The opening chapter of my book

Home Waters

On a fine Saturday afternoon in late April the year of my tenth birthday, I left my house with fishing rod and small tackle box strapped to my bicycle.  Pedaling north one block and east four blocks on the small-town back streets, I turned left onto the shoulder of the highway and coasted downhill for a half mile to the high iron bridge.  There I dismounted from the bike, pushed it around the guard rail and under the span, and clambered down the steep bank to the water.  Big River was flowing strongly, green and clear in the sun, and the water was cold against the pair of cheap plastic hip waders I'd recently purchased with money from mowing lawns.  I selected a new lure from my meager supply of tackle, a Rapala floating minnow imitation, and tied it onto my line with a loop knot that I'd learned about by reading my grandpa’s outdoor magazines. I waded along the bank downstream to the riffle, where I knew I could get across the river without going in over my waders.  Safely reaching the gravel bar on the other side, I walked up along the edge of the gravel to where I could move out into the river and cast toward the other side. 

I slowly made my way up the shallow stream as the afternoon passed, catching mostly longear sunfish and green sunfish, or “sun perch” and “black perch” as I knew them back then.  I can still remember the deep pocket in the little indentation along that clay bank; I could point out exactly where it was as I write this, well over a half century later.  I can remember the little lure splashing the surface and diving in a seductive wiggle as I started the retrieve, and I definitely remember the smallmouth bass that slammed into the lure. 

I hope that by this time the statute of limitations has run out, because bass season was closed, but when I finally grasped the lower jaw of that glistening, bronze-backed bass, I couldn't bear to release it.  It was about 16 inches long, the biggest smallmouth I'd ever caught.  I slipped that poor fish down the left leg of my waders and immediately started downriver to my bike.  Pedaling up the long hill on the highway shoulder was a lot more difficult than coasting down it had been, and I was fearful that somebody would stop me and see the illicit fish.  But I reached home safely and ran into the house to show my parents my trophy. 

Dad admired the fish for a bit, saying that it sure was a nice smallmouth.  And then he took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Son, let that be the last bass you keep out of season.”

It was.

Big River, just downstream from where I caught that first smallmouth, from an old photo.

In the next few years I spent a great deal of my free time on the river.  My dad and grandfather were both avid anglers, but Grandpa was mostly interested in catching crappie in the local lakes, and my dad was a reservoir bass fisherman.  I loved fishing with Dad in his big aluminum johnboat on the larger Ozark lakes, but there was something about the river and those powerful little smallmouth bass that the fat largemouth in the big waters just seemed to lack.  Dad, who had fished the river in his younger days, understood my attraction to it, and when I was 13 years old, he surprised me one day with a cheap 12-foot aluminum johnboat that I could use to float Big River.  For two years, my friends and I cajoled our parents incessantly to drive us and that boat to the river and pick us up at the end of the day, and when we got our driver's licenses, they must have breathed sighs of relief.  The little boat left aluminum scrapes on the rocks of Big River for many miles.

I replaced the boat with my first canoe in 1970, the year I graduated from high school.  By the early 1970s, the biggest thing in angling was the explosion in popularity of tournament bass fishing.  I was attending the local junior college, working in a supermarket in the summer, and fishing in the local bass club tournaments nearly every weekend.  I still floated and fished the rivers, but I had dreams of becoming a professional bass fisherman.  The river was a different place to fish and those smallmouth were special, but tournaments were held on the big lakes.  At the time, plans for a high dam on the Meramec River, little more than an hour away, were in the news, and we bass club members spent many hours poring over topographic maps of the area of the river to be inundated by the new lake, enthused by the idea of a big reservoir so close to home.  We gave little thought to the fact that a river would be lost to the lake.

 However, I was reading about the Corps of Engineers project from the perspective of the people who opposed it and wanted the river to remain as it was, and I began to harbor vague feelings that something important would be lost if the Meramec was flooded. I wondered how I would feel if my favorite stretches of my “home river”, Big River, disappeared.  Yet the lure of a great new fishing lake remained strong.

My change of heart came about in an odd way.  I'd developed interests in geology and archeology, and one day I saw an advertisement for a book called “The Buffalo River Country”, by Ken Smith.  The Buffalo, the most spectacularly scenic of all Ozark rivers, had been designated the nation's first “National River” a couple of years before, and the book had been instrumental in recruiting advocates for the National River idea as opposed to the dams that had been planned for the river.  But it was mainly the advertising copy, which noted that the book covered the river's geology and archeology, that intrigued me enough to order it.

When the book came in the mail, I immediately opened the package and started paging through it.  In the vernacular of the times, I was “blown away”.  The photos in that book were amazing, not so much because of their exceptional quality, but simply because of what they depicted.  I had never known that an Ozark stream could be so beautiful.  Somehow it made me realize for the first time the treasure that all these little rivers of the Ozark region represented.  I suddenly understood that even Big River had intrinsic value, as ordinary as I'd always considered it to be and as abused as it was in the old lead mining area where I had grown up.  And it made me rethink the Meramec Dam issue.

By 1977 I had graduated from college and was married and teaching art in Advance, Missouri, and the Meramec Dam controversy was at its height.  I had become firmly against the dam, but though I'd floated several of the most well-known Ozark rivers, I'd yet to float the section of the Meramec that was slated for destruction.  My wife and I decided it was time to finally visit the endangered section and see for ourselves what we stood to lose.  We had become active in environmental organizations, including the Ozark Society, the group that had been among the staunchest defenders of the Buffalo, and we had written a few letters against the Meramec Dam, but we wanted to be able to talk about it from firsthand experience.  So, in the summer of 1977 we set out on a two-day trip from Onondaga Cave to Meramec State Park.

The put-in at Onondaga back then was at an old "hog trough" low water bridge, so named because the parallel tracks of lengthwise planks upon which a vehicle’s tires were supposed to run, laid atop a layer of narrower planks crossways to the span, must have resembled a wooden hog trough to the old timers.  These bridges were made entirely of timber, down to the thick pilings buried in the gravel bottom which supported the span, and to anyone knowing the power of floods on streams such as the Meramec, the fact that they survived as long as they had was surprising.  We clattered across the bridge and parked on the north bank just downstream, where we launched the canoe and left our vehicle for a canoe livery to pick up and move to our take-out the next day.

We shoved off, with my wife holding down the stern and paddling while I fished.  As soon as we left the campground area I picked up a rod, and on the second cast I caught a nice 16 inch largemouth bass.  It was followed soon afterwards by a 13 inch smallmouth.

We soon came to the first bluff, high on river left and mostly obscured by trees.  Then as the river swung across its valley, a beautiful 80 foot wall of limestone came into view, fronted by a narrow ledge of alluvial soil lined with a single row of big sycamore trees, the layered rock strata oddly bowed upward in the center of the cliff.  The river was narrow and intimate there, trees arching overhead and shutting out the weak sun of a slightly overcast day.  Then the river split, with most of the water plunging through a narrow chute to the right and past a cave with a ten-foot-high opening in the cliff before sliding beneath an overhanging bluff rising nearly a hundred feet out of the river.  Water dripped off the rock, dotting the quietly swirling river surface.

Emerging from that narrow channel, we came to a wide stretch of river with a hundred-foot bluff set back from a narrow strip of bottom field cleared to water's edge.  At the margin of a water willow bed in a shallow pool, a large bass ripped into my spinnerbait, and I had visions of a trophy smallmouth, but when it turned broadside at the surface near the canoe I could see the black band down its side and knew it was a largemouth.  Nevertheless, a 19-inch river largemouth bass was a fine catch and merited some photos before releasing it.

We reached Campbell Bridge, five miles below Onondaga, after passing four more bluffs from 80 to 160 feet high.  Each one was different, but they were equally gorgeous, framed in bankside trees and clearing blue skies.  I switched lures, and immediately had a huge smallmouth, well over 20 inches, follow the white wobbling bait to the canoe before slashing at it as I lifted it from the water.  Before the day was over I'd catch nine bass from 13 to 17 inches on the white lure, but none like that one. 

The largest fish of the first day, a 17-inch smallmouth.

We passed beneath what I would later learn was Vilander Bluff, one of the highest and most scenic cliffs on the entire river, a buff and blue-gray streaked rock face rising over 200 feet.  I knew from my topographic map that two caves, Dry Cave and Little Onyx Cave, emerge from the bluff, and we stopped to climb up the steep talus slope to Little Onyx, hearing the eerie moaning sound of pigeons.  The birds clattered out of the cave as we reached it.  We didn't venture far into the gloom and were soon back on the river.

More bluffs, more interesting riffles, and wildlife including three mink and three species of herons, combined with the good fishing to keep us entertained in the three more miles down to Blue Springs Creek.  By the time we reached the low water bridge at the mouth of the creek, the afternoon was waning.  We slipped through a breach torn in the bridge, which was another wooden hog trough affair with planks missing or tilting crazily. We supposed there was little reason to repair these bridges when they might soon be buried under the lake.  Searching for a campsite, we passed up several good bars because there were other people around the summer cabins that lined the river near the bridge, and finally picked an intimate spot on a rather brushy bar a mile downstream.  Setting up camp, we heated some canned beef stew and enjoyed a hot meal in the orange light of the setting sun.  A nearly full moon gradually replaced the dying glow to the west, and we retreated to the tent and listened to the babble of the nearby riffle and a serenade of screech owls before dropping off to sleep.

We awoke in the cool, gray dawn, the river shrouded in mist, and ate a leisurely breakfast of hot oatmeal and tea, waiting for the promised sun to burn off the dew before folding the tent and loading the canoe.  In the eight miles to our take-out that second day, there would be fewer bluffs, but the river remained very attractive, with its mixture of riffles, fast runs, and long pools.  Banks lined with rocks and old, slick, submerged sycamore logs appealed to my fishing instincts, and I experimented with different colors of the wobbling lure that had produced the day before, finally settling on a green and black combination.  By the time we stopped for lunch just below Sappington Bridge, I'd released 10 bass from 12 to 17 inches.  But the river was saving its best for near the end.

The warm sun and the quiet buzz of summer insects in the riverside trees invited drowsiness, and soon my wife was dozing in the back of the canoe, the stern end cap and her paddle supporting her head and shoulders.  With 14 nice bass released by that time, I probably wasn't fishing as alertly as before, but in the back of my mind was the thought of that big smallmouth I'd seen the previous day at Campbell Bridge, and the hope for another one that size.

It was a swirling run, the river curving against a high clay bank, just a couple of miles above the park.  The canoe was tight against the vertical alluvium as I used the narrow zone of water slowed by friction against the bank to control the craft while I fished, since my wife and paddler was still dozing instead of handling the boat.  I was casting ahead of the canoe, parallel to the bank.  Cast and retrieve, cast and retrieve; halfway down the run, a paddle stroke to keep the canoe in position; cast and retrieve, cast and—there was a great swirl just as the lure dipped beneath the surface and I set the hooks against solid resistance.  My shout roused my wife, and she gasped as the big smallmouth cleared the water by two feet in its only real leap.  The big ones seldom waste much energy in jumping, and after that memorable sight, this one bored for the bottom, pumping a third of my rod down into the water, and then surged into a powerful run toward the middle of the river that swung the front end of the canoe around and stripped yards of line off my reel.  It surfaced as I dipped the rod tip and applied pressure to the side to discourage any more dangerous leaps.  Then the bass shot across the bow of the canoe in another powerful run toward the bank, towing the canoe back the other way.  Wife backpaddled away from the bank and a tangle of logs that would have given the bass refuge and a chance at fouling the line, and the battle settled into a series of surges and rolls and dives that ended when I forced the fish's head up and grasped its lower jaw, lifting 22 inches and five pounds of bronzeback, still one of the biggest Ozark river smallmouth I've ever caught.

The 22-inch smallmouth from that first trip.  I carried this little photo around in my wallet for several years.  I was much younger then!

After that trip, I wrote articles in a regional periodical, letters to politicians, and missives to newspapers, all extolling the virtues of the undammed Meramec, and I'd like to think I played a small role in the final fate of the Meramec Dam, voted down by regional referendum and eventually de-authorized.  I'd fallen in love with this beautiful river, and in the following years I got to know the whole Meramec, even floating it from its highest normal put-in, Short Bend near Highway 19, to Times Beach, a total of more than 160 miles, in one epic 12-day trip.  I also learned the Bourbeuse, Huzzah, Courtois, a couple of smaller tributary streams that are little known and seldom floated, and even several little tributary creeks which I explored by wading.  The streams of the Meramec Basin are still some of my favorite float destinations, and I've seen the changes, both good and bad, that have overtaken the rivers and the watershed.

The Meramec and its tributaries drain around 2,149 square miles of eastern Missouri, just southwest of St. Louis.  The system contains three major Ozark streams, the Meramec, Bourbeuse, and Big River, along with two smaller but canoe-navigable feeder streams, Huzzah and Courtois creeks, two marginally floatable streams, the Mineral Fork, tributary to Big River, and Indian Creek, tributary to the Meramec, and a long stream with little water, Dry Fork.  The Meramec itself is nearly 220 miles from its source to where it empties into the Mississippi River just south of St. Louis.  Big River, the largest tributary, is 138 miles long, and the Bourbeuse flows for 147 miles.  In total there are well over 500 miles of permanently flowing streams within the basin that are large enough to furnish typical recreation such as fishing and swimming.  And none of this water is much more than two hours’ driving time from the largest metropolitan area in the state of Missouri; a good portion of it lies less than an hour from the city of St. Louis.

Moreover, there is a remarkable diversity to the waters and land within this watershed.  The Meramec itself begins as a usually dry stream flowing northward from the vicinity of Salem in a typical Ozark Plateau landscape that is a mix of rough, steep hollows and ridges and more gently rolling pasturelands.  It picks up water from small seeps and springs and becomes a perennially flowing stream about 15 miles from its highest source.  It has been floated in good water from that point but does not really become big enough to float a loaded canoe, even in the higher water levels of spring, for a dozen more miles.  From there, the upper river runs for nearly 30 miles, a typical small, gravel bottomed Ozark stream, surrounded by hills and cleared bottom fields with frequent low cliffs of the dolomitic limestone so characteristic of much of the Ozarks, before receiving a major inflow from Maramec Spring.

Upper reach of the Meramec

(Note the different spelling of Maramec Spring.  Old published reports spelled it that way, though it was probably a mistake that it was not spelled the same as the river.  The James Foundation, which has owned the spring since the 1800s, has kept this traditional spelling.  In fact, “Meramec” is itself a corruption of the supposed Native American pronunciation of the river.  Legend has it that the Native American word signified “waters of ugly fish”, or catfish.  The French spelled the Indian word “Miaramiguoua”, and the river’s name has gone through a number of different historic spellings before the present version.)

The spring, which emerges from the ground in a beautiful park, is the fifth largest spring in Missouri, a state known for huge springs.  Under its influence, the Meramec for the next 8 miles or so becomes a trout stream, with water temperatures more hospitable to cold water fish and other creatures than the cool water species usually found in the Ozarks.  From that point the river is big enough to furnish year-round canoe floating and some use by jet outboard powered watercraft.  In the next 37 miles, fed by other springs and small creeks, the Meramec grows slowly larger, and as the spring influence wanes, it reverts into the kind of cool water habitat so typical of the larger Ozark streams.  Receiving the waters of Huzzah Creek, itself doubled by the merging with its sister stream Courtois Creek just a mile above the Meramec, the river becomes noticeably wider.  Huzzah and Courtois are twin gems; fast, exceptionally clear, and flowing through quietly scenic Ozark valleys. 

Huzzah Creek

                                                                 

Downstream from the Huzzah is the Meramec's most spectacular section, the part of the river once endangered by the Meramec Dam, with high, rugged bluffs at every bend, clear green water, and clean gravel bars.  At the end of that section, in the vicinity of where the dam would have been, the river winds by Meramec State Park, one of Missouri's finest parks.  Below the park, the river begins to slow a bit, and more of the ills of civilization become apparent, notably in the form of cabins and clubhouses along the banks.  But the Meramec remains classically Ozarkian in character until it reaches the mouth of its second largest tributary, the Bourbeuse River.

Meramec in the stretch that would have been dammed.

The Bourbeuse is far from a typical Ozark stream.  A good portion of the land it drains is underlain by sandstone, rather than the dolomite and limestone that covers most of the Ozarks.  Its valley is wider and shallower than that of the Meramec, a mosaic of small farms, woodlots, and pastureland, and the river flows more slowly than a typical Ozark stream.  With the abundance of cleared agricultural land, the Bourbeuse is usually murky, both from erosion from cleared bottom fields and from algal growth due to fertilizer and livestock waste runoff.  Yet its water quality is reasonably good, and inhabitants include not only the usual Ozark species, but some that are more typical of the flatter lands of northern Missouri.

Bourbeuse River

                                                           

Below the Bourbeuse, the Meramec flows for 25 miles before reaching its biggest tributary by average volume, Big River.  While the Bourbeuse flows through younger geologic formations along the flank of the Ozark uplift, the headwaters of Big River are in the Precambrian hills of the St. Francois Mountains, the geologic center of the Ozarks and the oldest exposed rock in the region.  When the river emerges from the St. Francois Mountains, it runs through the former lead mining area known as the Old Lead Belt, where it is badly damaged by the effects of previous mining activity, and from there it enters another mining area, this time barite mining, where it is further degraded.  Picking up the clear, clean waters of the Mineral Fork, the river continues into the continually expanding suburbs of the St. Louis area, and cabins and residences are very common along the banks.  Yet the river, for all the abuses it suffers, still retains a surprisingly healthy Ozarkian ecology.

Big River

                                                               

Downstream from Big River, the Meramec is a large, slow, and murky urban stream, a far cry from the sparkling clear waters of the upper river.  It is surrounded by suburbs and industry, sectioned off by many bridges, its banks altered by gravel and sand dredging in numerous places.  But its water quality remains acceptable and it furnishes recreation for many of the citizens of the St. Louis area.  

Lower Meramec

With the variety of lands and rocks in the watershed, the range of different stream characteristics, and the overall quality of riverine habitat, the Meramec and its tributaries are home to the largest number of species of aquatic life of any Ozark river system.  With clear headwater creeks, clean, strongly flowing mid-size streams, the slower and more fertile farm country waters of the Bourbeuse, and finally the lower river with its connection to the Mississippi, the system boasts just about every type of riparian habitat to be found in the Midwest.  Along with the quality and diversity of the streams of the Meramec Basin, its proximity to St. Louis makes it perhaps the most important riverine recreational area in the region.  That proximity also puts the system in perpetual danger of suffering abuses from human activities.  The mining areas on Big River are the most obvious, but far from the only environmental problems within the watershed.  Unwise land clearing with subsequent erosion of sediments into the waters is a ubiquitous problem.  Clearing of riparian forest cover makes banks susceptible to damage.  Gravel dredging, both for commercial use and in misguided attempts to control flooding and bank erosion, adversely affects the hydrology and the stream habitat.  Suburban sprawl, with attendant septic tank problems and storm water run-off, degrades water quality along with the aesthetics of the landscape.  The large percentage of the watershed used for raising cattle presents its own problems with nutrient pollution and agricultural wastes.  Moreover, the portions of the rivers closest to St. Louis flow through industrial areas with their own sources of pollution, along with alterations to the channel and banks.

In some places the streams are simply in danger of being loved to death.  Numerous campgrounds and canoe liveries are found over much of the Meramec, along with the Huzzah and Courtois.  While most of the campground and livery owners try to be good stewards of the stream resource, the sheer volume of users can have severe effects on both water quality and the recreational experience.  Add to that the continually growing popularity of high-speed jet boat use, with its attendant wave wash attacking banks, and the mainstream Meramec often seems to be in danger of drowning under a sea of people.

Yet the river and its sister streams have so many places where one can find solitude and quiet beauty.   Drift down the middle Meramec on a winter day when the colors are all muted grays and browns beneath cloudy skies, and the quietly flowing water is dark and mysterious as it swirls beneath a towering bluff.  Ride Huzzah Creek in a kayak down a twisting, laughing riffle that opens out onto a smooth run beneath giant sycamore trees growing across from a gravel bar gleaming in the sun, where you can see every rock on the bottom in the six feet of amazingly clear water and watch the minnows and suckers fleeing from the shadow of your craft.  Paddle along a steep hillside on Big River on an April day, when the bluebells are blooming thickly in the narrow, wooded zone at the base of the hill and the redbuds with their showy bouquets punctuate the valley sides.  Lean back in your seat and soak in the understated beauty of a long, still Bourbeuse River pool, lined on one side with thick bankside forest and on the other by a low bluff that has shed great sandstone boulders into the river throughout the ages.  Then you'll see why I love these Ozark gems.