes who discovered this corner of the secret place that turned the glaciers away. I had not, however, read about any fearless, jumping bass.

After a forty-five minute ride in George’s pick-up truck, we are standing on the water’s edge, at a city park in the town of Lime Springs. We have our final discussion about fast water shoals, some water falls over dams that we’ll have to portage, and where to meet up when we finish. Now our trip begins.

It’s immediately apparent that this is no ordinary river. As we float past pastures, and farmhouses at the terminus of roads, I think about how fortunate I am, and I imagine Wils does too. We drift beyond the modern world, further and further from the usual controls on our lives. With each stroke, we begin to pick up speed. With the help of the current, the river carries us further into the past; past stretches distinguished by groves of coniferous trees otherwise only found in the forests of the northern Taiga.

We paddle and ride currents that cut through the canyon, beneath chimney rock formations and limestone cliffs some four hundred feet high. The wind stirs the trees. The river’s scale is smaller than the endless waters of Ontario but it has its own power. This basin a mere fractal of the whole driftless place: a pocket canyon; a sanctuary; a secret garden. In this haven, I found myself able to ask the question lingering on my lips: God please help me understand why he had to die, I pray silently to myself as the current carries us along.

We float and paddle. And as we drift, we crane our necks upwards to see the hawks and turkey-vultures patrol the skies. A Blue Heron lifts off ahead, then disappears around the next bend through a loamy mist that rises and dissipates before the face of chalky white bluffs. We hear the rat-tat-tat of a pileated woodpecker that draws our eyes to its bright, red-feathered head, illuminated between branches framed by light-green leaves touched by the sun. We paddle on.

Our goal is to finish this trip fast in order prove our skill, but mile after mile the river pulls us deeper into its spell. We are lost in the timelessness of a basin formed by the torrent of an ice-bound lake released upon the land. I imagine the surge of frigid waters that had cut and carved and carried away large portions of the earth.

After several hours, we near a place we don’t fully understand. It is an unexpected niche within this unusual ecosystem, like those more typically found at the edge of glaciers across the planet—not in a canyon in eastern Iowa. These patches of microclimates are rare small islands that appear upon algific talus slopes at the bottoms of north facing cliffs and covered in ferns and mosses. Within their delicate ecologies, I had read: near to the ground, temperatures are modulated by subterranean cave ice. Warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

The further we travel through the river’s basin, the more convinced we are that we have discovered this place for the first time. A mysterious place once hidden by surrounding mountains of ice. A place of rest, protected from harsher forces. Another kingdom. A bubble. A drop of water on a leaf.

Unc had referred to Galena and its surrounding countryside as a sanctuary. I understood what he meant. This place was sacred. And like Canada’s wilds, God’s presence is here, again, unmistakable to me. I realize God had not never left. In my disappointment and anger—in my disbelief, I had turned from Him. I had tried to outrun God.

In the middle of the river we step from our canoes into the shallow water atop a gravel bar. Here, as if standing on the water, we spin in slow motion amidst the three hundred and sixty degree wonderment. I continue to turn, looking up at the sky I attempt to breathe it all in. God had never left!

“Jubie, this place is incredible!”

“Yeah, I know.” My words are carried on the wind. My thoughts too. We return to our boat and continue down river alongside towering bluffs plastered with clusters of mud nest, each with its own opening. Our presence on the water swiftly detected, then followed by a cacophony of squeaks and squawks as small birds grate out their warnings.

T he chirps grow louder as barn swallow heads pop in and out of their nests. Birds are now flying in and out, coming and going with nervous energy. Mischievously, I clap my hands seven times, as loud as I can, the noise echoing through the canyon. From nearly every hole, a bird flies swift into the forming flock above. A shape moves in unity up and over the bluff, then back. With fluid form, like a school of fish, it moves across the sky. Sweeping, twisting arcs break and take shape again to float and dive above the terrain of this strange, lost world.

“Wow.” I look to Pete, then upward and wait for the organism to return. When it does, it breaks apart and each bird returns to the nest from which it came while we stare—amazed. Witness to the angel flight of creatures, their artisan instinct, the magnificence of creation!

For the next hour we paddle in awe, cradled in the ambient noise of our surroundings: bird songs shrill and sweet, buzzing insects, the lapping of the water against our canoe and the gurgle of our small wake moves across the shore. I am healing now. The evidence is in this sensation of peace and stillness I have come for. The river. The evidence is everywhere. I perceive some semblance of answers I had cried out for weeks ago. Ages ago. The “why” is in everything here—the smells, the sounds, this amazing scenery formed in the rush of an ancient flood, detailed over time by the force of water, wind and nature’s cadence—fast and slow. The hand of God?

My healing isn’t a static thing. And to think I could imagine this process could be interrupted by me trying to run from Him; from my pain. Even in my refusal to surrender to the wisdom of His sovereignty—God is healing me. Through it all, in His time, in His way, for His purpose. It was always supposed to be about His glory—not mine. His will.

Ahead we hear the sound of a small rapids. Shoals we glide over with little effort then beach our canoe onto another gravely shore. Wils climbs out first and stabilizes the bow of the boat so I can climb over the gear, across the center. On land it feels good to stretch. We walk towards the rockier footing at the base of the bluff, towards a small waterfall where a spring bursts out from the top of an impervious layer of shale some fifty feet up the side of a geologic cross-section. Clumsily, we move across piles of rocks built up over million years. Each step requires greater intention. We look back upstream from where we have come, past the water rippling over the shoals in the middle of the river, following the rock wall with our eyes, it disappears around the curve of the bank. Then after a few more steps, we straddle the jumble of mossy rocks and look down. And up from the cracks and channels of the karst geology beneath our feet we can feel the chilled air rise, settling into an invisible fog.

There is an abundance in this place and I imagine its first people who follow Woolly Mammoth herds deeper into the incredible beauty and peace of this prehistoric utopia—an ancient canyon frozen in time.

“We need to make camp soon.” Wils agrees, so we’re off again to ride the river’s flow to its next gathering place. Our canoe glides into a confluence where waters pour in from tributaries, springs and streams. Originating upstream from smaller valleys and hollows, here they join and blend. The river widens. You can smell the water, sweet like a fresh rain, and familiar. And it’s part of us, and we are caught up in the great hydrologic cycle. Rains fall, waters carve and carry on their journey towards the lowest point. This river’s basin, a fragment of the larger driftless place—an agglomeration of other tributary systems, each collecting waters on their way to the Mississippi. Dendritic fractal patterns shaped by countless hydrologic cycles, spared the ice plow.

The next bend we spy a pebbly-gravel point, a good place to camp beside the ambient and soothing sound of moving water. I stare at sheets of glass that move with the currents. The rocks and ripples catch the glitter from the sunlight that squeezes between the branches. Beneath the honey flow, the river’s stony bottom, its brown and blue pebbles and stones dance in the light beneath the water’s relentless polishing.

I wonder where my life is taking me. Like the river, it flows at times beyond my control but to a certain end. On the surface, my eye is drawn to a single yellow leaf that floats weightless in the current. Effortlessly it travels past a darker eddy that swirls back under the shade of a tree. A tiny yellow canoe or a back floating swimmer, the leaf is swept downstream into the turbulence of a small rapids disappearing around a narrow bend—this image paints my mind.

As the day finishes we make camp on a sandy gravely shore. We pitch our tent on a high spot next to a large greyed driftwood trunk just in case. Our fire place we build up by piling rocks on three sides and soon the flames of an aesthetic fire crackle over pieces of grey driftwood. Our one burner gas stove is where we cook the evening meal of dehydrated stew. Then after instant chocolate pudding we clean our pots with hot water and biodegradable soap under a moonless night. Bellies full, backs against the dead tree, we stare into the starry heavens above the shadows of cliffs in the middle of a temperate micro-pocket once circumscribed by mountains of ice that dwarfed the forests within. “Do you think God can heal our pain, “ I ask still looking skyward.

“I don’t know,” he says. “How would we know?”

“That’s the thing. I’m not sure we can—except when we do. It comes with a big assumption.” When the grace of faith came to me again it was easier to believe than to doubt. “I wish it was always like this.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking over at me. I’m not sure we are talking about the same thing. But I’m not sure that we’re not. There is a power in this place and I believe it had once protected the fortunate sons of man. A power that has a name. Here they found a home in the midst of the abundance of a great plateau.

Thank you God for soothing my pain. And as I pray, sleep comes easy under the stars, and I dream of grazing mammoths, feeding, quivering when they smell us creeping closer. They look up. We are hunters. Now in the dust and rumble of their stampede we close in for the kill, from the side. They run alongside the rocks towards the ice and turn again. Our spears fly true.

The second day we rise and push to get onto the river early. We paddle hard all day into the unfolding splendor of this geologic masterpiece, determined to make great time.

After nearly three days we are ahead of schedule. The river’s surroundings have changed again. We portage around a couple of waterfalls.

Towards the afternoon of the fourth day, we approach our take-out at the town of New Albin, near the Mississippi. Aided by the current, we had paddled about hundred and ten miles of this hundred and fifty six mile Mississippi tributary. The banks had changed from gentle slopes to stands of hardwoods, then conifer covered palisades that rose up from gravel beds along talus slopes. We had passed from rolling hills and fields and pasture. Like a tunnel into the past and back out into the modern world, to the mudflat mouth that spills out in a great alluvial fan—the broad floodplain shared with the Mississippi.

As we docked and met with our welcomers, we were soon showered and donning fresh clothing. Wallace arrives and we say farewell to Knutson. “You’ll be back,” he says. I don’t disagree. After tasty burgers and root beer floats we are on our way back to the old house on a hill in the once mighty little river town. After a celebratory dinner with Unc, Wils and I sit on the patio reminiscing about the trip. When we re-entered the modern world this morning I was keenly aware my grief had been lessened. I had been changed in my need, if not from the asking. But I had asked. Tomorrow we return to Hinsdale where nothing has changed. John is still dead.

Over the years I had received the kindnesses of so many people: strangers, friends and family—the privilege of wise council from mentors who had saved me many times over—like Unc, my father, two stepfathers, my grandfathers, mother and grandmother. All those precious, evocative conversations stored in my mind that waited like spores to burst open.

From Chicago, outside of Rockford you turn onto a segment of U.S. Route 20 to get to Galena. The old highway ran from Boston to Corvallis, Oregon—the longest road in America, Like my healing I think.

In time, my memories and feelings from that trip in 1970 had disappeared and reappeared like springs that gurgled up from the karst hilled landscape that Unc and I wove through in his car that summer of 1979. Through the uplands, on the outskirts of Galena, we drove to and from Galena. I remember that last visit before I began a graduate program in urban planning at Florida State like it was yesterday.

It had been nine years since my first trip on the Upper Iowa with Wils, when I had been healed enough to go on. Unc was pushing eighty now. Yesterday we picnicked at The Rock with Mimi, a PhD candidate in urban planning at Cornell I believe he was trying to set me up with. We were on our way back to Chicago.

“What attracted you to this place?” I ask as we drive. He doesn’t answer right away. It was a question that he had been asked many times.

Through the passenger side of his Mercedes 450 SL he scans the countryside, then glances in my direction. “The scenery at first,” then he is silent, and I don’t speak either. The sense of wonderment in the car is palpable. Time freezes briefly… He clears his throat. “The past I suppose—all the history,” he says. “But the thing is…” Now he speaks in a different tone. And as we curve and weave in and out of the scenery, his words elucidate the mystery of his truth. “The thing is,” he says looking right at me. “Here in this place I felt the presence of God.”

I look through the windshield, across verdant hills layered up to the horizon where the day fades into a copper colored sky. “I understand,” I tell him.

Undeveloped places often unlocked a sense of freedom in me. Lives I believed were cut like landscapes, emergent, intricate, incised by the passage of time. Mine, in part had been the work of sacred lands and waters, and a dying town that had been left behind, forgotten only to be restored. These places were beacons; cairns. Reminders of the places and people that had joined in the carving of my soul. And they marked the lands where my understanding of time seemed to bend. Special places and unique circumstances where nature could transform you or me into someone else. This, I came to believe, was ultimately by the hand of God. What I learned, eventually, was that God had never left me. He never would.