May 27, 2015
Max’s Musings
By Max Molleston
You and I want rivers! Enjoy and marvel or, be suspicious and alarmed. Each spring, I am alert (you may be too) about the flow from seasonal northern snow heading south, filling creeks and streams, building those larger landmarks we call rivers. We live in the Mississippi River Basin, a grand sweep of land.
The mighty Ohio joins the Mississippi at Cairo. Locals say Care oh. Each time I muse on the Mississippi, it is romantic, even when defined through a half dozen meanings in my dictionary. A new age came in 1870, with steam engines. Dick Stahl’s poem:
Launch.Van Sant’s boiler knows its power;
how its steam pressure drives
the engines to run
two pitman arms that turn
a paddlewheel.
On its side, in letters
the size of boat lanterns, is painted
J. W. Van Sant.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser
and Captain Sam Van Sant wave
from the pilothouse.
Jake Mackenzie’s floating-raft license
Is in his eyes, seeing
water breaking
over the smoothest rocks, ripples caressing
a snag, shallow water
smiling at Rapids Pilots
to come in
and then sneering them
down into swirls
of five miles per hour, a speed
where his eyes write a new channel
by the second.
As the patrons of the Green Tree Hotel
are stranded, staring
at a churning paddlewheel ,
I turn my sweep
and dip
into the river’s flesh.
The sweep was a long oar used for steering the floating rafts. Dick Stahl, Davenport native, authored his book for Iowa’s 150th anniversary of statehood and titled it ”Under the Green Tree Hotel,” long a fixture in LeClaire, Iowa, on the Mississippi River. Dick and his wife Helen, traveled summers for a few years, north, then south on the upper Mississippi gathering rafting stories and personalities. The big river was the avenue for cut timber rafts bound to sawmills in these parts. Most ambitious, and lucky, was Frederick Weyerhaeuser. We still have the opportunity to buy or sell stock in that firm, which carries the family name. We are talking of rafting ending in 1915, dealing with the rapids rediscovered each downstream journey.
A personal note: I am longtime friends with Dick and Helen Stahl, as Dick is a premier poet in this territory. I noted the merit of his publication, “Under The Green Tree Hotel.” Dick volunteered that I have been a “best customer” over the years. I just might have the final two of these from the run printed by the East Hall Press, at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. I hope you’ve had time to spend on the river, and now are on a course to return in June.
