Mississippi Rowing
Now and then
September 2005
As I sit in the airport lounge, sipping my Sam Adams draft beer for what is going to be a very long time (I’m heading back to Cairo tonight), I skim the headlines of the day’s New York Times. The big story is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There are many sub stories about the flooding of New Orleans, putting up of thousands of people in the Superdome and the disruption of transporting goods on the Mississippi River and through pipelines carrying gasoline and other liquid products.
I read further and learn that the barge system responsible for shipping half of the US’s grain exports is in trouble – its system of towboats and barges disrupted by Katrina.
Half way though the NY Times article, I start reminiscing about my row down the Mississippi in the summer of 1982. With an 18’ rowboat christened “Guinevere” that we built in northern Vermont, Curt and I rowed the entire length of the river from the headwaters at Lake Itasca to Head of the Passes just south of New Orleans.
The day before we finished the summer long row, we had been in New Orleans with our rowboat tied up to a moored barge at a tow company located directly on the river. We had secured Guinevere with spring lines to ensure she floated up and down safely with the ever-present surges in the river level caused by passing barges and ships.
Our new friends, John and Pete, were not so fortunate. After a night of partying in the French Quarter, the four of us returned to the Mississippi to find their canoe crushed as the result of tying their boat too tightly to the moored barge and the shoreline. The nearby mud bank had suddenly collapsed and tossed the canoe hard against the moored barge. Our boat, on the other hand, floated serenely at its mooring just a few feet from theirs. The spring lines, a series of four lines tied at oblique angles to each other, had saved us.
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The Mississippi was a constant challenge the whole way down to New Orleans. We always had to be aware of what was going on in front of us, behind us and in our immediate area.
The northern most part of the river was full of recreational boaters, fishermen, duck hunters and wild rice harvesters. Our green fiberglass rowboat moved among all without a sound. We covered five to ten miles a day. The only battle we had with the river in the far north was with the mosquitoes and deerflies.
In Minneapolis / St. Paul, the river changed and our easygoing pastoral rowing odyssey was transformed. We rowed through the first lock and dam and experienced its impressive rising and falling of the lock waters as we passed from level to level.
In the middle Mississippi, we locked through 27 dams. We became old pros at the business of locking through. We’d caught the attention of the lockmaster by waving when we were alone or join the queue of waiting powerboats. Our biggest challenge in this stretch was rowing through the choppy waters left by speed crazy powerboats.
The heat was intense on the river in mid July. One day I started crying out of sheer exhaustion as we were trying to stay afloat in a wake left from several barbecue boats that came too close. I didn’t realize though, that I was suffering from a near heat stroke until we pulled over to the riverbank to rest. We sat for a couple of hours under the tent fly that Curt rigged. My body was burning as I dove into the river to cool off.
It was just south of St. Louis, Missouri when the river changed character significantly. The locks and dams finished at St. Louis where the Missouri River joined the Mississippi. Ahead of us was the wide-open Mississippi River of old story lore and evocative songs. “Keeping on rolling, Mississippi dream, won’t you keep on rolling for me……” went through my mind. Images of the Civil War – the Catfish Front – lay in front of us, or really in back of us since we were rowing.
Cedar and cypress trees draped heavily with black Spanish moss lined the banks. The river was wider but it did not mean there was more room for us. The tows and barges were bigger and more plentiful. We saw daily evidence of the power of the river: mud encrusted trees with clearly marked waterlines that were far above our heads; left over from the previous years’ flood. Sand bars were as plentiful as they had been in the middle Mississippi but here on the lower Mississippi, each night, we were careful to pull the boat up far from the river’s edge. With no dams to control the river’s rise, the height of the water seemed unpredictable to us.
One night we camped on a sand island in a tight bend on the river. The Corp of Engineers chart indicated that the Louisiana State Penitentiary was right across the river from our campsite. The notice to mariners also noted the possibility of alligators anywhere along the river’s edge – sand bars not withstanding. That evening as we lay in the sweltering heat of our tent, a tremendous thunderstorm with vivid lightening broke out. The rain fly on our old North Face tent began flapping madly. Nearby, barges waiting to negotiate the bend by Raccourci Cut-Off gunned their 5000 horsepower engines on and off in an effort to maintain their positions along the river bank.
The next day as we rowed south; huge towboats pushing 40 twenty-foot barges passed by as we dipped our oars in the muddy Mississippi. Bargemen from St. Louis had warned us never to be upstream and directly in front of a barge. A small boat could be sucked in and down the entire length of 40 barges, they said. The idea so horrified us that we always gave tows with barges an extra wide berth.
By the time we reached Baton Rouge we were beginning to question the advisability of swimming in the Mississippi River even after the long sweaty days at the oars. The air was hot and sultry as ever but the river was now an alleyway filled with chemical and gasoline discharge ports. Menacing guard towers overlooked most of the discharge ports.
We rowed by the impressive cut-off to the Achafalaya River and were once again impressed by the US Corp of Engineers efforts to suppress and divert the power of the Mississippi. And once again we gave a wide berth to the cut-off, imagining what could happen if we got too close to the lock that led to the Achafalya. In my mind’s eye I could see the cut-off like a giant whirlpool with grasping fingers, reaching out for our tiny rowboat. We would be helpless in the grip of the Mississippi’s powerful force as it slammed up against the Achafalya dam.
Perhaps it was not likely but looking across the river that day, over to the mammoth lock that guarded the division between the Mississippi and Achafalya Rivers, the river seemed very powerful and our efforts to row it were miniscule and almost laughable.
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The morning after we found John and Pete’s canoe crushed by the river, we left New Orleans in our bid to complete the row down the Mississippi. John and Pete, at our suggestion, called a local outfitter and secured the loan of a canoe so they could complete their paddle down the river.
Not far from of New Orleans, the landscape turned wild and we were looking at bayou: Houses on stilts, pirogues zooming past us and salt in the air. The day we reached the Head of the Passes, the traffic was heavy on the river. Ships, tows, barges, tugs, and pirogues jostled for space as they either headed inland or out to sea to avoid the beginnings of Hurricane Alicia in the Gulf. Within a couple of hours, we came to Mile 0 and ended our row there.
The river had changed so much from the northern forestland of Lake Itasca to a Corp of Engineers lock and dam controlled river to St. Louis where the dams fell away and the full power of the Mississippi was unleashed.
We developed a lasting respect for the river’s unbending power and energy. Every day as we rowed along the muddy banks, we saw evidence of its strength. Sometimes we’d hear the sounds of a deep thud and plop and look over to see a section of bank sliding into the river. Nowhere was this so evident as at Natchez, Mississippi. We stopped there one day and tied up to a solitary barge. In front of us, the broken uneven riverbank extended upward like a ravaged muddy face. Most of Natchez, with only a couple of its original streets left, was set way back from the river now. It had given up years ago trying to compete with the Mississippi.
April 6, 2010
Holland, Vermont
