Can you hear the Wabash River when you look at a map of Indiana? Come closer and hear the clop-clop-clop of shod horses pulling Amish carriages near New Corydon and Geneva.

Listen to engines roar to life at Terre Haute for the largest gathering of hovercraft ever assembled.

Listen to diesel farm tractors rev and sputter on bridges west of Logansport.

Hear rubber wheels on cars and trucks whine on I-65 near Lafayette.

Bait casting reels whistle and click on long fishing rods south of Vincennes.

A train whistle shrieks then rends the countryside in two pieces -- dreamland and consciousness.

If you were dreaming about the perfect river, Wah-bah-shi-ki might be the name you'd give it. The Miami Indians did, meaning pure white. When Native Americans named the river, the water was clear and the limestone bed was easy to see. This white rock was visible until sediment from fields and roads washed into the stream.

It's almost as if the river has two stories -- before modern humans used it and after. But there may be a third story, about how we're helping it recover.

The Wabash has more than 22,000 acres of surface water and drains an area of 32,910 square miles -- nearly 66 percent of Indiana's land surface. Water from four-fifths of Indiana's 92 counties contributes to it.

The Wabash has the longest section of free flowing river east of the Mississippi River. The river's one dam, Huntington Dam, is 411 miles upstream from the Ohio River. Two other dams at Salamonie Lake and Mississinewa Lake dam rivers by those names and feed into the Wabash.

Jim Gammon, professor emeritus of zoology at DePauw University, says algae is currently the river's dominant life-form. Nutrients washed from farm fields, and municipal sewage and livestock waste overflows, and feed the overabundant plantlike microbes. And many native fish and aquatic critters have a hard time living in murky waters with lowered oxygen levels.

Gammon has studied the river's aquatic life since 1967. He says the river's fish community improved a bunch during the early 1980s, partly because of better waste treatment and a reduction in agriculture as a result of federal payments to farmers who agreed to not grow crops.

Gene Stratton-Porter's cabin in Geneva was her home when she explored the Limberlost Swamp.