Muscatine

We started our journey one month after a six-month flood. Some say this one was even bigger than the Great Flood of 1993. The river brings and takes away. When it takes, it's as if it came to collect a debt for the entire history. Some places were simply washed away. Many towns are empty and abandoned. A marina is marked on the satellite map, but when you reach the spot where it's supposed to be, the marina is gone. Sometime you find the entire marina a few miles downstream, shattered by the wild river and dumped in a swamp.

The first time we encountered this problem was in Muscatine, Iowa, a small town known for making pearl buttons from fresh shells out of the Mississippi. On the map, the marina seemed like the perfect spot to make a stop, protected from the south wind that had been causing us problems the whole day. As we approached, we saw that the floating dock was broken in half and covered with a sign: KEEP AWAY! PRIVATE PROPERTY!

The entrance to the marina was very narrow, but we gave it a try, hoping to find a better spot around the corner.

"Merde!" I heard from Max's side.

A broken part of the left rudder rose to the surface of the Mississippi.

Gravel and mud piled up at the river bend, so the entrance was too shallow. The rudder broke in half like a twig.

We couldn't sail on with a broken rudder. We stopped on the shattered floating dock and tried to repair it. I was standing on the pier of an abandoned marina with a huge axe, trying to shape a piece of wood into the missing part of the rudder, when a child appeared at the entrance to the marina. He could not have been older than seven, maybe nine years. He screamed at us that he was an officer of the law and that he would arrest us. His eyes were faint, only blackness staring at me. I could not tell what he was on, but it must have been strong. He came right aboard our steamboat and started grabbing everything he could get his hands on. He did not respond to anything we said. Everything around us was empty and abandoned, except for some people who occasionally crossed the parking lot close by, who looked like they were a part of the kid's gang.

When we grabbed the kid and tried to keep him away from the steamboat, he started screaming even louder.

"I am an officer of the law!"

"You do not tell an officer of the law where to go!"

"I am an officer of the law!"

"You crossed the sign! The sign!"

"I will arrest you!"

"Don’t touch me!"

"I am an officer of the law!"

I kept looking over my shoulder to see when his brothers or the rest of the gang would show up. Max was holding the kid, I fastened the last bolt of the rudder, started the engine, and we left Muscatine.

We sailed back into the Mississippi, and when I looked back towards the marina, I realized we had forgotten the mattress of Max's bunk bed on the pier. The kid grabbed the mattress, gave us a mean grin, and threw it into the water.

Mississippi – floods, flood management, transport, and corn

Mississippi has always been flooding. On our journey, we even saw small mounds, safe shelters supposedly built by the indigenous peoples, which stand witness to the river's shifts and to the way life with the river was being organized from the very beginning. The founders of New Orleans started building local floodwalls and levees already in the 17th century.

In nearly three centuries of flood management on the Mississippi Government policies and activities to deal with flooding have shifted from ‘let the locals do it’ to full federal responsibility for an essentially structural-only approach, to a federally led, locally shared mix of structural and non-structural elements, that are gradually being combined with other water resource activities in an integrated and comprehensive approach to basin water resources management. The sheer size of the Mississippi and the Constitutional authorities of the states lessen the ability of Government to develop a uniform approach.

The 75 years of comprehensive planning for flood management in the Lower Mississippi was initially focused on flood control and navigation and has essentially succeeded in meeting these goals. Over time, navigation and flood control interests have integrated environmental and recreational needs to begin to develop a more integrated approach.

(USA: Flood Management – Mississippi River, http://www.apfm.info/pdf/case_studies/usa_mississippi.pdf)

In addition to flooding, the population along the river, and the United States in general, are also concerned about the river's navigability. Transport along the river is much easier and cheaper than on land. Considering the amount of transported load, it is also better for the environment than road transport, despite the pollution caused by cargo ships.

As early as the 1830s, the federal government began improvements on the river in the interest of navigation. In 1930, after extensive studies by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Congress authorized the nine-foot channel navigation project on the Upper Mississippi River. This legislation provided for a navigation channel with a minimum 9-foot depth and a minimum width of 400 feet, to be achieved by construction of a system of locks and dams that create a series of slack water pools behind each dam, supplemented by dredging. Construction of this system mainly occurred in the decade 1930-1940.

In the approximately 670 miles of river between the first lock at the Falls of St. Anthony area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, and the last lock of the project (Lock #27) at St. Louis, Missouri, the Mississippi has a fall of about 420 feet. The purpose of the locks and dams is to create a series of steps which river tows and other boats either climb or descend as they travel upstream or downstream. Locks and dams on the Mississippi were not built for flood control or to eliminate all the low spots caused by shoaling on the river bed (buildup of sediment causing a hazard to navigation).

(US army Corps of Engineers, https://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Stories/Article/476805/whydowehavelocksand/)

Grain – mostly corn – accounts for the largest share of transport along the Mississippi with 60%, followed by oil and natural gas with 21% and coal with 19%.

The United States are the world's largest corn manufacturers and corn plays a major role in the country's economy.

Corn, or maize, was spread across North America a few thousand years ago. According to recent research, it was first domesticated and cultivated in the Balsas River Valley in south and central Mexico. Corn's ancestor plant, teosinte, is still grown in Mexico. Major new varieties were already bred by Native Americans by cross-pollination.

There are currently six types of corn grown in the USA: dent corn, sweet corn, popcorn, flint corn, flour corn, and heirloom corn. The largest share of the corn is used for livestock feed, followed by ethanol production, beverage production, and the food industry.

Most of the Upper Mississippi River is in the Corn Belt, a region of the American Midwest, which includes Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri.

America, from a grain
of maize you grew
to crown
with spacious lands
the ocean foam.
A grain of maize was your geography.

(Excerpt from Ode to Maize by Pablo Neruda)

Corn farmers have two options to sell and distribute their crops. One is to sell the corn to elevators, i.e. huge granaries on river banks, from which corn is transported with cargo ships to New Orleans and further distributed worldwide. The other option are trains that distribute corn within the USA. Its price is constantly changing.

"It all depends on whether China is buying corn or not. And on the amount of corn produced in South America," said corn farmer Tim in the Booty Palace Bar near Hamburg.

The farmers we met usually don't really care what their corn will be used for or where it's going. Nr 2/sweet corn is the most commonly produced variety. Making ends meet, and possibly making s profit, is the top priority. Smaller growers are in a constant merciless struggle with the major corporate farms.

To mitigate soil erosion, a special farming technique was introduced in 1972, called no-till farming. In this approach, crops are grown without disturbing the soil with any kind of mechanical preparation, i.e. tillage. Use of this technique, however, allows for more weed growth, which in turn has resulted in increased use of herbicides.

"Of course we use GMOs, thank God they exist. In the seventies, I had to get a new dog every month. He would lick the corn and die," one of the corn farmers told us.

Genetically modified corn varieties resistant to glyphosate herbicides were first commercialized in 1996 by Monsanto, and are known as "Roundup Ready Corn". Bayer CropScience developed "Liberty Link Corn" that is resistant to glufosinate. As of 2011, herbicide-resistant GM corn was grown in 14 countries. By 2012, 26 varieties of herbicide-resistant GM maize were authorized for import into the European Union, but such imports remain controversial.

(Wikipedia)

All this, of course, affects the river, and the entire ecosystem around it. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone, just off-coast at the Mississippi River mouth, is one of the largest in the world. As the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico, it brings along excessive amounts of nutrients and minerals, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, dumped into the river along its course in the form of waste from the agroeconomic system, the meat industry, and sewage. This nutrient and mineral loading, also called eutrophication, results in algal bloom that robs the water of oxygen needed to sustain other marine life. Lack of oxygen, called hypoxia, is related to mass fish-kills in the Gulf of Mexico.

Watersheds within the Mississippi River Basin drain much of the United States, from Montana to Pennsylvania and extending southward along the Mississippi River. Most of the nitrogen input comes from major farming states in the Mississippi River Valley, including Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Nitrogen and phosphorous enter the river through upstream runoff of fertilizers, soil erosion, animal wastes, and sewage. In a natural system, these nutrients aren't significant factors in algae growth because they are depleted in the soil by plants. However, with anthropogenically increased nitrogen and phosphorus input, algae growth is no longer limited. Consequently, algal blooms develop, the food chain is altered, and dissolved oxygen in the area is depleted. The size of the dead zone fluctuates seasonally, as it is exacerbated by farming practices. It is also affected by weather events such as flooding and hurricanes.

(The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, https://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/index.html)