Mississippi River: Day 1
The Mississippi River stitches together a quilt of ten states from Minnesota to Louisiana. The geometric plots of agricultural land stretching out to either side form the patchwork in shades of brown, planted mostly with corn and soybeans but not yet showing signs of spring growth.
The team traveled today from Washington, D.C., where we’ve spent the past ten days completing the Middle East films (to be posted shortly!), to St Louis. This city nestles into the heartland of America at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
Mississippi is a Native American word meaning “great waters,” and it is easy to understand why. This is the third longest river on Earth, stretching over 2,300 miles. Even from the plane window, it looks impressive. I can’t help but feel an emotional draw to this body of water, which has played such a central role in the American psyche, a symbol of freedom, adventure, and bounty. I vividly recall reading Mark Twain’s Huck Finn as a young girl and fantasizing about taking a similar journey of discovery down the river myself one day. I am thrilled to realize I am doing that now – albeit with six other team members and a mountain of electronic equipment rather than a simple raft!
It is a relief to touchdown at an Expedition location after only a two-hour flight, feeling energetic, well rested, and ready to work. We cross both the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers to reach our motel in Alton, Illinois, a landscape littered with strip malls that still boasts some collections of charming, rustic brick and wooden buildings from bygone eras. Starving at 3pm, we wind up at a roadside diner for lunch. The Aussie team is particularly excited to experience “genuine American cuisine.” Unfortunately, the vast quantity of fried food we consume leaves us all feeling a bit sick to our stomachs.
We are here to explore water challenges and success stories related to the Mississippi River. Our guide for the day is John Chick, Field Station Director for the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center and the Illinois Natural History Survey. With his mutton-chop mustache and jovial grin, he looks like he could have stepped out of the 18th century, when trappers roamed the Mid-West and the Mississippi River served as one of the most vital modes of transit and transport in the country.
John’s primary concerns are with water quality and fish populations. The good news, he tells us, is that water quality has remained fairly consistent for the past 14 years, ever since the Clean Water Act went into effect. Admittedly, levels of nitrogen and phosphorous from chemical fertilizers – which are creating a massive Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico over 8,000 square miles wide – must be halved in order to achieve the EPA’s goals (more on that in future blogs – stay tuned). But still he feels that this lack of increase in water pollution is a positive sign of how government, industry, and non-profits can cooperate to affect change. The bad news is what’s happening to the fish. John says we have to see it to believe it.
We ride a car ferry for five minutes across a portion of the Mississippi River to an island off the coast of Grafton, Illinois, where John takes us to a local fishing spot. The site there is quite spectacular. Every few minutes, a huge fish, often two to three feet long, leaps from the water like a ballerina in the final act of the show – thrusting itself skyward and twirling about before taking a dramatic bow with a splash.
A group of four fishermen stands in knee-high rubber waders in the river, casting their bait into the Mississippi. They catch an alarming number of fish. Every five minutes, one of the guys gets a powerful tug on his line and reels in an enormous, twenty-pound sucker-faced creature. But he does not throw it into a bucket or shout out with triumph. He takes a long, sharply pointed metal hook and rams it forcefully into the fish’s head and gills. Then he whacks the fish powerfully several times against the stones at the river’s edge and tosses it, bleeding but still alive for a while longer, back into the water. The reason he gets rid of it is because Americans don’t consider the bone-ridden Asian carp edible (though we may one day soon, as all the large fish we currently eat are rapidly disappearing from the oceans due to over-fishing).
"We hardly ever catch the local fish we like to eat," a round-faced red-head fellow tells me with a sigh.
The snagging process is difficult to watch and I must admit, as an animal lover I find it gruesome. However, the fishermen’s actions cannot entirely be condemned. The plentiful fat jumping fish they’re destroying are a scourge upon the river. These Asian carp are non-native species. Catfish farmers initially brought them from China to the US to serve as vacuum cleaners: the bottom-feeding carp are fantastic devourers of algae and catfish poop, which collect rapidly in fish farms. But the clever carp jumped fences and made their way into the Mississippi and other American rivers. Now they are consuming phytoplankton and zooplankton, which otherwise would serve as food to local fish—and the invaders’ numbers are increasing exponentially. For the first time this year, John Chick reports, evidence suggests that the carp are highjacking the native fish food supply to the detriment of the locals. This situation has the potential to turn quickly into a major ecological disaster.
“We saw signs that the native fish are under-nourished.” John adds with a smirk, “They’re becoming skinny little Paris Hilton fish.”