Lisa Knopp’s most recent collection of essays, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, explores the rivers of the Midwest, the region she’s always called home. Knopp, the author of four other essay collections, combines nature writing, memoir, and place-based writing to explore the three rivers that have defined her life. For readers interested in a region that tends to be overlooked by contemporary travelers and writers alike, What the River Carries meaningfully contributes to a canon of Midwestern creative nonfiction that includes the work of writers such as William Least Heat Moon (his classic: PrairyErth), the work of the late Paul Gruchow (Journal of a Prairie Year; Grass Roots: The Universe of Home), John Price, (Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships; Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands), and others.
Organized into three sections based on each river, the book contains 18 chapters that blend highly personal experiences with explorations of the ways nature and culture have shaped places and people along and around the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte. The history of the Midwest might seem to have little to do with the violent past associated with the South, the mythology of the American West, or dramatic physical landscapes that loom large in the popular imagination. And this book at first glimpse reveals a region that seems quiet, devoid of drama, subdued, tamed. This impression may in part have to do with the fact that, as the author notes, the Midwest is a horizontal landscape that “suggests repose, peacefulness and spaciousness” and therefore lacks “dramatic and dynamic” vertical lines that suggest a restlessness. Some of this sense of domestication may also have to do with the fact that “the North American prairie is less than one-tenth of 1 percent of its former size”; there are few, if any other environments on the continent that have been eradicated to this extent.
As one reads the book, it becomes clear that, on a grand scale—the dams, locks, and levees of the Mississippi, the vast reservoirs of the Missouri, and the unsustainable demands placed on the Platte River—the region described in this book has lost much of the original grandeur and mythology afforded by the free-flowing Mississippi of Mark Twain’s era; it literally has been subdued. In often lyrical prose, the author identifies the long-term costs to people and the environment that are associated with heavy-handed use such as the dumping of chemicals, overharvesting of mussels, or poor use of groundwater resources. In “Mississippi Harvest,” for instance, Knopp chronicles the rise and fall of the Mississippi pearl button industry, before it was undone by the decimation of the mussels whose shells were used to make the buttons, and by the invention of plastic, which simplified the button-making process. Though it’s probably an exaggeration to say that “[f]reshwater mussels are now the most threatened and endangered group of animals in all of North America”, since such species as the black-footed ferret, the Alabama beach mouse, or the bonytail chub—along with a host of others—are severely endangered, I was intrigued to learn that freshwater mussels “prevent or limit those bacteriological or algal infestations that endanger the well-being of entire aquatic ecosystems”. The author notes that saving freshwater mussels is not as “glamorous” as saving species such as polar bears or California condors and thus this work is “largely unseen and unsung,” perhaps like the Midwest itself.
For this chapter, and others, a map or a series of maps would have been a welcome addition in order to help readers locate specific stretches of river, towns, and events, and in general, see the geographical proximity of the three rivers to one another. But in short, for those interested in reading about the Midwest, What the River Carries offers a glimpse into a fascinating landscape that includes Indian burial mounds, catfish, the history of Nauvoo, Illinois, and its Mormon neo-colonization, the story of Nebraska’s magnificent Sandhill cranes, and the history of outlaw Jesse James. The author writes that “the more I learn about prairie, the more I see it as a place of keen competition between the various plants for water, light and nutrients”. You could also say the same for the region itself. The more deeply one goes into this place and the rivers that flow through it, the more it becomes clear why, despite the many past and current struggles in this region, so many call this place home, in all senses of the word.
Look for Hal’s essay “Time and Chance on a High Desert River” in Issue 30 of Terrain.org. Header photo by Simmons B. Buntin.