The Last of the River Rats

The river is his, 100 miles of silt-choked brown water and all the clams he can haul up from the murk until he drops from fatigue. Dan Davies has the entire upper Mississippi River to himself, a diver’s paradise, but he wonders how long it will be before he too is banished from its depths.

Beyond blades of sun leaching through the cottonwoods and river maples, Davies nudges his flat-bottom boat out to pools where the clams lay stratified on the sandy Mississippi bottom like bricks in mortar. Fed oxygen through a hose, he crawls in a diving suit for hours on the inky river floor, filling net sacks with mollusks. River clams are his living, his primary source of income for the last 15 years, and his pride. Without them, he is lost on the land.

“This used to be a free river,” Davies says. “Not no more.”

The upper Mississippi is a shore of lost men these days, its waters nearly expunged of the “river rats” who plumbed deep there for decades. Davies, 38, is the last diehard clammer on the waterway’s northern stretch. As recently as five years ago, he and hundreds of competitors trolled the Mississippi, reaping tons of shells for export to Japan. But many of them have left their livelihood, forced out by the vagaries of nature and the intrusion of government--an enforced absence from the river many fear will become permanent.

Clammers were outraged this spring when Mississippi River border states suddenly began banning them from their waters. Convinced that the river men have been dangerously depleting generations of prized Washboard clams, state regulators ordered a halt to shell harvests in Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri--and are pressuring to shut down the last open shoreline in Iowa.

“We’re looking at a train wreck waiting to happen,” says Kurt Welke, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources biologist who long has warned that the river’s clams are imperiled. “If we didn’t move now, we’d regret it later on.”

The crackdown comes at the worst possible time for a regional Midwestern industry already reeling from economic ills. For decades, the Mississippi’s famed Washboard shells--known either as mussels or clams--have been craved by Japanese pearl growers for their ability to irritate the innards of Akoya oysters. Inserted into the Akoyas, the ground-up clams fertilized a steady supply of cultured pearls.

But in recent years, a virus sweeping through the Akoyas has killed off more than half of Japan’s underwater oyster beds. The flattened demand for Washboard shells pared the industry’s output to $11 million last year--a sixth of its record total from a decade ago--and has forced hundreds of clammers to find other work.

Because he is an Iowan and still has the legal right, Davies continues to dive. A few stubborn Iowa divers gave him some competition earlier this year. But even they soon vanished from the river, swept up by an ongoing federal probe that authorities say exposes the freewheeling and sometimes criminal activities of the clamming industry. A group of mussel divers and buyers were charged in April in a 59-count indictment, alleging they ranged from the Dakotas to Ohio, poaching and transporting thousands of pounds of clams to be sold to the pearl industry.

Hard Questions About Government Actions

The tough government actions have the whiff of finality, but they also have spawned hard questions about who the river belongs to--and whether the urge to regulate the upper Mississippi’s marine life requires the sacrifice of an already ailing industry. While wildlife authorities insist that divers must be kept away from the Washboards to keep the mussels from dying off, clammers worry that they are the river’s real endangered species.

“There’s plenty of clams, but not plenty of us,” says Bob Hagensick, a 73-year-old Wisconsin dredger who has harvested mussels for a half-century. “I’m semiretired, but I’d be out there today if they let me. You know the government won’t open that river back up once they got it closed.”

Even a comforting verdict of science is absent, leaving marine life experts torn over whose studies are the most accurate--and whether there is a clam crisis at all.

On one side, government scientists say that years of careful sampling of Washboard beds have convinced them that excessive clamming has nearly killed off the mollusk’s youngest generations. Their conclusion is challenged by a clam industry study that estimates 550 million Washboards crowd the upper Mississippi. “Not exactly an endangered species,” snorts Marian Havlik, an industry consultant.

The result is “a classic conflict between conservation and commerce. But there are no definitive numbers to prove that either side is right,” says Richard Neves, a mollusk expert and research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Without overwhelming data, Neves and some mollusk experts wonder why government scientists in the upper Midwest are rushing to ban clammers from the Mississippi. Wisconsin’s Welke, who leads the call for the divers’ exile, answers that “biological science is biological science is biological science. We all use the same scientific guidelines. Our numbers are sound.”

Tempers are worn so raw on the upper Mississippi that even the conduct of government men like Welke is at issue. He is accused by clammers of pursuing a vendetta to purge them from the river. Ill will has metastasized far beyond the feud over science. An entire way of life is at stake. Reputations are on the line.

“Welke and his buddies are just jealous that we make money off the river,” says Darwin Lee Ballenger, an influential Muscatine, Iowa, shell buyer. “He thinks clammers are the scum of the Earth.”

Ballenger, a cigar-teething rogue who calls himself “Butchie,” has plenty of troubles to spill. Thousands of pounds of clamshells, stuffed into gunny sacks, sit unbought in his riverside warehouse. He was among those indicted by federal agents in April for violating the federal Lacey wildlife act, allegedly conspiring to poach clams in states closed to mussel harvests. “Butchie’s innocent as a baby,” he scoffs.

Welke, an outspoken naturalist based near the river in the town of Prairie du Chien, Wis., has yet to live down an infamous clash he had with clammers in Tennessee several years ago. The row has since become river lore among foes like Ballenger. During a meeting with Southern state river authorities, Welke admits he lost his temper and snapped at angry clammers: “If you SOBs got off your fat asses and worked, we wouldn’t have to pay your bills!”

Welke now rues the words, not the sentiments. “These guys deal in hard cash, and it’s in their interest to dodge the tax man. They’re the square pegs in the round holes of society,” he says. Despite their affluence, some clammers, he insists, scheme to “get on public assistance . . . and who pays their bills?”

All this enmity revolves around a lowly mollusk that multiplied by the millions through North America’s rivers and lakes after the last Ice Age glaciers receded 15,000 years ago.

Washboards were just one species among scores that thrived in the Mississippi, nestled among obscure mussel relatives like the Clubshell, Fanshell, Higgin’s Eye, Pink Mucket, Purple Cat’s Paw and White Wartyback. Those species now are endangered, biologists say, and it is only a matter of time before the Washboard joins them.

The Washboard and its cousins lay undisturbed until the 1890s, when riverside entrepreneurs discovered their toughened shells were perfect for stamping out buttons for coats and shirts. A cottage industry soon boomed in places like Muscatine and Prairie du Chien. River rats began combing the Mississippi, dragging clam beds with a hooked dredge known as a brail.

Japan Pearl Industry Revives Clam Harvest

Brailing was the only way to harvest clams even after the Mississippi’s pearl button factories were snuffed out by cheaper plastic manufacturers in the 1940s. The emergence of the Japanese cultured pearl industry in the 1960s revived the clam harvest, but the soaring demand for pulverized Washboards brought a new element to the river: divers.

The first divers were Southerners from Tennessee and Kentucky, where lake-bottom clam beds produce Washboards even larger than the Mississippi’s. When the outsiders showed up in the 1970s, Mississippi River brailers welcomed them with the politesse of a mountain clan. They brandished shotguns on the river and raked the Southerners’ diving spots with log chains. But soon enough, they realized that diving was the most efficient method of sifting through the beds for the largest, most desirable shells.

“Brailing had the history, but it was for dinosaurs,” Ballenger says. “Diving’s where the money’s at.”

His father was a brailer who dredged as he tacked home on the river after a long day’s work as a Muscatine boiler fireman. “When I was a kid, I’d haul them shells out of the boat,” Ballenger says. “To me, clamming is like a farmer plowing his ground. You rip up the bottom, stir up all the toxics down there on the shell bed. It’s a public service, you know?”

Pollutants in the Mississippi have taken a toll on clam populations--one of the few facts clammers and government regulators agree on. Chemical plant spillage and silty farm runoff from the Missouri River is so dense that it has virtually killed off the clam population south of the point where the Missouri meets the Mississippi. Even northward, chemical runoff is sometimes so severe that clam divers straying too close often emerge with erupting skin rashes. “Imagine what it does to the clams,” Davies says.

Divers Say They’re Least of Clams’ Threats

Divers have a hard time understanding why they are being singled out as the clams’ predators, when pollution, barge traffic, habitat disturbance caused by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dams and the invasion of razor-sharp zebra mussels all have been cited as hostile influences on the river’s aquatic life.

“You tell me, are we any worse than these things?” Davies said, hauling massive brown crystalline tapestries from the river. They were single Washboards, hidden under jagged, parasitic hives of tiny zebra mussels.

Wildlife specialists like Wisconsin state biologist Mike Stagg say they have little jurisdiction in containing most of the river’s ills. But “we can stop clammers when they get too greedy,” Stagg says.

Despite the environmental and human onslaught, Washboard populations in the upper Mississippi remained so plentiful that the region’s clamming industry stayed unregulated through the mid-1980s.

But the coming of the divers alarmed upper Mississippi wildlife agents. The numbers of licensed clam divers suddenly skyrocketed. Washboards began to fetch dramatic price increases--in Iowa, shells rose from $200 to nearly $500 a ton. Clam harvests fetched nearly 1,500 tons of shells in 1985--vastly outstripping previous years.

Marine biologists like Welke and Stagg took these changes as evidence that Washboards might be in jeopardy. In Wisconsin and other river border states, wildlife agents began setting limits on shell sizes and increasing license fees. Harvest seasons were limited. Night clamming was abolished. And as guidelines were codified, biologists began taking regular samples from clam beds to see if the populations were holding steady or declining.

It was not long, Welke insists, before the studies confirmed their fears. When he and other state divers returned year after year to shell beds off the Wisconsin banks, they found some of the youngest Washboards missing--an indication that the harvest of adult clams was interfering with the creatures’ breeding.

“We kept finding fewer and fewer young Washboards,” Welke says. “There were plenty of older generations there, but as they picked off more and more of the adults, the stock of younger ones kept dipping.”

Mollusk experts such as Neves and Ohio State zoology professor David Stansbery disagree. Young mollusks, they contend, are often buried in sand deep under the river bottom--easily missed even by trained divers.

“Just because you can’t find juveniles doesn’t mean they’re not there,” Neves says. “On a turbid river bottom like the Mississippi, it’s easy to miss them.”

Confident they missed nothing, Welke and other state wildlife officials began pushing last year to ban clammers from taking Washboard shells from the Mississippi. To the biologists, it hardly seemed an onerous move. Divers, Welke said, could still compete for more plentiful river species like the Three Ridge mussel.

That concession draws guffaws from river veterans like Ballenger. Cutting off the supply of Washboards, he groused, was “stealing Butchie’s wallet. The Japanese don’t want Three Ridges. The shells ain’t valuable. If the virus over there is so bad that we can barely get them interested in Washboards, why would they care about a Three Ridge?”

River rats were scrambling to find other work even before the states moved. The mysterious virus among Japanese oysters had depressed the value of Mississippi Washboards to the point that only hoarders like Davies and Ballenger were still seeking shells. Others, like Hagensick and his sons, turned to logging and trapping. Some, like Greg Wadden, a Muscatine sheller who once sold exclusively to Ballenger, gave up for good, becoming a roofer.

“Even if I wanted shells, there’s almost nobody out there willing to dive,” Ballenger said.

But federal prosecutors charge that as the Mississippi market fell, clammers looked elsewhere for shells--sometimes in states closed to clam harvests. For four years ending in 1997, federal agents charge, Ballenger, his wife, Cheryl Ann, and four divers conspired to poach Washboard shells from lakes and rivers in Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan.

Illegal Clamming Scheme Alleged

Ballenger shrugs off the accusations as “a set-up. I bought from these guys, but I never told them to go out of state. I don’t work that way. I buy from whoever comes to me with clams. I don’t ask where they got them.”

The illegal clamming scheme arose, says Walt Kocal, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent in Des Moines, because the defendants wanted to harvest shells in lakes and streams far from the competition of other divers and the scrutiny of enforcement agents.

“These areas were all off-limits, and these individuals knew that,” Kocal said.

To Welke, the indictments came as one more sign that Washboards were becoming scarce in the Mississippi. “Why would these guys travel hundreds of miles from their home base if they could get what they wanted at home?”

If clammers were straying from the Mississippi to illegal beds, even a diver like Davies, who has never been cited for a clamming violation, could empathize. “It’s because the states have made it so damn hard for us here,” he says.

Despite his clean record, Davies knows he is being watched when he trolls the Mississippi. He has seen Iowa and Wisconsin Natural Resources agents watching him from hiding spots on both sides of the river.

Their surveillance was hard enough to take, Davies said, when there were scores of clammers on the Mississippi. But now it is just Davies, a careful man who wants no trouble. Going out on the river--crawling on the silent shell beds as schools of sheepheads swim past--seems like such a placid, easy choice.

It is a gamble. Davies is betting that one day soon, the Japanese pearl companies again will call for the shells he hoards. He is betting he won’t run afoul of the law. He is betting that Washboard clams will stay plentiful.

He is betting he will not be the last Mississippi clammer.