"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." — Heraclitus
ST. CLOUD – As he maneuvered his jet boat — specially designed for shallow-water river fishing — around a point just a few yards beyond one of the greens for the St. Cloud Country Club, noted guide Dave Genz joked that the Mississippi River has a clay bottom in that area. Then he motioned to a big concrete box on the west bank, nearly covered in overgrown brush, which not too long ago was one of the three houses for a trap shooting range.
For nearly 40 years, until the range closed in the early 1980s, sport shooters would send thousands of clay pigeons and countless millions of lead shot pellets into the river, concentrating on the quest to break 25, and giving nary a thought to the long-term effects on things like water quality downstream.
But on this Saturday morning in May, the Mississippi was a significantly more serene place. Even with the hype of the Governor's Fishing Opener happening just a few miles upriver, Genz zipped up and down this stretch of water with few other boats in sight, finding a few places where the walleye and smallmouth bass were hungry.
A lifelong resident of the area, with a house on the east bank of the river, Genz talked about a time when two St. Cloud meat packing plants dumped their waste products directly into the water, and very few anglers would eat fish from the Mississippi. Up until the 1970s, the city of St. Cloud didn't treat its wastewater, choosing instead to pipe it directly into the river and send it off for the folks to eventually deal with it in St. Paul, Rock Island, Ill., and Hannibal, Mo. In one notable piece of St. Cloud riverfront architecture, one can learn plenty about the state of the Mississippi a generation ago.
"One of our hotels right downtown has a restaurant, and the big windows are on the parking lot side of the restaurant, not on the river side," said St. Cloud's four-term mayor Dave Kleis. "That's probably a testament to when it was built and what the river smelled like at that time."
But on the morning of the 2017 fishing opener, when Kleis joined Gov. Mark Dayton and other politicians from throughout Minnesota angling — successfully in most cases — on the stretch of the Mississippi that runs through St. Cloud, it was a significant moment for a community that Kleis said mostly turned its back on the river for decades.
In recent years the community has raised money via a citywide sales tax, garnered some federal funding, and has invested $8 million in a riverfront trail network that provides new access to the famed stretch of muddy water. South of the locks and dams in Minneapolis, barge traffic becomes more common and the Mississippi of St. Louis or Memphis is akin to an industrial freeway. Not so north of the Twin Cities, where the river is narrower and shallower, and the watercraft scene is dominated by canoes, paddleboards and pontoons.