This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Why is it that children have all the best books? After Snow White and Rose Red, Huck and Tom, The Cat in the Hat and Curious George, what's left? May I recommend Minn of the Mississippi, written by Holling C. Hollings in 1951. It's 86 pages, and 2,552 miles long.
Minn is a snapping turtle born at the headwaters of the Mississippi. In delicate and detailed pencil drawings, Hollings follows the adventures of the turtle down the Great River past Rock Island and St. Louis and Vicksburg for twenty-five years until, fat and content with life, she reaches a cypress swamp below New Orleans.
I know of no other book that presents such a clear and caring vision of the intricate web of life sustained by the Mississippi River—the connectedness of water and land, nature and human. Are you curious about the life of turtles? How they are hatched and what they eat? How big they grow? It's here. Do you want to know how the Mississippi came to be, how it forms bends and cuts new channels, who discovered and lived along its banks? That's here, too.
Here you'll find the story of the amazing mound builders a thousand years ago, the canoes, flatboats, and great lumber rafts down to the towboats of today steering barges through the locks (whose workings are explained). Want to tan a beaver pelt? You'll learn how. Interested in how floods happen? Check chapter 17. Even things you did not know enough to ask about are answered here in picture and in word.
If you haven't ever read this book, it's time you did. A part of your childhood is missing, and you aren't getting any younger. If you don't have the nerve to check Minn out of the children's department, your son or daughter will do it for you. Give yourself an afternoon to make the trip through its pages.
And then you're ready to head for Lake Itasca where the Mississippi is born. For like all good children's books, Minn of the Mississippi in not an end but a beginning. It isn't enough to read about what someone else has done—you need to make the trip yourself; find your own snapping turtle. Minn of the Mississippi takes two hours to read; the real trip will never end.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
