Essentially the Only One

The Mississippi is in flood, unusual for November. I took the train downtown after work to catch these images.

When something, however off-beat, interests me, I tend to keep tabs on it. Today I returned to my favorite sluice valve with most satisfactory results. To be precise, my visit solved the nagging issue as to how the sluice valve was actually operated.

This had puzzled me ever since I first came across it. How nice it was then to find this elegant solution - a mobile diesel engine and belt drive.I was the only person here by the Mississippi on this gorgeous evening (apart from a Conservation Policeman checking to see if I was fishing on the sly). A lovely evening marred only by the fact that I dropped and damaged one of my older cameras. It still works, but I broke the auto-exposure somehow. Not an absolutely essential feature, fortunately, as long as I shoot using manual settings and I often do that anyway.

The Mississippi River is the borderline between the states of Illinois and Missouri and has been so since Missouri's origin as the Missouri Territory in 1812. For the most part this remains true for the entire length of the river along the border, but very rarely nature has played a trick on the geographers and moved the river after the lines were drawn on the maps.

Kaskaskia, Illinois, is one of these curious anomalies. In 1884, a great flood created a new river channel, converting what had been land contiguous with the western region of Illinois into an island. In due course, the Mississippi decided that it preferred this new eastern channel and the old western course of the great river dwindled into a small channel, effectively binding Kaskasia to the land of the State of Missouri.

This was an unfortunate fate for Kaskasia, for from 1809 to 1818, this town was the capital of the Illinois Territory and from 1818 to 1820, capital of the newly formed State of Illinois. Defiantly, it maintained its allegiance to Illinois, making it, and the surrounding farmland, a curious little incursion into Missouri.

Today it is practically a ghost town, a handful of houses surrounding a beautiful church. Only the street names, now long straight roads running through the corn and soybean fields, give a clue as to the former importance of this town. Isolation, repeated flood damage, and the relocation of the capital of Illinois, first to Vandalia and then in 1839 to Springfield doomed the town to decline.

According to the 2000 census, there are only nine people living today in Kaskaskia. I saw one, an aged farmer, sitting on his front yard eying me with an steady indifference that seemed to define my impression of this town. There was no tourist industry here, despite the clear historical importance of the town. Instead, the land was ruled by the wide corn fields enclosed by a high levee, growing tall and vibrant on the fertile, flood-enriched, land.

With agriculture as the only viable means of making a living, everything except faith had departed. Somehow, I felt this was enough. Did this town need to be resurrected with tacky souvenir and antique shops and coffee houses catering to the city folk out for a weekend? People much like me, in truth. There are enough of those. Despite its decline - or perhaps because of it - I came away from Kaskaskia with sense of rich, real life.

Another trip to the American Bottom floodplain this evening, and a rather aimless ramble down country roads was brought up short when I found this unusual structure.

It's the Fort de Chartres, a beautifully renovated 18th century French fort dating, in its first incarnation, all the way back to 1720. That is old for this region.

As you can see, I found it very late in the day with the sun low in the sky. The museum had closed so I was able to do no more than walk around the grounds.That was interesting enough in itself though, resembling many a castle I have wandered through in England, yet here it was right in the middle of America.

There was absolutely no one else there at this late time, generating a sense of desertion that added to the historical aura of the site. I climbed up above the gatehouse and looked out over the corn fields to my east, getting a strange frisson from the clash of past and present. By now, the sun was very low in the sky, enough to illuminate from almost zero elevation the trees outside the fort. This resulted in a delicious fiery glow. Then it was off home, almost beating the full dark of night.

There was a certain surreal quality to our trip out to Valmayer and beyond onto the American Bottom floodplain yesterday. It wasn't just the flocks of egrets or the long levee road - certainly the longest levee road I've found in this area.

Levees such as this act as a clear demarcation between the land that man claims and that given over to nature, and traveling along such a borderline produces a lot of deep thought about the interplay of the two in my mind.But that's only one level of division. To the edge of the floodplain lie the river bluffs, the natural levees as it were, that act as yet another line of demarcation. Villages built on or leading up these beautiful hills are spared the power of the river, giving them a longevity that far exceeds the floodplain settlements. One of these was Maeystown, an almost Shangri-La like village nestled in the folds of the bluffs leading a little way up from the plain. An old German settlement, dating back to the exodus of 1848 (the forty-eighters) following the failed European revolutions of that year, it is now sleepily reviving itself as a tourist attraction. Ruth and I found a charming old brick building that hed been converted into an antique store and coffee shop. We stayed there a while, enjoying a turkey sandwich and, in my case, a root beer, while the extended family that ran the store introduced themselves in the most amiable of ways.
Afterwards, we walked through the village finding the usual collection of derelict, semi-derelict and restored buildings that mark many of these small hamlets and - charmingly - a large litter of kittens playing in a front yard. The feel of this town was quite different from one just a few yards away, yet down below on the flood plain. This little place, Fults, showed some signs of flood damage, and, although much of it was well-kept and the small church was delightful, there was a sense of distinct impermanence. If Maeystown seemed sleepy - and a wedding yesterday worked against this sentiment - Fults was positively somnambulant, with only the shiny red paint on the newer tractor wheels propped up against a decaying building suggesting recent activity. In the end, though, what astonished us most of all about this wonderful journey was that we had no idea it was here, so very close to St. Louis. I've explored in almost every other direction but for some reason had missed this. Part of this may be that the main river road on the Illinois side, Illinois Route 3, stays well away from the Mississippi at this point and winds through uninteresting developments that tend to speed you away further south. I found yesterday's discoveries by just looking at the map and seeing all this land to which I had never paid any heed. It makes me wonder what else there is to find.

Really, I'm very lucky in Missouri - many more days than not are sunny (often with a little cloud to add interest) but this was not the case on Sunday.

I arrived at this idyllic Mississippi view near Mozier, Illinois only to have a heavy bank of cloud descend and a thunderstorm erupt all around me. A storm that would not budge for an hour.

Consequently, the only view I had was grey, rain-spattered and muddy. I passed time sitting in the car listening to a radio play about the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster. Maybe thoughts of that led my eye to this sluice valve control leading down to an underwater pipe.A very benign piece of machinery compared to the high pressure oil and gas pipelines that ruptured on that North Sea oil rig killing 167 people in a series of horrendous explosions and fires. Thankfully so.

Without much sign of shifting clouds, I headed home. Naturally, once I was well on my way, I saw brightening skies in my rearview mirror! Never mind, I will go back.

What a great month it has been. And it is still cool!

Sunday morning, and after a bath and shave, I left the Muscatine EconoLodge and drove down to the riverside park, finding there this extraordinary statue of a freshwater clamshell fisherman.

According to the dedication, Muscatine was once the pearl button capital of the world (I always love these 'best in the world' dedications). Fishing those clams with those long rakes looked like very arduous work to me.

Enough to put me in the mood for breakfast, but first I decided to head out of town north on Iowa Highway 22 and enjoy the Mississippi a little more.

By the time I got to Buffalo, Iowa, I was really hungry. Fortunately, I came across a delightful diner/restaurant called Clark's Landing that was buzzing with local business.

Definitely a visual metaphor!







I settled in for a few invigorating cups of coffee and this heavenly feast.
That put me in a very good mood for the rest of the day.

On then to Mississippi Palisades State Park with its striking overlook of the Mississippi.

Then eastward through northern Illinois. I reached the town of Oregon on the Rock River and two very imposing images caught my attention. Firstly this statue of a Indian, the Black Hawk Statue.

I wasn't sure if I liked this. It was good to see some form of representation of the native Americans here in this beautful river valley, but it seemed rather a cliché of the noble savage that was the romantic ideal of Indians at the time the statue was constructed (1908-1911).

Further up the Rock River valley, near the town of Byron, this landscape revealed itself.

Beautiful young corn, glimmers of the blue river sneaking through the treeline on the bank, and two huge cooling towers from Byron Nuclear Generating Station on the horizon.

Some photographs from my weekend trips over the past few weeks.

Silt collecting on farmland.



Washed up by this muddy river, the Illinois in Calhoun County, Illinois.



Below, the confluence of the Missouri River, to the front, with the Mississippi River, to the back beyond the point.

Such a peaceful looking mating of two massive rivers. Not so peaceful during time of flood - this whole region would be underwater.

The Missouri River at sunset.




Below, enjoying the Missouri!

I decided to chase the sunset tonight.

There are too many trees, buildings and hills in my neighborhood to get a really good view, so I got in the car and drove north into St. Charles County.

I left late and the sun was descending fast. By the time I got to a clear, open, area it was almost below the horizon.

I was close to the village of Portage des Sioux. I thought it might be worth driving down to the Mississippi riverside to see what it looked like there.
There was a lot more water than I expected. I drove through the village and down towards the statue of Our Lady of The Rivers. As a rise came up and then the drop to the river bank, I hastily stopped.

The road was completely flooded.

A pain for the locals, I am sure, but it made for a very pretty view.Ahead of me lay the flood water. Standing in it, there was the statue of Our Lady. Unapproachable now except by boat, but still lit up and glowing. I waited until it became a little darker and then headed home.