River's End

. . . . . . . . . . Major funding for Rivers End was provided by a grant from the Audubon Council of Illinois, a council of the National Audubon Society Actors in Illinois, additional funding was provided by the Vermillion County Audubon Society. . .

. . . . . . . . . . . A river flows forever. It's ripple cadence marked by human hands. And echoed in what they make. Of that the river never knows. Till a day comes when the tools of people cut. Not in clay or flint or bone, but in shoreline sky and water.

Change color, sight and sound. Arrange nature's careful choice with careless disarray. And quickly comes a time that can't turn quickly back. And a river of forever flow looks like a river's end. . . Time brings change in our lives. And you've got to be sometimes as hard except that you have to be big enough to accept these changes. And there will be, like it used to be. I drank water from the river, but no way would I drank it anymore. No way.

. It's going to take a lot of give and take in a lot of places to do anything that even will stop what's happening. Not cure it. It could make a difference in the future loss, but not what we've already lost. Removing the bottom land lakes from the Illinois River by drainage and levee districts was very similar to removing the rocks off a Samson by the self-seeking Delilah. The river dumps more of its sediment load in those remaining lakes because it can't get into the areas that were drained and protected by levees. When nature changes things, it's called a natural catastrophe. But when mankind changes it, it's called progress. Is it progress? What is progress? Is changing our lakes by filling up full of mud at progress? .

The river so bright I was born in a hut made of husks with a tall yard. I first bied my Julius so true that I wrote about in my country. Singing through the waters so blue, like a feather will float in our country. Anytime that you heard the steamboat whistle for a landing, or for the bridge to open to let it through, you've got to flock of people down here. And I heard that I dropped everything I was doing around down here.

Judge Howard White was just a boy when the riverfront was the heart of town in Havana, Illinois. He remembers lots of good times before pollution sent down river from Chicago, the draining of lakes and wetlands, and soil runoff changed the way of life. There were canoers, boats, and all sorts on the river. I barely remember when they had two or three launches that were harbored here, that carried people back and forth up the river to the river. I should talk apart just north of here, and the river beach on beyond that were resort areas.

I should talk about the bath house dressing rooms down on the river, sand beaches, which you have trouble finding anymore. On up here at the swimming area of quiver beach, they used to have big dance hall and boardwalks. Like a lighting city, maybe in the miniature. Like a feather will float in our country. When you look back, 60 years ago, 50 years ago, it changes extreme. We had pretty clear water in the lake, and they had the diving rack with about a 10-foot tower on it.

If you tried to dive in from a tower, if you could float a tower out there, out toward the middle of that thing, you'd land with your head in the mud. It looks more like a ditch that does a lake at the upper head there. Very full. Every day I'm working on the Illinois River again, a half a day off with paint. At the turn of the century, the port of Havana was supposedly the largest freshwater fish shipping point in the country. The fishing was mostly done in the backwater lakes or riverside lakes. From the time I was about 10 years old, I watched them down here. They caught nets full of commercial fish, transported them down the river or up the river to the market boats and let them call the live box.

Then they take the big long handle dip nets and dip the fish up out of those live boxes into the market. Dressed them, pack them in ice, boxes, and ship them out of here on the railroad. Almost all of us are here. Almost all year round that the fishermen could use their nets.

They fish under the ice, make what they call the same hull, under the ice, and cut large amounts of fish. Then all spring and summer fall with the leveeing off for farmland of a good many of the lakes that they would have faced. Later on the siltation problems with some of the shallower lakes. They just ran out of any place to catch commercial fish. They're limited now to whatever they can catch in the river and some small amount of backwater that are still deep enough to fish. That's it. The loss of place to fish. In the magnitude of loss, I'd say 95%. I represented the commercial fisheries organization of the state for almost 30 years.

And the same thing is true to one degree or another, one end of the river and the other. Loss of areas to fish in. To me, it's a matter of ultimate survival. And it's been said that if a buzzard follows their nest long enough, they've got to find another place to live, can't stand it. The comparison is that if we continue to destroy our wetlands, our woodlands, our other environmental benefits, we're going to have to try and find another place to live, but where is it? There's a soul still keep a watch on the deep for the rest of the river day.

Is it then come back as a channel cap or the wasped light on the wheel? Or the birds that fly through summer sky? Or the fish swimming under the keel. That's when we got married when we was cutting buttons. It made everybody get the money. It had a quick cutting rod to start digging shells again and then start fishing again, commercial fishing, nets, basket, all to have you. Put it this way up until 53 river was my life. Born right on the river. It didn't go nothing but the river.

Leonard Easley made his living off the Illinois River for almost 50 years. He's fished for muscle shells, which were used to cut mother of pearl buttons before they were replaced by plastic. He's seen most of the muscle beds disappear. He's one of a few old time rivermen left who knows what the river once provided. We just go out there in the morning, after we eat, we just go out there and go to the bed. Where the bed was, we pick out it every bed each day. And we start to put our bars out and start to drag and race them every few minutes. Or whenever we thought we had a bar load and pick the shell up, drop back out and go ahead again. There's a gentle sneeze in the river breeze. I'm saying so, I'm going to bed. And then the light, the pipes go off in the night.

It was a firefly. When I was real young, we had a cabin boat. Otherwise, we camped out, we just take a tent out, we'd take a tent out and set it up on the bank. Just digging shells. Just digging shells, that's all I know. What I mean, you know, out on the river, morning to night, morning to night. Of course there ain't too many beds now, but you learn at that time you learn where there was. And where you could drag and where you couldn't drag is a lot of places in your shell. But you couldn't drag. There were too many logs and hangs and snakes and stuff like that. But, you know, it'd be a tussle to grasp them around. We'd come in the end of the day and run over shells. Like today, while we was out getting more, the mother would cook them out. They'd have to be in a vat, and what wasn't in the vat was that she cooked shells.

She would throw them out on the table, starting table, I guess you would call it. When we start the shells from the meat, then scoop in more shells. Load the vat up, get them cooked them up. In the meantime, she might have a pot of beans on cooking for dinner. You know, you can go to the shell bed, it used to be. And you can find shells there yet. But they're dead. But kill them. I'll tell you it's truth. I thought I shouldn't even be eating the fish in it. But I do. It's probably get to me. I'm too old and I don't worry about it. You know, back then, the river was supposed to have been polluted.

But it's not polluted like it is now or fall. You see, they didn't have all them chemicals like they got now. That's what's fluting the river is all them chemicals. That's what's killing all the fish and all the clam from everything else. One of you, they just going to kill us. All the roads we ran, folks we knew. Risky things that we used to do. Now it's over and over through.

I know we should read at our time again. We should read at our time again. Then formed, and that was our living. We found that the purpose of the island was duck hunting. Dorothy Van Deventer lived on Meridocia Island for 43 years. She called it her island garden, her heart's home. She helped run a duck club, but the ducks began to disappear when their food source was polluted. The leveeing off of the floodplain bottled the water in, and the river swept over her beloved island one too many times. She still visits when she can. I don't think you guys will ever see the ducks that I saw. This generation will never see them. That first problem here, it just be thousands and thousands of ducks. Some said it would be the black cross the western sky in that beautiful red. None of the morning they become in this way.

They leave the rest pond wherever they was at at night and they go that way and come around to different ponds. Then the sky would be a different color. It would be silvery wind, just silvery. If you're outside you could hear the noise of many thousands of wings. The first time I was here was in 1936. I belonged here at the end by May in 1937. They would always get the ducks ready for me and I would bake them and cook the meals. Then everything but the laundry. We took the laundry into town. I didn't do the laundry.

It was pretty much the same year in and year out each duck season. But it got smaller and smaller, less ducks and less ducks. Oh, there was lots of fish in there. The fish were good. They didn't have all that oil and taste and stuff that they have now. I don't like fish all the river anymore. It wasn't for a long time. Yeah, you had your hard chips but it was worth it. I love my island. I know what it's called. I called it my island because it was ours from one duck season to the next. But it was sweet at our time. It was sweet at our time. It was quiet and it was not with nature and all the ducks and everything. Just what I wanted. Just what I enjoyed. A lot of hard work, a lot of hard chips. It went with it but it was, it was home. It was fantastic. If you stay with the river, you're sometimes you gain some time to lose but it's just the way of life.

The several families lived here at home before I came here. The water came up. They didn't really have to move out like we did because later years they started building dams and levees and things and that course all over the country. But those early years, the water come up and go back down and come up more regular, you know, more often. It used to be many, many pecan trees down the lower end of the island but then the water continued flooding killed out. I think with the yard of pecan trees. It seemed lots of floods. We've had a lot of floods here and moved out many times. People say, why do you go back and say, it's my island. I want to go back. Clean up the mud and play the wild and pretty soon you move down again. But then you always, we always came back, always. Don't find any of the houses. We couldn't clean it up anymore.

It was gone. It was hard. It was hard to see it go but it had to go because you couldn't clean it up. Down the wood and talked to the birds about it and cried a little bit. We came back and it was all right because I knew the house had to go. It couldn't, it was a mess. It had, it went due to me floods. It has been termed the most studied river in the world. It probably is to some degree with a amount of work that's

done on this for such a long period of time. Our predecessors were saying what we're saying today and they were saying it 80 to 90 years ago. Dr. Steve Havera, a wildlife biologist grew up near the Illinois River in Peoria. He saw the diving ducks leave the river, the fishing die out. The lakes getting shallower and the floods getting worse and worse. I think what's most frustrating is that even though we had been telling people what's happening, people didn't seem to understand or appreciate what they were losing. The old saying is you don't appreciate something until it's gone is very true. Probably the biggest thing that's happened after we had the Lake Michigan diversion, which has been more or less reduced to some degree. We had all the sewage and industrial waste coming down from Chicago that occurred with the first of a pushable Lake Michigan diversion in 1900 to about 1920. We now have sanitary districts that take out a lot of the problems associated with organic

and industrial pollution. The levees that are there, they have been there since the 20s. Our dams were put in place in the 30s and they're still there. What we have now is a sedimentation problem. The problem was that that bare ground laying out in these fertile fields, soil in the world because we don't have the waterways that we had in the fields. We don't have the buffer wetlands that we had. A lot of that soil was removed from our fields. A lot of people have called that the Great Terrain robbery. The sad thing is that we're taking the best soil in the world and it really was not managed properly the last 20 or 30 years and it's being transported to a large degree to the best wetlands in North America here and subsequently we're mining our soil and we're losing our best wetlands. Double-edged sword. This is happening to all the lakes along the valley. What are we losing?

We're losing the biological functions of wetlands and many people don't understand what they are but they purify our water. They help us against flooding problems. The aquatic plants that used to grow in these lakes were extremely important. They were productive. They cleansed the water. They provided habitat for fish for animals that other mammals and birds ate and so forth. They were to key to the entire valley. And until we get aquatic plants established in these lakes again, it's going to be difficult for the ecology of the river to heal itself. And it's kind of sad to see all that go down the tubes. I think what we all have to do is work together and I think agriculture has to get a lot of their policies so that they complement each other rather than contrast with each other to manage our soil wisely to keep the soil work long at the same time providing habitat for a multitude of wildlife species. I wish I saw the river 50 or 60 years ago when all the fish and plants and ducks and things were out there. But are people going to be saying that?

Well, I wish I would live back in the 1980s and 1990s. They had a good back then. We are just temporary stewards at one little picture or window of nature's eons of time. We're here for what? Less than a hundred years. And it's important to us. It's like a flower blooming and then fading away. We, as people, we as a world as a society, will have a lot better livelihood for those who follow us if we work in concert with nature and work with her rather than trying to tame her, trying to manhannler, trying to dominate her. We'll all benefit in the future if we work with her. I wish we had our time again.

I wish we had our time again. I wish we had our time again. Thank you. Major funding for Rivers End was provided by a grant from the Audubon Council of Illinois, a Council of the National Audubon Society chapters in Illinois. Additional funding was provided by the Vermillion County Audubon Society.