A Muted Voice

Chris Adkins, Dallas County Conservation naturalist

Mike Kilen/Des Moines Register

text excerpt: Mike Kilen, A muted voice in water quality debate is finally heard, Des Moines Register, 8/29,2016

They sat on a panel together on a sunny Saturday morning in Redfield near the banks of the Raccoon River, which is at the heart of the dispute.

Economics and scientific data filled the air more than bird song — millions of dollars to clean up, milligrams per liter of nitrates to worry over. You may have heard some of this before. It’s how we talk about nature.

Then a voice rose in the summer breeze from a big, bearded man making the introductions — Chris Adkins, a Dallas County Conservation naturalist. He speaks as if the ancients are calling from the cliffs of nearby Hanging Rock. It is this soulful deep voice that has been missing from the debate, a man with enough science between his ears to make you dizzy with facts, but one who chooses to settle you instead with the story of the river, spoken from the heart instead of the head.

Adkins told the 50 assembled here that if there is magic in this world it is in the water, which makes up 70 percent of our bodies. We are the magic waters.

Adkins held up a gift to the crowd, a jug of water, straight from the Middle Raccoon.

“Who would like the first swig?” he asked. “You’re all looking at me like I’m crazy. ‘You can’t drink this water. Chris, we’re a little beyond that in this debate.’ But why are we? Why is this an acceptable notion?”

His great-great grandfather rode on horseback across Iowa in 1858 to settle and wrote about it in a journal. When he got thirsty, he didn’t wait for the next hamlet to stop at a Casey’s, Adkins continued. He drank the water. When steamboats came through Des Moines they knew how deep the river was because they could see the bottom.

On this day, the water was so muddy with sediment that your hand disappeared just under the surface.

“Two years ago I was telling this story to a bunch of fifth-graders. One was a special-needs kid … and when he heard it, he said, “No! No! Chris, that’s a bad story!’ And he took off running,” Adkins said.

He told the teacher he would chase the boy down. When Adkins caught him, he thanked him.

You are the first person in my 30-year career that I have put that out to who has responded in a sane fashion.”

“It’s the tragedy of the historic present,” Adkins continued. “That what we are experiencing now has always been so.”

The panelists would go on to make their remarks later, of course. Stowe is convinced that agriculture producers, like any industry, should be responsible for what comes from the drainage pipes of their fields.  Wolf said each piece of land is so varied and complex and the weather so changing that universal regulations are difficult. It will take dogged voluntary conservation efforts and public money to finance them.

Moderator Mary Skopec, who is a water expert as a research geologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said that excess nitrate readings from farm field drainage have recently become a year-round problem, not just in high-flow months. But while we focus on nitrates, we also can’t forget the dangerous bacteria and blue-green algae increasingly popping up in our rivers that are even more a danger to public health.

But Adkins’ stories, minus the numbers, were just as real.

He talked of taking youth to field trips to the deep wilderness on the Selway River in Idaho, diving down 7 feet into the clear waters so transparent that he could see the bottom far below and the surface high above.

“For the only time in this old German’s life, I could fly. So I have this dream. I’m going to drink in the Raccoon River, and I’m going to fly in it. That’s what motivates me to bring these people together today. I want to be magic again.”

The words of writer Wendell Berry came to mind. He urged people to not reduce nature to economic units and surrender to the idea that new technology will fix it. “And the voices bitterest to hear,” he wrote, “are those saying that all this destructive work of mindless genius, money, and power is regrettable but cannot be helped.”

The group listened to Adkins conclude the panel discussion by beckoning them to the river ramp, telling them that they can’t float down a river and not be changed, as the current takes you at times out of your control.

“It’s not half as important to know as to feel,” he said. “And the only way we are going to solve this is by people falling in love with these wild places.”

Twenty-one canoes and kayaks took to the water to float the river that day, continuing to talk, but not Stowe and Wolf.

The armada stopped at a sandbar, and Adkins gathered the paddlers around him.

The people were quiet, and Adkins looked up to the towering cottonwoods on the far bank, light green leaves fluttering in the breeze. The Lakota called it the “tree that talks,” he said, “so cup your ears and listen to them.”

There is a special bravery talking this way today, when so much is reduced to bottom lines and brass tacks. He’s been called delusional. But the leaves were chattering that day, and everyone was quiet to hear the trees.

“Maybe that’s who we should listen to,” he said.