A niece and nephew on Manyu’s side of the family visited last week. One of them is an influencer living in Los Angeles. The other manages a UN refugee camp in South Sudan. If I knew how two kids from the same family ended up with such different careers, I’d write about that – but since they don’t even know how it happened, I need to write about something else. Instead I’ll explain how I tried to introduce these two young, worldly individuals to simple and relatively mundane La Crosse, Wisconsin.
My strategy was to immerse them (literally immerse them) in our one noteworthy resource, the Upper Mississippi River. On their first afternoon in town I took them for drinks on the outdoor deck of the Waterfront Restaurant. The Waterfront’s happy hour includes Wisconsin cheese plates and brandy old fashioneds, the official cocktail of the state of Wisconsin.* More importantly, the deck is only a few feet from river’s edge, so it provides an excellent view of barges, riverboats, and recreational boaters.
The morning after their arrival I took them paddling through an especially peaceful stretch of Upper Mississippi backwaters. I was surprised to find access to the backwater from the main channel completely blocked by a long sandbar. This is actually a good thing, as it means that motorized watercraft cannot enter. Once we dragged our kayaks over the sand, we had miles of backwater to ourselves.
I never take the Mississippi backwaters for granted, but unless I bring newcomers there, I tend to forget that common sights for me are rare occurrences for others. Eagles, beaver lodges, an acre of lily pads, miles of solitude are big deals to anyone who doesn’t experience them once a week during the non-winter months. Also there is the fact that the Mississippi backwaters almost always offer something new even to its regular visitors. On this trip, the new and unexpected feature was a large bed of traveling clams.
The route we paddled was a four-mile loop. We entered the backwater at one spot along the main channel and exited some distance downstream. Both access points had long sandbars, but whereas the sandbar at the entrance was high and dry, the sandbar at the exit was a few inches below the surface. As we stepped out of our kayaks to float them over this isthmus of submerged sand, we noticed dozens of freshwater clams walking atop the sand. By walking, I mean that they were extending their feet outside their shells, grabbing hold of firm sand, and then pulling their bodies forward a very short distance. This action was exceedingly slow, but I imagined I was seeing movement. More dramatically, the clams were leaving tracks in the sand, some of the trails as long as five feet in length. I don’t know why one spot on the sandbar was better than another, but these bivalves were on the move. Much of the Mississippi River has a slippery muddy bottom, so movement that requires a solid foothold may not always be possible. Maybe these clams, finding themselves on solid ground, were moving simply for the joy of moving.
I asked Sheela, the influencer, whether her short kayak trip might stay out of her online postings because it runs contrary to her persona as a trendsetting Angeleno. “Steve,” she said, “of course I will use it. Everything is about balance.”
* The brandy old fashioned really is the official cocktail of the state of Wisconsin, listed right alongside our state bird, state flower, and state tree. Our dysfunctional state legislature cannot approve a budget increase for the state university system, but they were able to designate the brandy old fashioned as our official state booze.
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