Driftless | Part One

I read once about a region northwest of Chicago that possessed the greatest concentration of cold water streams anywhere in the world. A landscape etched and tunneled by hundreds of springs that bubbled up into streams, disappearing underground only to return to the surface somewhere else.

Over time this became a familiar terrain. A place I had hiked and paddled and picnicked; a land I traveled through, back and forth by bus to Thunder Bay, to and from camp in Ontario. And our passage through this etherial land was as I imagined Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where, more than once, I had walked out from the shadows into perfect light, and marveled at the crispness of the robin’s egg sky, against the rich purples and browns that gave shape to the tops of vibrant green hills. This extraordinary region, embellished with an intricate topography, took form on many maps that spread out from contiguous corners of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois—from Galena to Minneapolis.

In a dream, I look down from space on those six hundred cold water streams, their sustaining creeks and springs, and numerous rivers that flowed into the Mississippi, eventually draining into the Gulf of Mexico. Zooming out, the shape of the place resembled an obsidian adze; then a fossilized leaf with textured veins running towards a stem—zooming in, it became the pulsing heart in the middle of the continent; it had split a sea of ice like firewood. I imagine myself on the top of a hill, beneath a cobalt sky, staring across the layered landscape, the horizon hidden behind a mile high ice wall grinding slow across the plain. A ship-of-land moving through a sea of ice.

Unlike the surrounding Midwestern landscape, this place was almost completely devoid of glacial residue known as “drift”, so it was no surprise it had been dubbed The Driftless Area.

Near the Mississippi River, the town of Galena had grown on the edge of this amazing place. And across the river, in southeast Iowa, there was a tributary which I had only seen in pictures and on maps. One day, I tell myself, I will paddle its length to the Mississippi. This is a story about how that happened.

*

I had gotten to know my great uncle at holiday gatherings and visits to Galena. In many ways, he reminded me of my grandfather—the way he looked me in the eyes, the way he took an interest in my life. From his stories I had learned about our European ancestors, how they came to America and why; and about Galena, how it had risen and fallen.

He told us about the first American settlers who arrived in Galena in 1821 hoping to strike glorious riches. The town had boomed and became the busiest steamboat hub north of St. Louis—paddle boats coming and going every day. “Galena’s mines,” he explained to our eager ears, “were so productive that they provided most of the nation’s lead.” He explained how it was only natural that the town be named Galena—the Latin term for lead sulfide—the ore that made it rich. And he taught us that when the railroad headed west from Chicago, Galena turned down the route, so instead of a connection to the future, the rail line from Chicago to St. Louis bypassed the town. Further, the Galena River, the town’s connection to the Mississippi, eventually silted up from decades of erosion, triggered by extensive mining. “By 1880 Galena was off the map.”

After John had passed, my great uncle’s words came back to me. “For a century,” he had said, “the town faced its growing isolation and leveling decline. Cruelly, it had been cut away from the progress that continued to blossom in other places.”

I, like Galena, felt cut off from the world. John was dead now, and I saw how everyone mourned in different ways. After a while, everybody else seemed to be moving on; people didn’t want to talk about it anymore. My continuing grief had been bypassed by the blossoming recovery that I saw in everyone else.

This time, mine was a different kind of grief: more complex than my parent’s separation when I was seven. At that time, I had been transported to a different world: from the Florida Coast to the Chicago suburbs. Now, instead of being cast from a tropical paradise into the land of snow and deciduous trees, my present loss was a plucking: a swift separation from a world where everything was finally working. Now I had been thrown out into the void.

My grief was cumulative: the loss of my childhood; the loss of my father (even though I knew he was there for me—just not here); and the loss of John, my stepfather, my mentor, my friend. He had gotten through to me when no one else could.

After he died I saw, the pattern. The desolation came every seven years it seemed. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think at all. I had to reconnect somehow; I had to escape, or else I would lose my mind.

I had already found my way in the woods. And had often lingered in the recollections of my idyllic early childhood. In these places I flourished and healed. I remember times of laughter and adventure when pain washed off me like dirt.