Sutliff mourns its bridge but revels in fall foliage

Gazette photographer Jim Slosiarek and I must have had an exceptionally high creep quotient the morning we walked to the end of the breached dam at Palisades-Kepler State Park to talk with the young woman sitting there alone, enjoying the sights and sounds of a fall morning on the Cedar River.

"Watching you guys coming right for me, I was getting ready to bail, but I realized I had nowhere to go but into the river," said Laurie Muldoon, 35, of Coggon.

Muldoon, one of the few people to feel relief upon learning she's talking to a reporter, said she was making her first visit to the park since 1993, when she severely injured herself in a 70-foot fall while climbing on the spectacular limestone bluffs that give the park half its name.

The other half comes from Louis Kepler, whose estate donated about half the park's 840 acres to the state in 1928.

Photos by Jim Slosiarek

Despite Muldoon's long absence from the park and her misgivings about returning to the scene of a shattering experience, she said she was glad she came.

"I actually feel like this is where I'm supposed to be today," she said.

Sitting at the end of the broken dam overlooking the only Class 2 rapids on the Cedar River, Muldoon surveyed the moonscape of rock and sand left behind by the June flood and said, "It's crazy. It really shows the power of the river."

The stretch from Palisades-Kepler down through Sutliff and Cedar Bluff to Cedar Valley is the most classically scenic section of the Cedar River, especially in October when the river reflects the red, yellow and orange leaves of hardwood trees on limestone bluffs.

As we paddled under the Highway 1 bridge, I wondered how someone had managed to scrawl "S.J. + J.J., 6-1-08" way up high on the concrete abutment - a feat that would have been even more difficult, if not impossible, 12 days later when the raging Cedar ripped off the easternmost span of the historic iron bridge downstream in Sutliff.

The 10 miles of river between the deep gorge at Palisades and the flood-truncated bridge at Sutliff slid quickly and effortlessly beneath our kayaks, and we arrived sooner than we'd planned.

At the boat ramp, we met two secretive fellows from De Witt with a cooler full of catfish fillets who replied, when asked where and on what they'd caught them: "In the mouth with hooks."

Randy Baxa, who knows all the local river rats, being one himself, said: "Stink bait. That's all those De Witt boys use."

Across a dusty road from the 110-year-old, plank-decked, iron-trussed bridge, we joined a congenial gathering of river lovers for beer, fried food, laughter and conversation at Baxa's Sutliff Store and Tavern, an institution only a year younger than the bridge.

Tavern proprietor Baxa, 53, said the span went out just after noon on June 13, as the river crested in Cedar Rapids at 31.2 feet.

"A lot of people were here watching it," he said. "A cabin came floating down and stuck on the side of the span, and the water pushing against it was too much. Once it started going, it was gone in two or three minutes."

Randy Brannaman, 56, chairman of the non-profit Sutliff Bridge Authority, said he's optimistic the Federal Emergency Management Agency will fund restoration of the bridge.

"This is home. This is my community. That bridge is important to us, and we need to have it back," said Brannaman, who has been living in a camper at his parents' house since June 13, when the Cedar destroyed his home and swept away more than 60 of his cattle.

Just before dark, Jim and I concluded our evening of clubbing in Sutliff and repaired to the sandbar across the river to sleep under the stars.

With Sutliff's two or three city lights dancing on the shimmering surface of the Cedar, we ignited a hastily gathered stack of flood-deposited tree branches and spread our sleeping bags on freshly deposited, clean-smelling sand.

Our daily ration of grog imbibed, we treated our incipient headaches with the therapeutic murmur of the Cedar's current before falling sound asleep.

Leapfrogging down the Cedar, we resumed our journey at another time-forgotten town, Cedar Bluff, where Mike Schmitz, a 27-year-old self-employed computer consultant, invited us to share a cup of coffee in his home/office in the town's former general store.

Schmitz said he recently moved from Iowa City to Cedar Bluff, in part because of the building's charm but also to enjoy the beauty of the nearby river and the serenity of a town in which a car on main street constitutes an event.

Though Cedar Bluff names a specific community, it could have as easily applied to the next dozen limestone outcroppings flanking the river on its course to Cedar Bend - a free-flowing stretch in which no signs warned of dams or other navigation hazards.

House-sized boulders along a cave-perforated bank adorned with plum-colored hardwoods made it hard, at times, for a paddler to watch where he's going.

But the always eager current, humming through ever-present snags, reminded us to keep our eyes on the river.