On finding river creatures so bizarre I think God was messing with us when he made them

Or my two days paddling the Meramec with my daughter and her friends

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The following is my latest story. It appears in the latest issue of Missouri Life. You should go buy like 5,000 copies and tell them it's because of this story.

My daughter sat in the front of the canoe and I sat in back as we maneuvered along the Meramec River. Across a leisurely two-day float, I watched as she progressed from never having been in a canoe to following my instructions to anticipating my instructions to completing them before I could say them.

Which is not to say we navigated the river seamlessly, by which I mean it was completely my fault when we spun 360 degrees because I was distracted by eagles soaring overhead and wasn’t paying attention to the current as it related to the nose of our canoe.

She seemed to enjoy that spin—I won’t tell her it was a mistake if you won’t—so we teamed up to turn a few circles just for fun. As our nose and tail almost clipped other canoes … and sometimes did … and as our fevered paddling “accidentally” sprayed our friends with water, we laughed in delight. That was fitting, because the most important lesson we learned from our two days on the Meramec River with Earth’s Classroom was to take joy in Missouri’s rivers.

Now in their 26^th year, Earth’s Classroom founders Bill and Jody Miles have shepherded and entertained and educated more than 77,000 customers on herpetology, ornithology, camping, canoeing, caving and more. But they’re never far from the water. “We are the river state. We have so many rivers to take advantage of,” Jody says.

And so many ways to take advantage of them. In two days on the Meramec, our trip was part celebration of our water, part scientific study of our water, and part family fun on our water.

At each of several stops, Jody and Bill pulled out nets to capture and examine the vast array of living creatures in the Meramec, the most biologically diverse river in Missouri. It is home to more than 120 fish species, 47 kinds of mussels, the highest density of crayfish on earth, and I don’t know how many butterflies, but I’ve never seen such variety or abundance, and that’s just counting the ones that landed on my hat.

The objects of our study ranged from a paddlefish (an ancient shark relative) to bugs smaller than my fingernail to fish the size of my pinkie. We also studied birds overhead, turtles on logs and cicadas everywhere.

At one stop, Bill plopped the creatures caught in his net into a white plastic tub. Jody peered inside and reacted like a baseball card collector who opened a new pack and found her favorite player. “I’m so excited! I can just go home now,” she joked. She tipped the tub so Bill could see it. “Isn’t that awesome?”

The catch that aroused her passion was a dragonfly nymph, a creature so bizarre I wonder if God was messing with us when He made it. It has an arm attached to its face that it uses to grab food and stuff it in its mouth. It swims by shooting water out its butt, a mode of transportation that makes adults and kids alike giggle.

When the nymph grows into an adult dragonfly, it will have four wings that it can operate independently, which will make it nimbler than most flying things. I left unsaid at the riverside but confess now that looking up close at dragonflies has always given me the heebie-jeebies. If they were huge they’d star in monster movies, to say nothing of my nightmares.

The name of Bill and Jody’s non-profit learning center, Earth’s Classroom, is fitting because class was always in session, even when we were playing. I felt bad for the fly fisherman we encountered at lunch time. He thought he had found a quiet place to pull rainbow trout out of a stretch of the river close near Meramec Spring. Then the 11 of us rolled up — Bill, Jody, my daughter, another dad, two moms, four teen-age girls and me spread across six canoes, and our excited chitter-chatter chased him away.

He should have stayed to hear us squawk when we got in what felt at the time like cold water on river right. As if to dare us, Jody described how crystal clear – and markedly colder – the water was on river left where Meramec Spring met the river. I swam over there, following the girls even though they squealed when they reached the spring.

When I reached that cold water, it felt like someone grabbed the skin on my back and cinched it to make it tighter. With a mask on, I dunked my head underwater to examine whether it was as clear as Jody described.

Yep … but it not so clear that I wanted to linger because it was also COLD. I swam back across, and river right, which just a few minutes ago had chilled me, now felt like a warm bath.

Late the first afternoon, we parked our boats on river left. Bill taught the girls to set up their tents and then let them do it themselves. We stayed up late talking around the campfire before reluctantly scattering to our tents.

I woke up early the next day and walked along the river, casting a line in every now and then with hope of catching a trout. I had no luck, probably because they were all stuffed full of cicadas and had no use for the bait I offered them. That was Bill’s interpretation, anyway, and I’m not going to argue with an expert.

Storms were forecast for that afternoon, so we quickly ate breakfast, packed our tents, and got back on the river. We stopped near swiftly moving water, and the girls floated through it on their backs again and again.

At our last stop, the girls joined Bill in scouring the river for life. They pulled up rocks to see what creepy-crawly creatures dwelled underneath. One of them pulled out a crayfish and carried it over to Bill and Jody for identification.

Most creatures they recognized on sight. This one looked very much like two species of crayfish, so they scoured their reference books to properly ID it as a saddleback, a unique find indeed. “You caught a critter that’s found nowhere else in the world but this river,” Bill told her.

We quickly returned that critter to its home so the next group exploring this incredible river could enjoy it, too.