“The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.”
— Mark Twain, “Life on the Mississippi”
The plan had been in place for months. Dr. Jim would drive over from Cleveland at daybreak and ferry us to Dennis Landing where we would launch our kayaks into the big river and paddle downstream 15 or so miles to Terrene Landing where Doc would have left our truck and trailer.
Finally the day came, Memorial Day.
In conversations about the Mississippi River, you come to realize most feel about it the way they do about rattlesnakes, something to be feared and avoided at all costs. As written here previously, John Ruskey of Quapaw Canoe in Clarksdale has made it his life’s work to change attitudes about this river system. Ruskey would have us regard it as the natural treasure it is, one to be experienced.
The Mississippi is the Pacific Ocean of rivers. It is vast, complex and mercurial. For some reason, it’s always bigger than you remembered. You stand on its banks looking out — the water coming from, according to Twain, an area “as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey” swirls, boils and gurgles past. You consider your sliver of a boat and question the sanity of venturing out on it.
As we drove through the early morning Delta landscape, Dr. Jim and my paddling partner, David, both natives of Rosedale, chatted away about the people who live or once lived in the houses we passed, about marriages gone bad, fortunes made and lost, scions of the old families who have abandoned the farm life for Memphis or New Orleans.
The two of them speak in the easy shorthand common to people who have lived in a place all their lives. The stories are finely burnished and to the outsider, the talk has a soothing, almost musical quality.
After traveling several miles on a narrow paved farm road, we come to the levee with its apron of grassy pasture. Topping the rise we are faced with a wall of willow, cypress, tupelo and Osage.
“That tree has great pears,” David, says. He is a musician/woodworker who has come to know the river while searching for the raw materials for his chairs, tables and musical instruments over the years and from growing up on it.
At the landing, we unload, don our PFDs, secure our water, KIND bars and a bilge pump you hope you never have to use. We seem to be in no particular rush to get on the water until Dr. Jim declares he has to go and jolts us from our reverie. We walk down the ramp and launch our kayaks. As we ease into the swirl of the river, my euphoria is tinged with fear. Though small and insignificant, we have become part of something primeval and mysterious.
In our eight-plus hours on the river, we will paddle over stone dikes near Island 70; at Smith Point walk on beaches as white and as expansive as any Florida has to offer; during a rest stop at Scrubgrass Bend, feast on dewberries from a thicket the length of a football field; halfway through the Old White River channel, now afternoon and both of us half delirious from the heat and exertion, pass another pristine beach where four young deer contemplate our presence. One of them approaches as if to say, “What is your business here?”
We emerged from the mouth of the Old White and paddled up the west side of the river against the current. The day had been a particularly busy one for tugboats, which have the power to convert the river into a maelstrom. Someone compared it to paddling in a washing machine. David, more experienced with the river, would wait out these upheavals, which from tugs pushing large payloads upstream, could take 30 minutes or longer to subside.
Finally, after a sprint across the river between tugs and a quarter mile upstream slog against a strong current, we dragged our boats and sand-encrusted selves on to shore. Back in Rosedale, we rehydrate with a refrigerated watermelon, a $1.99 Memorial Day special from Kroger. Maybe the best I’ve ever eaten.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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