Descriptions of Places

It’s easy to take the Midwest for ugly, because a casual look around can reveal so little. The horizon is flat and nearly featureless. Driving can seem like an exercise in futility, with the corn and soybean fields, rolling hills and plains, grain elevators and barns blurring together. The mixture of extreme fertility and blunt continental weather is somewhere between hospitable and forbidding. But get to the edge of a major river and things start to come together. In Minnesota, south of the Twin Cities, the Mississippi flows through a deep channel hundreds of feet below the surrounding plains. Steep slopes capped with limestone bluffs flank the river’s broad floodplain for hundreds of miles. Tributary streams cut through the limestone with networks of steep-sided gullies, or dramatic waterfalls. The Mississippi’s floodplain is about three miles wide, scooped out on such a grand scale by glacial meltwater. Today the valley is punctuated by deltas from various tributaries, that