Story originally printed in the Vernon Broadcaster or online at www.vernonbroadcaster.com
Published - Wednesday, January 30, 2008
FWS bestows guardian award on Clements
Byron Clements began navigating the Mississippi River 70 years ago, even before he was old enough for school.
Now Clements, a 76-year-old river boat captain from Genoa, has been honored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a half-century of saving lives on the Mississippi. He has rescued capsized boaters, shored up dikes, stopped a runaway barge and raised a 35-foot cruiser that threatened to leak 300 gallons of fuel and oil into the river.
Saturday, Clements’ wife and son lured him to a surprise dinner in Lansing, Iowa, where the FWS presented him with the first River Guardian Award.
“He’s a river watcher,” said Don Hultman, manager of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.
Hultman said the agency came up with the periodic award to recognize citizens who do good things for the river and people on it.
Clements’ connection to the river stretches back to the 19th century, when his grandfather rode timber rafts down from the north. A 1925 Fish and Wildlife Service ledger shows Byron’s uncle and other members of the clan earned $3.50 a day at a fish rescue station. His father, Elmer “Pat” Clements, was a commercial fisherman. Byron started going out in the redwood strip boat with an old Redwing engine when he was 6.
In 1937, Elmer Clements built a stationary fishing barge below the recently completed lock and dam. Byron sold the barge to his son, Mark, and since 1999 has run Captain Hook’s Bait and Tackle with wife Jennifer.
“The Clementses have been on the water a long time,” said Mark, who also is a licensed river pilot.
All told, Byron Clements said he’s saved 26 people from the dangerous currents around Lock and Dam 8. And that doesn’t count the stranded boaters he’s towed to shore.
He can recall one from November 1957, when he pulled two people from a sinking boat in a storm. In those days, Clements said, there weren’t as many restrictions or people preaching boating safety.
“The boats were lousy,” he said. “The engines didn’t start when they were supposed to.”
In the record flood of 1965, Byron spent a month helping to build a temporary dike. Some years later, he used his 26-foot launch with its 130-horse-power engine to guide a runaway corn barge into port.
In 1998, he watched a “very small boat” caught in bad weather. “It went into a wave and never came out,” he said. Mark was piloting a boat and sped out to help them. “They had life jackets strapped to the seats,” Byron said. “That’s how smart they were.”
The rescuers tossed life jackets down and then towed the craft to shore. Later they discovered one of the boaters was a licensed captain on Lake Michigan.
Clements doesn’t just watch out for people on the river.
“He’s always been an advocate for care and habitat on the river,” Hultman said.
At the award banquet Saturday, he was lobbying people to attend an upcoming public meeting on changes to Dairyland Power’s wastewater discharge permit.
But in his time, Clements has seen more improvement than degradation. “The river right now is cleaner than it’s been in the last 40 years.”
Still, there’s no rest for a river guardian.
“It’s something that needs perpetual care,” Clements said. “All the time. Always.”
All stories copyright 2006 Vernon Broadcaster and other attributed sources.