middle of this magnificent waterway. In the distance, above the treeline, the only pollution we could see was smoke and steam from the factories of Wood River, on the Illinois bank, the spot where Lewis and Clark wintered before they paddled and poled three boats 2,315 miles upriver. At that thought, I felt more comfortable, paddling downstream.
Mike Clark steered the canoe from his seat at the stern. He shared his paddler’s philosophy. “Some people judge others by what they say. I judge them by how much they’re willing to paddle.”
No problem for me. I pulled my own weight. And the cold subsided as we got into a rhythm and worked up a sweat. A north wind tried to aggravate us, but Cora blocked its best gusts. Cora, the island on our port side, shielded us from the wind until we were almost to the confluence of these two mighty rivers.
“Heron,” I pointed off the bow at a remarkable bird in flight, with its wide wingspan and long legs and long neck and long beak. Herons are good luck.
In the distance, south of the confluence, we watched a thousand pelicans take low flight and move like a shimmering school of fish to another feeding spot. Above us, an immature bald eagle flew across the water to the treetops along the bank. Our eyes followed the bird to its aerie, a wooden fortress, a monstrosity in the world of birds nests, bigger than your childhood tree house.
“This is in the middle of a metropolitan area,” Mike said. “But out here, we’re away from all that.”
Most of it, anyway. I glanced at the big white columns of smoke and steam from the Wood River refineries, making jet fuel for a thirsty nation. The north wind pushed the steam down the Mississippi flyway.
We stopped on the peninsula to check on the tree saplings that Greg, our bow paddler, had planted last fall. “I figure one in ten will survive,” Greg said, as he bent to examine a protective sleeve around one sapling’s trunk. “But with good conditions, half of them might make it.” A sapling’s life could be cut short by flood or drought. But the biggest predators are deer, who agree with each other that saplings are tasty.
With his left arm, Mike made a sweeping wave toward the north. “Up there is the new Audubon Center, right in the middle of the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary.”
“Audubon picked a great spot,” I said.
“The birds picked a great spot,” Mike said as he pivoted to face west. “Portage des Sioux is up there,” Mike pointed upriver to the spot where Native Americans used to carry their canoes across the narrowest strip of this peninsula, from one great river to the other. By portaging their gear overland, they saved a twenty-five-mile paddle around the point. It was also the site of the Treaties of Portage des Sioux, which hastened the displacement of the Mississippi tribal cultures as a hungry Manifest Destiny moved west.
But the spirits that guided the native inhabitants, they’re still here. The plants. The wildlife. The moon. And the point where two sacred rivers join together.
You can feel it, the life-giving power of these waters. Indeed, there’s only one reason St. Louis grew so populous. The confluence.
We paddled to the point, where I stood with one foot in the Missouri, the other in the Mississippi. Facing that narrow backbone of land that finally allows these rivers to mingle around my ankles, I saw two bronze nameplates, one embedded in each bank. The north plate spells Mississippi River. Just a few feet away, the south plate is covered in mud. As I scraped the mud off the letters that spell Missouri River, it was living proof that Big Muddy delivers on its reputation. You could grow cotton on top of that nameplate.
Mike Clark and I stood for a photo at this point where two sacred rivers join to mix their juices. In the picture, Mike held his sacred paddle, a paddle that has traveled the entire length of the Missouri and the Mississippi, the Colorado and the Amazon, too. Painted on its broad blade is the Rolling Stones logo, the tongue that first appeared on the Sticky Fingers album. You know the one.
The sun set as we paddled down the Mississippi. We stopped on a sand bar and built a fire, boiled some water and drank hot tea. Then we drowned the fire and in the February darkness, climbed in our canoe. We were fearless as we paddled down the Mississippi, black water against black forest, silhouetted in the dim backlight of a major urban center, just over the hills out of sight. The moon rose to guide us to our landing.
Sacred.
Rafting the Mississippi
The days were getting warmer when I got a call from a good friend alerting me that an adventurous soul was about to experience the dream of every American river rat. He’d built a raft, and was looking for crew members to help him drift from St. Paul to the Gulf of Mexico.
Holy Huck! I’m in!
But would I trust my life to somebody I’d never met? After some background checking, I committed to the journey of a lifetime.
I was one of maybe a dozen conscripts who volunteered for the three-month journey. Every one of those volunteers quickly realized that none of us could spend an entire summer floating down that big river. I tempered my dream with a realistic plan. I’d sign on to crew from St. Louis to the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. That would cover a part of the Mississippi I hadn’t traveled.
It wasn’t a big boat. In terms of cubits, it was a two-by-four. But it had a big backyard, a mile wide and 1,800 miles long. And it became the summer palace for a big thinker who has no problem translating big thoughts into action. Even his name was bold, fit for a John Wayne movie.
Justus McLarty has dipped his paddle in rivers throughout the world. Amazon. Yukon. Patagonia. Colorado. He’s plunged kayaks down forty-foot waterfalls and shared the unfamiliar food of a dozen different tribes. But the Mighty Mississippi had eluded him.
No longer.
Most big thinkers don’t progress past the idea stage. Justus not only planned the adventure, he built the boat. He spent the better part of a year in the driest of dry docks, in his garage in a tiny West Texas town where the surrounding seas are subterranean black gold. That might seem like a problem, transporting a dream from tumbleweed country to the headwaters of America’s seminal waterway. But remember, Justus McLarty thinks big.
He had the luxury of summertime to complete the journey. His job goes dormant during the summer when his employer, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, takes a production break.
Unlike an SNL rerun, you never step in the same raft twice. A raft always has a changing view, and a different danger lurking around the bend.
So what kind of vessel would deliver a passenger from Sorenson Landing, Minnesota, to Head of Passes, Louisiana, in relative comfort and safety?
The design bounced around McLarty’s brain for years. Unlike too many of us whose dreams die unfulfilled, Justus was swift and sure. From his own mental design, he began a trial-and-error process that produced a creature as unique to this universe as Mary Shelley’s monster or the zilla of God.
At first glance, the boat looked nearly as freakish. The cabin was framed by welded aluminum joists and fit with bright yellow plywood decking. Walls of waterproof nylon, canvas, and clear plastic protected the passenger from the elements and rolled up during a breezeless swelter. The whole house sat atop two bulbous pontoons, blue as a Simpsons sky. The pontoons were tough rubber carcasses that sported a patchwork quilt of repairs incurred in a previous life, when the pontoons took a thousand trips down the Colorado River. The boat even had a tiny outboard motor.
So the raft was a bit more sophisticated than a Huck Finn production. But Justus McLarty was determined to guide his craft like a raft.
The interior offered the rudimentary comforts of home: a stove, a sink, an ice box. Running water flowed from refillable plastic tankards. Ample shelving supported all the things a body would need for ninety days: kitchenware, food, flashlights, books, even a boom box loaded with a billion river tunes. Since interior space was devoted to cooking, sleeping and storage, the living room sat atop the flat roof, furnished with folding lawn chairs. Not a lot of shade.
Mark Twain