This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Of the thousand or more island sprinkled on the Upper Mississippi River, only one is fit for that Biblical wise man: the solid limestone bed of Rock Island. Foolish men have their choice of any of the others, from St. Paul to St. Louis, all of them made of slippery silt or sand. As the Sunday School song says, "when the rains come down and the floods come up" . . . watch out foolish man.
Or perhaps not so foolish. At the expense of uncertainty, life on a Mississippi sand island is a drama of endless acts, comedy and tragedy mingled, a real-life theater in the round.
Such an island makes its impromptu entrance, stage right, at a place where the current laden with sand and silt is slowed by a curve or a tree branch snagged in the river bottom. Here, the river lays its burden down. Most of these small sandbars are soon washed away by rains and high water, but on a few, by chance, birds or wind bring seeds from rushes and cattails. They sprout, and their roots hold the sand, long enough for sandbar willow to find their way there.
With luck, and no severe flooding for a year or two, this fledgling island will begin to grow at its downstream tip as the current is slowed so that more sand and silt are deposited. The new island soon looks like a baseball bat or an exclamation point.
Often, more substantial trees find their way to the island, silver maples, black willows, and elms, as well as new shrubs and flowers: giant ragweed, milkweeds.
With the stage set, the actors arrive: egrets and blue herons, mink and otter, raccoons, and other bit players. The scenery changes. Walnuts and ash and cottonwood arise. The plot thickens. There are the hunters and the hunted, chases and escapes, struggles for dominance. Life and death.
Now for the final act. The rains come down and the flood comes up. Animals and birds head for higher ground. The current swells, eats away at the stage. A silver maple gives way, an elm leans and topples. Exit right. Sans actors, sans scenery, sans stage, the drama ends.
This is Roald Tweet, on Rock Island.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
