Driftless | Part One
Driftless | Part One
By Rick Jebb
Fifty years ago, when the unexpected happened, I didn’t know where to turn. “You can’t outrun God,” the priest had said—turns out he was right.
My family moved to the Midwest without my father when I was seven. At nine, I was fortunate to be introduced to the town of Galena by my great uncle. It was a different kind of place—a place of great surprises.
Our visits always involved exploring. Sometimes past cemetery park, we would walk down hundreds of sidewalk-stair-steps to explore the old commercial district—where the past came alive again. I welcomed the change of scenery: rolling hills, high bluffs and the mansions on cliffs, above the old town center that curved along the banks of the Galena River. These sights, imprinted in my memory, were reminders of a golden age.
Exploring the countryside with siblings and friends, we took delight in the shadows of trees where we were enlisted to pick morel mushrooms that would be sautéed in butter and wine. When we picnicked, sometimes it was at The Rock—my great uncle’s treasured haven. It had been known as the Table Rock by the locals, and from the top of its bluff, we would stare for miles out across the Mississippi floodplain.
After feasting on sandwiches and pie, released again to wander the countryside, sometimes we would squeeze into crevasses cut into the bluffs: cave-like places, laced with rattlesnake shelter and the myriad lairs of mammals.
Our trips to Galena were always filled with delight, a stark contrast to the confusing world back home without my father.
In 1969, my mother remarried. We found ourselves welcoming an intriguing and cool guy named John into the fold, bringing three kids of his own. Our family turned into an amalgamation—something like the Brady Bunch. He became my long awaited savior; full of selfless care, helping me turn my life around. The process had already started in the Northwoods where I had almost lost my life to a whirlpool and had been baptized by the undertow. His part, however, the wilderness could not accomplish. He was a brilliant engineer who taught me the discipline of mathematics and analytical thinking, igniting the part of my brain I hadn’t yet exercised. And he taught me how to play Poker.
By 1970 I had spent four summers at camp, half the time out on canoe trips, paddling millions of strokes, trudging countless portages, and traveling nearly two thousand miles through the boreal forest by canoe and on foot. In this great expanse of meaning and learning, I no longer doubted who I was or worried about the trajectory of my life. And then the unthinkable…
At the end of that summer, my feet were knocked out from under me and my soul was crushed.
When he and my mom had seen me off at the beginning of the summer, we hugged, and my Mom said, “Make sure you bathe every day, and brush your teeth!” John had chuckled to himself; He knew how to let me go in ways she had not. “Have fun,” he said. “Remember what I said about doing your best.”
Those were the last words he ever spoke to me.
I first learned my thirty-eight year old stepfather was lying in a coma when he hadn’t been able to greet me upon my return from camp. That first day back was the first time I recall seriously bargaining with God. Sobbing under the waterfall of my grandparents’ guest room shower, I offered my life for his. Then I waited, and I prayed. And when I went to see him tangled in a jumble of wires and tubes, nothing happened but the dirge of the respirator—a harbinger.
A few days later, my mother arrived home, her hair a mess as she delivered the final blow. “He’s gone,” she said upon returning from the hospital, hollowed out, having aged countless years over those few days. That was when death burst through the wall of my life, sucked the breath out of John and tried to shake the life out of me.
I had done my best! But John was gone before I could tell him.
Amidst the unconscionable injustice, confusion descended like a poisonous fog. In my anger and disbelief, I turned from God. This might have happened anyway for a neuro-atypical teenager in the 1970s but my faith had been shattered. I had to escape from my hell—but I didn’t know how.
Clay Banks
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.
Raffo Perez
In the wilderness, my life was more than just childhood bliss. It had been the place where trial and challenge required me to make sacrifices and face my pain. It had been the place that I was transformed. In nature, it felt as if something was shaping me, carving me, and purifying my soul. The wind in my face; the light reflecting across the lake’s glassy surface; the dangers of rough white waters; and the tough slogging across rocky, muddy portages, loaded down like a mule. This was a way to grow stronger. A way to be tested and forged—to be refined by the fire, cooled by the water, and pounded by the hammer of God.
Before the summer’s end, I had been living in a bubble of hope.
And now, in the early rage of my grief, I struggle to hold on, to break free from the grip of the current, like drowning once again in the waterfall of that first summer.
Alone in my bedroom, inside my self-pity, I consider the last time I felt strong and alive. It had been in a canoe—cutting through the deep blue of pristine glacial meltwater, paddling hard—when I had been tested and healed.
I think about Galena’s golden age, when our nation sprawled out along its rivers and trails, chasing the hope of the frontier before the railroads came.
And I think about the driftless place, meticulously carved by time—its rivers and streams.
I wander downstairs to our den, where I pick up a book about natural scenic wonders and sit and read as I had often done when I felt alone. Turning glossy pages, I find a familiar picture of four hundred foot chimney rock limestone bluffs that decorate the river’s canyon. And when I read the narrative about its rare ecology and archeology, I know in my bones that I need to face the challenge of nature again—to be cradled in its brilliance. It was there, in that moment, that I considered the possibility of another canoe trip, similar to that of my youth, but freed from the expectations and supervision of my elders.
The idea of this trip was a prompting. The present necessity of what I would later determine as an emotional survival instinct, striking at the heart of my frequent desire to escape. The prompting was a response to an inner pain that would continue to define much of my life. The prompting spurred me, at the last minute, just before school began, to propose a canoe trip, hoping to break free from grief’s suffocation.