Some stretches of the Mississippi feel remote. Others, like the Mississippi River backwaters remind you how closely the river runs alongside everyday life.
Near Savanna, Illinois, the river spreads into a chain of wooded islands and shallow back channels. The water moves slowly and quietly here. From the canoe, it’s easy to lose sight of the nearby towns and highways. The river twists into narrow passages between sandbars and marsh grasses.
Into the Mississippi River Backwaters
For this paddle, we crossed the Mississippi and launched from Sabula, Iowa. The homes lining the riverbank gradually faded as we made our way along Israel Day Lake, at the southern end of Cavanaugh Bottom. The sloughs and lakes here form a maze of slow-moving waterways, creating swamp-like habitat rich with wildlife.
Before crossing the main navigation channel toward Illinois, we encountered a group of pelicans wading in the shallows along one of the islands.
This stretch of the Mississippi River felt considerably more built up than the waters we had paddled in Missouri or farther south near Princeton, yet it still offered pockets of quiet. As we moved through the bottoms, massive pieces of driftwood rested along the banks and shallows, reminders of the river’s constant reshaping of the landscape.
Between Two Worlds
Still, signs of the human world were never far away.
As we paddled along one of the back channels on the Illinois side of the river, a freight train rolled past on the far bank, its long line of cars echoing across the water before disappearing from our line of sight.
We pushed the canoe deeper into the islands, leaving the sound of the train behind. As is characteristic of a slough, the water became very shallow. At points, it seemed almost impassable, with brown silt rising above the waterline in places.
We worked our way through the backchannels until the train was gone and the towns had disappeared from view. For a while, it felt as though we had slipped entirely into the river’s world. But out here, the human world was never very far away.
