The State We're In, Part 1: Ghost of a lake

Afternoon becomes dusk, and LeRoy Peterson downshifts his pint-size Chevy sedan and cruises into Okabena, a speck of a town on the edge of Heron Lake in southwest Minnesota.

Pointing to a weathered brick building, Peterson says: "That's where the old school stood."

A century ago, kids in that school scrambled to classroom windows when October winds ushered in the first flights of canvasback ducks.

So many birds descended on Heron Lake in autumn, cascading downward in long plumes, that they blackened the sky.

The ducks beat their wings thunderously until they splashed onto the lake with a whoosh.

Peterson recalls this story with great excitement, waving hands and pointing fingers.

Ultimately, however, it is a tale of regret, told through a fog of sadness.

"It's all gone now," he says. "Or most of it."

Riding with Peterson, a visitor peers into the gathering twilight and sees the vague outline of ... a lake.

Peterson sees something more.

He sees into the past, to 1942. He is 10 years old, clad in canvas cap and coat, standing alone in the still dark of an autumn morning.

Pulling on an old pair of hip boots, he wades into Heron Lake's clear water, a box of shells in one hand, a 16-gauge Iver Johnson in the other.

To the east, silhouetted against the blush of early morning, dart plovers and snipes, while egrets and herons sail overhead. Tall shafts of hard-stem bulrushes wave in the early breeze; a coyote yelps, joining a chorus of crickets and frogs.

He climbs atop a muskrat lodge, breaks open the gun and entombs a shell into its steel barrel.

And waits.

Soon, with the rising sun, come ducks, and the Iver Johnson cracks the still morning like a whip. Arcing downward, a mallard cartwheels and disappears behind curtains of tall reeds.

By 8 a.m., birds stuffed into the game pouch of his coat, he walks to shore, where he wrestles with his leaky boots, wrings out his socks and scurries to school.

Today, these many years later, LeRoy Peterson's past is never any further from him than the sight of a wheeling duck, the chill of a fall morning or the dank hint of a pungent marsh.

Peterson returned to live in southwest Minnesota in 1995 after an absence of 47 years, drawn by the Heron Lake of his childhood -- the one that teemed with muskrats and minks, pelicans and geese, cranes and swans, snails and insects, worms and crustaceans.

But the Heron Lake he returned to was far different: Changed by decades of ditching and draining, and dike and dam building, the lake is, by broad consensus, 8,000 acres of dirty water.

Minnesota residents say they value conservation and the outdoors and believe the state does a good job of protecting the environment. A recent Minnesota Poll indicated that 97 percent of Minnesotans believe they are as committed or more committed to protecting the environment than they were five years ago.

But people's beliefs and values are in stark contrast with reality: The truth is, Minnesotans are draining wetlands and turning them into farms, parking lots and subdivisions. Some lakes are being turned into holding ponds for farm runoff, and habitat on other lakes is threatened by the overdevelopment of shorelines.

Across Minnesota, more than 10 million acres of wetlands -- half the state's original total -- have been drained in the past century and converted to cropland. This was often done with government encouragement and at government expense. Many wetlands that remain are in the northern part of the state, where drainage historically has been difficult and expensive. In some agricultural regions, where financial incentives for drainage are greater, more than 80 percent of the original wetlands have been eliminated.

As a result of drainage, water is often shed from the landscape so fast, carrying with it so much silt, that native vegetation is wiped out.

Lost in the process are many things Minnesotans say they hold dear: fish, wildlife and wild places.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Heron Lake.

"Most of the lake's vegetation is gone," Peterson says. "And with it, the wildlife."

As Peterson speaks, he drives on, the headlights of his Chevy stealing darkness from a long stretch of two-lane blacktop.

Cast in the half-light on one side of the road is corn; on the other side, soybeans.

Heron Lake.

Peterson seems not so much embittered by its status as he is haunted by it, as if the ghosts of those Okabena schoolkids who loved to watch ducks have him by the throat.

Between 1832 and 1838, Joseph Laframboise, a French-Indian, operated a fur-trading post northwest of Heron Lake in what is now Murray County.

Laframboise was not attracted to the region by the soil -- what dry land he could find could hardly be broken with a pickax, so deep were the roots of the tall grasses.

Instead, he was beckoned by marshes, wet prairies and wildlife.

Particularly the wildlife.

One year, with the help of Wahpekute, Sisseton and Mdewakanton Indians, Laframboise trapped and skinned 8,000 muskrats and shipped the pelts to his agent, Henry Sibley, in Mendota.

"We can give you plenty of buffalo meat and tongues," Laframboise told a visitor to his camp in 1836, "wild geese and ducks, prairie hens, young swan, beaver tails, pigeons, some green corn, squash, onions, plums, grapes, watermelons, pommes de terre [potatoes], some coffee and some tea. There is plenty of sport here, and in a short distance you will find buffalo."

In 1837, when the price of muskrat pelts plummeted, Laframboise closed his camp and left.

Fifty years later, immigrant families arrived in the region, clamoring for soil on which to grow crops and graze livestock.

But in many places, productive land lay intertwined with the region's vast sloughs and shallow, grassy lakes, from which rose clouds of mosquitoes and multitudes of blackbirds.

The mosquitoes carried diseases. The blackbirds carried off settlers' grain.

The settlers soon realized they had a problem: Too much water.

Relentless from the north, the bitter wind chases Milton Wolff, 77, from his farm fields to his home. With him is his son and partner, Tom, 49.

Like Joseph Laframboise and the legions of German, Irish and Scandinavian farmers who followed him, Milton Wolff laid claim to land in southwest Minnesota because he sensed opportunity.

Arriving in 1951 with his wife, Veronica, and short on cash, Wolff at first rented 160 acres, about a quarter of which was low and wet.

Ten years later, after he had purchased the property, and with the financial help of the federal government, he drained its low spots, laying tile every 100 feet and pumping the runoff onto his neighbor's land.

"My neighbors took me to court," he says. "But I won, and in the end, they all laid tile, too."

Now much of that runoff, like the runoff from all the other farms and towns in a 454-square-mile watershed, flows into Heron Lake.

On this day in the late fall, with their corn almost harvested, Milton and Tom Wolff are greeted at the elder Wolff's home by LeRoy Peterson.

Over coffee and cookies, a hot topic is discussed: Heron Lake.

"Heron Lake's problem," says Milton Wolff, "is that water can't get out of the lake fast enough because of the dam at the outlet and the dikes that surround it."

At issue is vegetation that wildlife needs. But the vegetation can't grow if too much water is held in a shallow lake for too long in the summer.

Constructed in 1937, and rebuilt many times, the Heron Lake dam has long been a subject of derision in southwest Minnesota.

Once it was dynamited. But no one was arrested, and the dam was rebuilt.

The only reason it exists, Peterson and the Wolffs believe, is to placate hunters and others who own land surrounding North Heron Lake. Closing the dam in the fall floods the backwaters of that lake, they say, improving hunters' chances of bagging ducks.

"Why the taxpayers should foot the bill for a dam that is totally unnecessary and that is ruining Heron Lake by keeping too much water in it, I'll never know," Peterson says.

Jim Sehl, a Department of Natural Resources hydrologist stationed in Windom, about a 20-minute drive from the Wolff farm, disagrees.

So does DNR area wildlife manager Randy Markl, who also works in Windom.

It's not the dam that's killing Heron Lake, they say. It's the farm tiling: the nearly boundless web of open ditches and subsurface drain tiles that snake through, and under, the lake's watershed.

When snows melt or heavy rains fall, the runoff washes through the tiles into the ditches, where it picks up soil particles, or silt, and continues in a relative torrent to the lake. The silt-laden runoff smothers native aquatic plants such as sego pondweed, hard-stem bulrush and broadleaf cattail.

So much silt -- a foot or more -- covers portions of the Heron Lake bottom that some aquatic plant seeds buried beneath it may never germinate.

"Nobody wants to tackle farmland drainage," Sehl says. "They look at it and just throw up their hands. It's such a monster. And it's not getting any better. Farmers are laying more tile as we speak, placing them closer together, tiling hillsides, tiling swales that once were pastured, all without even anyone documenting where the new tile is going."

Since 1989, the Heron Lake Watershed Restoration Project has spent about $14 million to clean Heron Lake and reduce runoff flowing into it, in part by restoring wetlands. The project is administered by the DNR under the auspices of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Still, this spring, after a heavy rainfall, so much water rushed into Heron Lake that it rose 7 feet. A "bounce" of this magnitude usually wipes out any chance the lake might have of producing vegetation until the following year.

"You need the lake dry, or mostly dry, by July 1, if you want aquatic plants to grow," Markl says. "That's just not happening."

The rushing water often carries excessive phosphorus, which can produce algae. Sometimes the phosphorus is picked up from the soil, sometimes from farm chemicals and sometimes from effluents of cities and towns.

Worthington, for example, sends more than 2 million gallons of water daily into a creek that runs into Heron Lake.

Peterson listens to all of this and sighs.

Obviously, he says, farmland drainage is a problem. But since tiles and ditches aren't going away, "you do what you can do."

"The DNR wants to put the blame for Heron Lake's demise on the farmers up in the watershed," he says. "But the farmers are pawns of the government and the big agribusiness companies that write farm policy. Drainage isn't going to stop; it's a reality.

"People who have diked off the lake and who insist on keeping the dam at the outlet, they're the problem."

If the dikes were removed, allowing the lake to find its natural flood plain, Peterson says, and if the dam were removed, the lake -- at least in relatively dry years -- would drain itself fast enough to nurture vegetation.

Counters Sehl, the DNR hydrologist:

"But you have to look at the big picture. The water has to go somewhere. If we could remove the dikes -- if we had the money and could find willing sellers -- and if we also removed the dam and dredged the downstream channel as some people want, we believe it might make some difference to Heron Lake. But what it would also do is create problems downstream, in Windom, where silt already has made two islands behind the town dam.

"We believe instead that the source of the water has to be dealt with, upstream of Heron Lake. And that's going to be hard because the economy is already so tough for farmers."

On this last point, Tom Wolff agrees. Next year, when his father retires, Tom Wolff will be responsible for the family's 1,000-acre corn and soybean operation.

"We've got crops growing fence row to fence row right now," he says. "Our expenses are high -- they want $200,000 or more for a new tractor these days -- and the prices we get are low. We get about the same for a bushel of corn today that Dad got in the 1960s.

"It used to be, when the government offered a set-aside program, that you could afford to let a little land rest each year, plant it in oats or whatever. But the small grains have all gone out of this country. And the pasture, too."

In this environment, Tom Wolff says, conservation is a luxury.

"We would prefer a mixed countryside if we could afford it," he says. "But if farmers in the watershed are going to restore wetlands to help Heron Lake, the government would have to put a lot of money on the table as an incentive."

In neighboring Murray County, dairy farmer Richard Vander Ziel farms 240 acres. An agricultural iconoclast of sorts, he keeps another 300 acres covered by various grasses, including 200 acres that have never been plowed. He has laid only a few drain tiles on his land.

From a conservation standpoint, this is good.

But it would take a lot of farmers like Richard Vander Ziel to restore Heron Lake, according to a recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

To cut drainage into the lake about in half, the study found, a corresponding percentage of farmland in the watershed would have to be retired.

That would cost more than society seems willing to pay.

"Farmers are out there making a living on land they own, and with that ownership comes certain rights," Sehl says. "Yes, they are destroying a public resource. But we live in a society that demands cheap food, not conservation.

"Farmers can provide that food. But they're not going to worry about Heron Lake or any other resource until they worry first about feeding their families."

Scott Sievert and brothers Brent and Jason Rossow hunker in a blind D on South Heron Lake, eyes upward, hoping for ducks.

These are not well-traveled hunters with big trucks, engraved guns and kennels full of professionally trained dogs.

Minnesota has lots of those kinds of hunters, and each fall they head for the Dakotas or Canada, trying to find the ducks that once passed through Minnesota.

Instead, if only by accident of their birthplaces, Sievert and the Rossows are among Heron Lake-area waterfowlers who seem fated to pick up the pieces of what's left of duck hunting in southwest Minnesota.

Sievert and Jason Rossow are 33, Brent Rossow 25. They have only heard stories about the Heron Lake of yesteryear.

Stories like the one from the early 1900s, about hunters from the Twin Cities who gathered on rail platforms on Friday nights, some wearing fedoras and long coats, some smoking cigars. In crates, stacked near them, were their hunting dogs and double-barreled shotguns.

When their train departed at 8 p.m., the men climbed into berths and slept until, six hours later, the engineer whistled their arrival in the town of Heron Lake.

There they transferred to waiting cars for the bumpy, often muddy ride to their hunting clubs. No one slept: Sunup would come soon enough.

Sunday night, when the men returned to the Cities, boxes of ducks, iced and tied five to a bundle, were hoisted into the baggage car with their dogs and guns.

Nice story, say Sievert and the Rossows. But that's not the Heron Lake they know.

On this cold morning, a nor'wester, portending the winter, casts its fury out of the Dakotas.

With the big blow, Sievert and the Rossows hope, come ducks.

LeRoy Peterson isn't so sure.

He's watching through binoculars from a small hunting shack a mile away.

"As long as I'm working to restore Heron Lake, I won't hunt it," he says. "I'll probably never hunt Heron Lake again. I don't want anyone to ever say I'm acting out of my own self-interest."

Time passes, the morning comes full and Heron Lake, its shorelines naked of vegetation, shows itself.

Just as generations of southwest Minnesota duck hunters have, dating to the time of Joseph Laframboise, Sievert and the Rossows pass the day's first hours telling stories and laughing.

But very few ducks fly.

Seeing this from afar, through binoculars -- and through time -- LeRoy Peterson shakes his head.

-- Dennis Anderson is at danderson@startribune.com .