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60-some miles south of the Twin Cities, the Mississippi River widens into a large body of water that has come to be known as Lake Pepin. (Readers of Laura Ingalls Wilder may recall her girlhood crossing of the river ice there, just before its thunderous spring break-up, in Little House on the Prairie.) Two miles wide and 22 long, with a total surface area of about 40 miles, it's about the same size (and shape) as the famed Loch Ness.

Like Loch Ness, it has its own water-horse. Well, that's what they say.

“Pepie,” they call him, predictably. (Her? It? Them?)

Keep an eye on any sufficiently large body of water for long enough, and you'll be bound to see some strange things, for sure. Just how long folks have been seeing Pepie isn't entirely clear.

Predictably, there are stories ascribed to “Native American” times. Since a number of the local Indigenous peoples knew of “water panthers” that lived in lakes of a sufficient size, that's maybe not surprising.

(Water panthers are water-spirits who have an ongoing feud with the Thunderbirds. A number of 1000-year old effigy mounds in the area apparently represent these water panthers, powers of the Great Below.)

Some have dismissed Pepie as a “20th”-century publicity stunt to draw tourists. Well, people do love monsters, and monster tourism does indeed bring in money. Ask anyone in Roswell, New Mexico.

Admittedly, on the face of it, the prospect seems zoologically dubious. You can't, of course, have just one Pepie, since not even monsters are immortal. You need a breeding population of Pepies, which is another matter entirely. Pepin's a big lake, but it's not that big.

Publicity stunt or not, I suspect something deeper going on here. There's a witch in every woods, a monster in every lake. The language of the Good Folk, of those Others with whom we share the Land, gives us a very real, if nonliteral, way to talk about our relationship with the Great nonhuman Out There.

If you're looking for naturalistic explanations here—leaving aside wakes and floating logs—I'd personally suspect sturgeon. There used to be so many sturgeon in the Mississippi that there was actually a thriving domestic caviar industry, until—predictably—overfishing put paid to it. Sturgeon, which in the Mississippi sometimes grow to a length of nearly three feet, have been around since the Upper Cretaceous period—about 100 million years ago. So maybe, just maybe, there are prehistoric monsters in Lake Pepin after all.

A Hymn to the Mississippi

Many-colored River,

Father of Waters,

to you I sing my praise.

I sing the White Mississippi,

iced-over, clad with snow.

Many-colored River,

Father of Waters,

to you I sing my praise.

I sing the Brown Mississippi,

heavy with silt of Spring.

Many-colored River,

Father of Waters,

to you I sing my praise.

I sing the Blue Mississippi,

son of the Summer Sky.

Many-colored River,

Father of Waters,

to you I sing my praise.

I sing the Golden Mississippi,

Sunset liquid fire.

 DN = Divine Name

When you're outside and see the Sun for the first time after waking, kiss your hand and say:

Love to you, my [DN].

If you are not wont to address the Sun by Name, kiss your hand and say:

Love to you, my Light.

When you're outside and see the Moon for the first time after waking, kiss your hand and say:

Love to you, my [DN].

If you are not wont to address the Moon by Name, kiss your hand and say:

Love to you, my Light.

When you're outside and see the major River in your area for the first time after waking, kiss your hand and say:

[Name of River], I kiss my hand to you.

If you are not wont to address the River by Name, kiss your hand and say:

River of Life, I kiss my hand to you.

At the big public Samhain that year, everybody had paid a coin to the Ferryman to cross the River.

Obviously, money collected under such circumstances can't be put to just any use. After the ritual, we donated the bulk of it to the local AIDS hospice. (That seemed appropriate.) But the foreign coins and the gaming arcade tokens (talk about cheap) called for a different—if still respectful—disposal.

As it happens, one of the great rivers of the world flows through our city, so I volunteered to take the coins down to the Mississippi and throw them in.

Well, I put it off and I put it off. (It was a snowy year, if you want my lame-ass excuse.) Suddenly it was Midwinter's Eve, and I still hadn't disposed of the coins.

“This can't wait,” I thought. “It really has to be done tonight; tomorrow will be too late.”

So after our Mother Night ritual and feast, I drove down to the site where, 1000 years ago, a winter village once stood on the East Bank of the River. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Old People who lived there buried their dead across the River on the West Bank.

Being a warmish Yule that year, I was wearing my kilt: commando, of course. (You know what they say: With underwear, it's just a skirt.)

The warm weather had given the snow a slick crust. Just as I was negotiating the last snowbank down to the River....

Yule morning. A friend and I are driving back from singing up the Sun out of the Mississippi River valley.

Each year, as we have for decades, on Yule morning we sing the Sun up from a bridge once dyed red with the blood of a poet.

Surely such a bridge must stand forever.

My friend gets a text from his partner, who has decided to forgo the annual cold and discomfort of the river valley's microclimate, and instead has proceeded directly to the Sunrise brunch location towards which we're currently heading.

“Where is everyone?” she writes.

In fact, the singing was particularly good this year, and we lingered long to savor it. You could feel our songs calling up the Sun out of darkness. You could feel us calling the trees into bud, the apples into blooming and fruiting, all in their own proper season.

“'Minneapolis Bridge Collapses, Coven Killed,'” I intone in my best self-important banner-headline tone.

We riff off of this scenario for a few minutes, laughing.

“They'd still be telling stories about us a hundred years from now,” I say.

There were once two brothers who loved the same woman.

In a fit of rage, seeing which way the wind was blowing, the elder killed the younger. He tore him limb from limb, and threw the pieces into the Mississippi.

Now it so happens that this woman was a witch-woman. She paddled her canoe up and down the Mississippi, singing songs of power as she went, gathering the pieces of her lost love wherever she found them.

She found his head.

She found his torso.

She found his right arm.

She found his left arm.

She found his pelvis.

She found his testicles.

She found his right leg.

She found his left leg.

Up and down the River she paddled, from the Headwaters to the Gulf, singing songs of power as she went. All the parts of her lost love she found, all but one. A bullhead had eaten it.

Procession to riverbank. People bear flowers, branches, and gifts for the River. Drums, incense.

At the river’s edge, officiant strips off robe (attendant receives it), and enters the water to the waist

Down drums.

Massed conch shells sound.

Libation Prayer (officiant).

Threefold Libation (officiant) [milk, wine, river water]. (Blasts on conch shells punctuate each libation.)

Hymn to the River (everyone).

People pray, make offerings.