General Impressions: If I had thought about this river adventure I would have imagined that somewhere in the Great Plains I would have looked ashore and seen huge wheat or corn fields. In retrospect that was foolish.
Trees love water, in the dry west every creek is lined with cottonwoods, mostly. This river is lined with walls of trees and undergrowth. Only where large sandbanks have been exposed by low water can you see more than a few feet beyond the shoreline.
The effect has been a green wall along both banks, except where people have cut it back to build a house (on the upper river) or a town. The vistas are still sweeping because the river is wide and you can see a long ways upriver or down, except where it is meandering and the curves cut off the view.
In that sense the experience I’ve had cruising the Danube or Rhine doesn’t translate, the view there is more varied than here. Cruising this river is visually more like cruising the Amazon although there the forest goes on for hundreds of miles and here I suspect it is just the strip that floods when there’s high water that they leave forested to hold down erosion.
It might be interesting to cruise Old Man River after the leaves drop in autumn, you might see something besides the seeming forest we’re seeing.
I fear this post is a string of recollections from a life of travel and reading. I’ve seen the claim that when Europeans first arrived here, North America east of the Mississippi was so heavily forested that a hypothetical determined and energetic squirrel could have covered the entire distance without ever setting foot on the ground, leaping from branch to branch.
I do know that east of the river a tilled field, if left fallow for several years, will spontaneously sprout chest-high young trees. You’ve heard the term “free and clear” spoken of ownership? To homesteaders the land wasn’t yours until you’d cleared it of most of the trees and turned it into farmland.
To the west there is less rain and trees have to be more selective in where they grow. Along bodies of water, for sure, and also on the north side of hills where there is less drying sun and the moisture that falls as rain or snow lingers longer.
In my part of Wyoming you drive north up a valley and the south-facing hills look bare, with some scrub brush on them. Drive south down the same valley and the same hills are lush and green with conifers. No compass is needed to tell north.
If someday we and the Russians are on friendly terms again and you take the river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow as we did some years ago, you will see the conifer forests stretch to the horizon in every direction. It’s quite a sight.
Somewhere in the middle of that vast forest on the banks of the river or canal we were sailing, was a small town with a dock at which was tied up a black, streamlined nuclear (?) submarine. In the post-Soviet era their navy was contracting. The ship was not camouflaged in any way, and could not submerge as the river was too shallow.
My theory: they were going to beach the ship and its captain knew his home town had no electricity. He sailed it home, and used the reactor to generate power for this tiny cluster of houses. I hope they haven’t started having two-headed babies, radiation is no joke. Maybe it was a diesel, they generate electric power too.
