Learning the Iowa River When I say I'll learn a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it. I'll learn him or kill him. ?Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi When I started teaching at the University of Iowa in 1965, one of its beauties was the Iowa River flowing gently and picturesquely through the campus. At the University of Illinois, where I'd started teaching, there was no river, only a much-abused ditch (presumably once a creek) nicknamed "the Boneyard." The Iowa also looked big enough for canoeing and boating, and there was an attractive stone canoe house on the west bank just upstream from the University theater. Farther upstream was the Coralville Reservoir, with a large swimming beach and campground. The dam that impounded it, just finished in 1958, was not attractive, but it was solid and imposing, a smaller version of the great govern ment wonders on the Colorado. The rush of water from the outlet far beneath it was sublime, at least to my young son and me when we climbed on hands and knees up the rock rip-rap above. But it was not long before I began to have other feelings about the Iowa River. The city's drinking water came from it, and in late February the tap water had so much chlorine that it smelled like a swimming pool. "Runoff," old timers said, "runoff from farms," explaining that the melting snow washed manure from the fields and barnyards upriver and that the water treatment plant had to counteract with extra chemicals. So "runoff" was a euphemism: we were drinking treated and diluted dung and urine. But the word was pronounced with a tone of bold nonchalance and cultural superiority, the tone of people who'd learned to make the best of a rotten situation by using the local vocabulary. "We've accepted it," they were saying, "and so will you." And so I did. Besides, in the 1960s and '70s there seemed to be bigger troubles than a seasonal smell in the local water. My wife, however, was not so accepting. My daughter reminds me that whenever the water was smelly, she bought a lot of Hi-C, a canned
