In 2019, Victoria Bradford Styrbicki ran the length of the Mississippi River. Not content with the physical challenge of doing that, she used the run as a way to hear about people’s lives and their stories about the Mississippi River. In this episode of the podcast, I talk with Victoria about the project called Relay of Voices, about the inspiration and the physical challenges. We also talk about the importance of listening, about what she learned about our relationship with the big river, and about the upcoming launch of her new website that will showcase the people she met. In the Mississippi Minute, I confront my irrational fear of spiders and do a little research about orb weavers.

Show Notes

Follow Victoria’s work at:

Want to participate in the November 1 launch for Relay of Voices? Register here.

And here are a couple of shots of orb weavers. They’re harmless. I swear.

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Transcript

Mon, Nov 27, 2023 5:16PM • 1:03:39

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, river, stories, mississippi, work, run, experiences, relay, headwaters, weavers, november 1st, listen, louisiana, body, spent, unbuilt, orb, community, interviews, voices

SPEAKERS

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki, Dean Klinkenberg

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 00:00

This landscape, this waterway that asks to be physically encountered. You know that it’s asking for the body to be with it and to know it in a physical way.

Dean Klinkenberg 00:32

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg, and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people in places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going. Welcome to Episode 10 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Victoria Bradford Styrbicki about her remarkable feat from 2019, in which she ran the length of the Mississippi River. Obviously, the first question I have to ask is, “What were you thinking?”. So yeah, we get into that. I’ll ask her a little bit about her inspiration for wanting to run the length of the river. But there are two aspects to this story that I think we will find interesting. One is obviously the physical part. How she prepared and managed the physical challenges related to running so much and running every day. But the second part of her project is she wanted to listen to people’s stories. And in the course of the four months she ran the river she interviewed about 600 people about their lives, about their stories related to the Mississippi River. The first set of stories she’ll be releasing on November 1st. Chapter One focuses on people from the Headwaters region. I’ll post a link in the show notes where you can check that out and I hope you will. A quick shout out to Patreon supporters as usual for continuing to show love to the podcast. If you would like to show some love as well go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg and you can make a contribution there. Now let’s get on to the interview. Victoria Bradford Styrbicki is an artist and cultural producer working across the lines of public art, dance, social practice and installation. Bradford currently works as executive and artistic director of A House Unbuilt, a nonprofit organization focused on movement research. She refers to the work she does there as social choreography, moving people both physically and conceptually toward greater connectivity. This work relies on collaboration from other artists as well as research institutes, environmental organizations, political organizations, art organizations, governments and government agencies, individual citizens and communities at large across the United States, particularly as witnessed in Relay of Voices. Bradford studied visual arts, anthropology and theology at the University of Notre Dame, and visual arts and performance at the school, The Art Institute of Chicago. Welcome to the podcast, Victoria.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 03:37

Thanks, Dean. It’s good to be here.

Dean Klinkenberg 03:39

It is such a treat to have some time to really talk in depth with you about your project ‘Relay of Voices’. And I’m not exactly sure where it makes the most sense to begin. Should we talk first about A House Unbuilt or should we talk about Relay of Voices? Where would you like to begin?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 03:57

I guess we can talk about A House Unbuilt and just kind of explain the background of the work that I do.

Dean Klinkenberg 04:05

Sounds good. So give us an idea about you know what A House Unbuilt’s main focus is and what that looks like.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 04:13

Sure. So A House Unbuilt started out really with a basis in movement, but movement that’s rooted in landscapes and situations. So I started out as a choreographer, a dancer, a visual artist. Someone who was responding to my environment and my situation and making artworks that landed not often in a gallery or a museum but often right back in those environments where I was inspired from. So out on the city street, out in a garden, out on a pier along the Mississippi. In these different spaces, finding that this real connection with these, these landscapes and these environments, and eventually I started to realize that, you know, being a part of these situations and these environments was also an opportunity to listen to the people who were in those spaces, and to tell their stories as well, that they were kind of connected to the landscapes and the environments that they were in. And so the stories started to become, you know, full of words, not just movements, and the work became more complex. And so it wasn’t that dance…dance became something that was social and engaged in communities. And I started to think about how this was not just putting performances in the way of people’s sight, you know, something to witness, but it was more of a research effort of looking at the movement in people’s lives, looking at how people’s behaviors and their actions and the stories that they tell through the way they live their lives. You know, it’s something we can connect to and learn from, and that that can kind of build bridges across some of the boundaries we’re experiencing in the world. And so I started to build projects that did that or that kind of tapped into those resources. So some of those projects were like a project that have this focus on bringing people together over a meal, doing dinners, having people share over long durations of time that meal and kind of engage in conversation and suss things out through creative experiences. And then, of course, like Relay Of Voices, you know, traveling down the river, having dialogue with people, sharing those stories as we travel. Turning those stories into other stories and, you know, reconnecting with those people, many times, there’s a lot of iteration in the work that I do, where you take something, you do something, it becomes something else, and it becomes something else again. So there’s never just one time with a material. You can think of that as a, you know, a physical material but also as the the lived material, like a story or like an encounter with a person. So I’ve been doing this work for, you know, 12 years now, maybe longer and formed a nonprofit, A House Unbuilt, in order to kind of house the work and to support the work by being able to raise money, you know, through grants and individual donors to do these different projects. Some of them are large and some of them are small. And that’s really, that’s really helped to get things off the ground. Fantastic. So the idea of movement is central to your work. Could you just explain a little bit about how you define movement? Why that plays such a central role in what you’re interested in? So while I use words a lot, especially in this new project – writing, I always go back to the body. That I think there is language, or there’s knowledge housed in the body, and the way that we move, in the way that we sense our environments. That is only housed in the body. That there’s a way of knowing through the body that comes before language. And I think that it’s important to tap into that. And a lot of it comes from simple movement, even just a breath or the way we open and close our eyes in the morning. It doesn’t mean doing a turn or a leap or splitting your legs open or whatever, you know, in some kind of dramatic dance movement, but just the the simple ways we move our body and being tuned into that. And you know, how it kind of changes the way we interact with other people and with ourselves and the energy we have every day and then how that interacts with the words that come out of our mouths and how that changes and shifts the way we communicate with ourselves and with each other. And so I think there’s all this energy that’s housed in the body and that we become sometimes alienated from it. Because we’re on screens. Because we’re gabbing. We’re talking and that it’s important to reconnect with the body. And all that energy and that knowledge that’s housed there. Because we can learn new things about ourselves and about kind of an origin of ourselves and an original way of, you know, kind of how we came into being and how we connect with each other. And that gets to our rootedness. You know, and maybe possibly how we can get over some of the the kind of tensions and divisiveness that we’ve created. And that’s just something I personally believe in and feel. I don’t have any proof.

Dean Klinkenberg 11:06

So if I’m kind of understanding it right, it sounds like there’s this idea that we experience things maybe on a physical level that we aren’t necessarily, acutely conscious of, or don’t necessarily, aren’t necessarily part of our mental awareness. But they’re, you know, it’s another way of kind of experiencing the world and you’re trying to kind of tap into that and help bring out some of that and bring some light and help people maybe be a little more aware of what their body is telling them about how they’re experiencing the world. Is that one aspect of this?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 11:43

Definitely, I also think one of the things I’m doing is using the body as a place to kind of reprocess things that we do with words or, you know, with technology. And so kind of, like, using the body as a tool to unpack some of what we’ve packed in and layered. So I create these, you know, dances or these movement experiences, where hopefully that can show something that we’ve kind of hidden. And that creates a space for new knowledge and new experience. And then I not only do that in my own body, but I try to create opportunities for other people to have those same experiences. Whether that’s through workshops, through storytelling experiences, or community gatherings, you know, through a kind of immersive performance, where people are engaged, and they don’t realize they’re having a movement moment, but they’re having a movement moment, things like that.

Dean Klinkenberg 13:12

Fantastic. There are just so many different ways we can experience the world and I think this is one area where particularly in our culture today, we just don’t pay much attention to our bodies as much and what our bodies are trying to tell us. So it sounds like your work is a part of it is certainly helping to increase awareness of that and help people get in touch with that and learn from what their bodies are trying to say.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 13:37

I think that’s exactly it. And I think when we get to the project and talking about the river, and how it’s a physical environment, it’s this landscape, this waterway that asks to be physically encountered, you know. That it’s asking for the body to be with it and to know it in a physical way you know. You can read about it, you can look at the statistics about what’s happening to our you know, to our river, whether it’s in industry or water, clean water or all those things, you can know it in a variety of different ways. But if you know it by being you know, on the landscape in the water, there’s such a different experience and taking the time to soak that in really changes things.

Dean Klinkenberg 14:48

Well, that’s a that’s a nice transition. So let’s get into that a little bit then, the Relay of Voices. So at some point, I don’t know, you woke up some morning and you decided I want to run 2500 miles along the Mississippi River. How did the work, tell me about how this idea came to you, the genesis of this?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 15:08

Well, it is kind of like that. I’ve never been an athlete. I wasn’t a runner. But I started running about six years ago because I needed an exercise. Like I needed to start exercising more because I wasn’t dancing as much as I used to. I stopped a big project I was doing and I needed a daily practice. I just needed something simple. You know, going to the gym, which was expensive. Running, you could just put on tennis shoes and walk out the door, hit the pavement. So I asked a friend of mine, who was a triathlon coach to kind of give me a plan, and help me not hurt myself, you know, because I’m clumsy. And I was bound to injure myself. And so he, he ended up being my trainer. And after a few weeks of running every day and starting to get into this kind of meditative space, you know, with running and feeling like, really just at home and coming to know the streets of Chicago, which is where I was living at the time, in a whole new way. I started to really learn the landscape. You know, I had been walking the streets of Chicago for a long time. But as I ran the streets, and I ran further than I had ever walked, I you know, I went into new neighborhoods. I kind of explored. I just fell in love with this rhythm that was kind of coursing through my body. And I thought I need to do something with this. Like, I need to make art with this. Because anytime something like connects with me in that way, I feel like I need to do something significant with it. Right? And the thing that made sense for me at the time, was to run home to Louisiana, because I had been living in Chicago for about 10 years, and I had really been struggling ever since around the BP oil spill, which was several years prior, but with the sense of like, “why am I here and not there?” Helping my state, like being a part of that conversation, which is a really complicated conversation. Um, you know, and participating in some way to make a difference in the community where my family lives, where my family is struggling, and where is my home? And so I thought, well, I titled the project “Running Home”. It was going to be called Running Home and I was going to run, you know, from Chicago down the Chicago River to the Mississippi River. I was going to run home. And then I started, you know, took time thinking about it. And I realized that the Mississippi River is like the backbone of our nation. And it’s also the waterway that shapes my state, Louisiana. It is what forms the boot. And for better or for worse, considering what’s happening with subsidence and how people are trying to or not harness the river water to rebuild land and all of those complicated conversations.

Dean Klinkenberg 19:21

So where in Louisiana did you grow up?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 19:24

I grew up on the southwest side of the boot in Lake Charles. So the heel of the boot.

Dean Klinkenberg 19:34

When you were growing up, what I guess, what role did water or the Mississippi play in your life when you were growing up?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 19:44

I grew up in Lake Charles but my family is really from kind of all along the coastal area. My dad grew up in Baton Rouge. His family’s from New Orleans. My mom is from a small town in Lafourche Parish on Bayou Lafourche called “Cut Off”. And her dad was a trapper. We grew up fishing every summer on Grand Isle, a barrier island, kind of off the coast at the toe of the boot. And I saw Grand Isle every summer, change, you know. Some years we would have a beach, some years you would see new, like apparatus for erosion, you know, whether it was these, like, kind of, they look like amphitheater kind of structures or it was Christmas trees, or it was a new jetty put in or, you know, all these different structures to try to prevent the erosion and some years there would be a great beach and then other years, there had been a hurricane and it was all washed away. And it was you know, but always it wasn’t like a Florida beach. It was a, you know, salty, smelly, dead fish. You could see the oil rigs, you could see the shrimp boats. And we surf fished early in the morning, out in the water. And, you know, my mom always said we were a water people. And, and definitely you know that I grew up, I learned how to clean a fish from my grandmother in this little like fish cleaning hut there in Grand Isle. You know, they lived on the Bayou side.

Dean Klinkenberg 21:52

So the next the next time I’m going fishing, you’re coming with me to show me how to clean what I catch. If I catch anything at all.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 21:59

Right. I mean, it’s so many of my family members still live down there in Lafourche Parish. And several of my cousins were boat captains, you know, pilots on the Mississippi. So even though my mom ended up moving over to Lake Charles, which still has a strong relationship with the waters of the Gulf and what’s going on in those industries, we still spent a lot of time close to the Mississippi. And so that’s what I kind of realized. And I also realized that as I would run down the length of the river, I would be intersecting all these communities that also had a relationship to the river, and people who made their home along the river, and I could learn from them. Why? Why did they make a home on the river? You know, what’s their relationship to that place. And so I realized it, it wasn’t just about my story. It was just kind of where it started. It really was about kind of stepping outside of my story and listening very deeply to all these other stories that I might encounter. And that through that listening, I might come to know something. And it’s it was listening with my body. As I ran the landscape of the river. As I spent physically time with these people, moving through their days that I would learn and know. That was the theory.

Dean Klinkenberg 24:17

Well, we’ll get to whether or not it lived up to that in a minute. So all right, so you had this idea coalesced. You decided you were going to run the length of the Mississippi. What did you do? How did you prepare for that physically?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 24:31

Well, so like I said, I had this friend who was a coach, and he stayed with me as my coach getting me running more and more miles. Doing strength training. Eventually I started cycling, which I hadn’t ever done. I was always kind of a hazard on a bicycle. I had wrecked several. But it was important to have a side plan that if I couldn’t run, I could bike. And so I was running every day. I was cycling every day. I was doing strength training. I was swimming. I was pretty religious about it. I was in the best shape of my life. I wish I was in that good of shape now. I went through a couple of injuries in the process, you know, learning where my weaknesses were, which I think is really important, because as a dancer, my body is built in such a way to be very flexible. And a runner is more tight. And you have different kind of muscle groups that are kind of like prioritized. And so I had to work maybe harder to be able to run longer distances, you know, and, and to keep up that kind of endurance. But yeah, so I mean, originally, the project kind of went through several iterations, and it was called Relay of Voices because I thought I would have several people running. I thought I would have communities running. And we did have people run with us along the way. But I envisioned masses running. And I also envisioned this group of dancers like myself running and breaking up the distances into kind of reasonable chunks. And this group of us going out and interviewing people in this movement, research style. But it turned out that it was hard to get these other people to kind of commit to taking four months off of life. And, you know, committing to a training plan, and things like that. So, in the end, it turned out that it was going to be just me. And that seemed almost impossible. So my husband said he would join me. And we would do it as a two person relay. And that’s how it worked out.

Dean Klinkenberg 28:07

So as a relay, then did that mean, you would run one day he would run another day? Was that part of the structure of it?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 28:18

It meant I would run part of the way and then he would run part of the way. So say, take the day from Nauvoo to Warsaw. He ran out of Nauvoo and I ran into Warsaw.

Dean Klinkenberg 28:37

So I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the logistics and the like the physicality of this, but I am curious about it. Because it’s one thing to train to run a marathon, for example, you run those 26 miles and then you’re done. But you’re looking at running a couple, well, 2300 miles over the course of four months. So I imagine that you got into that, like there must have been times when your body was not always happy that you’re going to try to run a few more miles that day. There must have been days like that.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 29:17

Yeah, I mean, when we got to the Driftless area, some of the hilly areas, I had a tendency to go out too fast. And not expect the landscape, not prepare myself, you know, that kind of, pace myself. And I would peter out sometimes. Like, I would, and Tom would, have to take over and I could like pick up later on and come back, you know, so we would have to relay several times. You know, it because I tended to be a little speedy, but I didn’t always prepare for those hills. It got better when we were in Louisiana, when it was just flat. But then, you know, we did have bikes with us. So for those long days, we’re like, oh, where was it…East St. Louis to Prairie du Rocher. That was like a 56 mile day. We rode bikes, we ran out of East St. Louis and ran into Prairie du Rocher. But for the intervening miles, we rode the bike. And it was not easy even riding the bike, because it was a headwind. And it was still tough, you know, still like doing a biathlon. But, you know, so that helped. At least it helps your joints and things like that.

Dean Klinkenberg 31:12

So it sounds like you kind of had a structure set up for yourself where you’re trying to get to a particular place every day?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 31:20

That’s right. We had 104 communities and every day was planned, in terms of where we were going. We had, I think, 14 communities that we stayed two days and the rest of them we only stayed one day. So it was 120 days total. And in each community, we had some planned interactions, people that we had coordinated with to interview and spend time with, and some community events that we had coordinated. And then we had some unplanned interactions that happened. But I had spent, like, you know, two and a half years in advance planning this. Reaching out to communities. I had visited all the communities in advance. Spent time with people to make sure that they knew who I was, what I was hoping to do, you know. And that we wanted to collaborate.

Dean Klinkenberg 32:35

So one of the things jumping out at me from this, too, is the extraordinary amount of preparation that went into making this work. So obviously, the centerpiece of this in many ways is the people that you ended up talking with and collecting stories from. So you had a couple of years where you’re doing some outreach. Ultimately, how did you decide which people were you going to talk with and interview as you traveled down the river?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 33:07

So in each community, we connected with maybe like the mayor’s office, or the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, or the Arts Council, or a church or some organization. Or it was a group, or it was like a steering committee that came together. And we tasked them with coming up with a diverse group of people for us to spend time with. So they came up with a list. And we checked that list and said, “Oh, this looks good” or, you know, “No, this doesn’t look good”, or “Maybe you should add someone else to the list.” You know, we kind of went back and forth about the list. Obviously, they know their community better than we do. And, you know, when it came time to do the interviews and discover who these people really were, we did find that a lot of people gave us their best foot forward. You know, they wanted us to know, the city councilman and the, you know, the teacher of the year and you know, whatever it is. But everybody has a story. And everybody breaks down at a certain point and tells you who they are and their real feelings. And we spent hours with these people. And while we did learn that there were some other stories that we needed to hear or that we should go back and hear. Things where people might have even said, “Close your eyes when you drive by here”, “Don’t look there”, you know, or just stories they didn’t want us to know. We want to know those stories. We want to know the full picture of a community. But we learned something about that person when they told us that. And we learned something about the community just from that moment. And so there was always something to be learned no matter who they gave us to, to listen to.

Dean Klinkenberg 35:37

So in the end about how many different people do you think you had a chance to talk with and interview?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 35:45

I think it’s about 600.

Dean Klinkenberg 35:47

Oh, my goodness. And you recorded all that?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 35:51

Yes.

Dean Klinkenberg 35:52

So give us like a broad sense of the experiences of people who, obviously, we’re not gonna go name by name, but like, in a broad sense, who were the people that participated in this? What was their relationship to the river? Like, what kind of spectrum of relationships did you come across?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 36:13

Well, I can think about where I’m at on the river riding right now. There’s a farmer, you know, in Missouri, who experienced, you know, a levee breach and flood damage to his home and his farm. There’s a chemist in Warsaw, Illinois, who worked during the Clean Water Act, being put in place and, you know, was really, kind of like, spent his lifespan, the time of that being put in place and working on water quality and new restrictions and being very proud of that work to the point of the Trump administration coming in and rolling back restrictions and kind of being devastated by that happening and seeing what change is happening to water quality. But he’s, you know, not just a chemist. He’s a historian and an amateur archaeologist who found a hidden fort along the shores of the Mississippi River. You know, we spent time at the biological field station up at Itasca and met with students and the Director Jonathan Schilling there and learned about, you know, everything that they’re the research they’re doing there and their relationship to the water. We met with an Ojibwe leader in Cass Lake. And, you know, talked about the kind of unique situation of the Leech Lake reservation, being kind of like a chessboard, you know, kind of checkerboard reservation broken up because so many people have sold their allotments not realizing the value of their land at the time, and what she’s doing to try to create value for their people through some new initiatives. And we met with this really interesting group down in Rosedale, Mississippi, the Rosedale Freedom Project, a young man from the East Coast, moved to Rosedale and started this group for young people of color to come and learn about their heritage in the civil rights movement and the original kind of freedom schools and to find a way to have a chance to go to college. All kind of rooted in, you know, freedom songs and freedom rights, kind of all of these really strong lessons. But also like learning new skills in video, technology, writing poetry, you know. We met with some of the students themselves and interviewed them and talked about their experiences in the community, a very poor part of the Delta. I don’t know that there isn’t any poor, not poor part of the Delta. But we were down in Louisiana, meeting with like, several coastal activist advocates. Richie Blink, who planted 1000s of trees and is also now a parish councilman from Empire in Louisiana, which is disappearing. He’s a young guy. He’s like, my age or younger. It’s just like so heartening to see a young person like staking their claim on their home like that. And like doing that kind of work in a community that most people don’t even realize, they think the river ends at New Orleans. And there’s this whole, like 90 miles, Plaquemines Parish, you know, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines Parish that still exist. And that matters. You know, so I don’t know that I could go on and on, there’s tons of stories.

Dean Klinkenberg 41:07

So you’ve met people from a whole bunch of different backgrounds. And a part of this was because of that preparation you did in advance. You had a chance to build some of those connections right away. We hear so much today about you know, how divided Americans are and how hard it is for people to talk to each other. And yet here, you traveled through the middle of the country, talking to people from very different backgrounds of your own. What do you think are some of the keys to having those conversations and connecting with people that are far too easy for us to dismiss otherwise?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 41:44

You mean, just for anyone to have those conversations?

Dean Klinkenberg 41:48

Sure. Maybe what your approach was?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 41:51

Well, I think, you know, we did a presentation just yesterday about two different stories on segregation. One was a story from a black man who had experienced segregation as a youth. And one was from a white woman who had experienced segregation as a youth. Two very different perspectives on segregation and yet, when we encounter both of these stories, we just listened. We didn’t judge them. We didn’t offer any remarks to say, “Oh, God” or, you know, I think it is giving people a chance to tell their story to that their story is worth hearing. To, give them the space and the time to do that. It doesn’t mean that we can’t all have a position or take a position, you know, at some point when it’s appropriate. But to really engage across the perceived boundaries, I think we need to look for the humanity in people. And I think that can always be found. And listen for the humanity. And recognize when you know, something you hear, is maybe not what you want to hear. But just keep listening, because there might be something else that they have to say. And that’s just part of the conversation.

Dean Klinkenberg 44:14

Fundamentally, like there are just times we need to shut up and listen, essentially, right?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 44:19

Exactly. And let it all come out first, you know, before you do that knee jerk reaction, like “I’ve got the answer for you. I’ve got to correct you.” You know, I listened to this one woman and in the moment, like, the matter of a minute, she talked herself out of being racist. You know, she started being racist, and then she talked herself out of it as she was talking and so let people find their way.

Dean Klinkenberg 44:58

Well, let’s, let’s get back to the river too because this is the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast after all. And I’m curious, from your experiences talking with folks and spending four months along the river, what impressions did you come away with about the Mississippi?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 45:18

That it’s very different in different places. You know, like, my Mississippi River is levied and dangerous and full of ships and you don’t go on a kayak in that river. And yet, there’s this other river, where everybody’s like, on an island, and boating and waterskiing. And it’s like the destination. I mean, that’s one thing. That was just as a I think I went in totally unexpecting of that just not you know, like a total naive being. Also, perceptions about water quality. You know, obviously, people up at Itasca and the Headwaters region felt like their water was clean and pure, and, you know, crystal, like, just so great. But even further down the river, some people thought their water was great. In Lacrosse, people thought we had the best water ever. But then you get, you know, further down, and some people don’t even think about the water quality, because they’re not connected to the water. Because there is a barrier. So I think also, you know, the river is, you know, it definitely becomes more industrial. More of that navigation superhighway. And, you know, it’s a transition from kind of the scenic splendor in the Headwaters region, to a kind of different river way. Which still has a beauty if you appreciate that, you know, if you, if you understand that’s part of our kind of American infrastructure. And it’s important that we use the river that way, or it has become important to the world economy. And, you know, we climbed over the levee in Carlisle, Louisiana, and stood on the batture. And you know, it’s beautiful, from that vantage point, even seeing the shipping traffic and everything else. And the woman we were with, was like,”Tear down the levees, let the water run.” But the reality is, obviously, that’s never going to happen. Maybe through a diversion channel. But we won’t get the river back to its, quote, “natural state” and what its natural state is, or what that means natural state is debated. Some people think natural state means just, you know, with the shipping channel. Depends on who you talk to.

Dean Klinkenberg 49:29

If you’re enjoying the show, share that love with other people. Leave a review on iTunes or your preferred podcast app. Each review makes a difference and helps other fans of the Mississippi River and the Midwest find this show. So tell me again, when you did Relay the Voices, I think that was in 2019. So since then, you’ve been going back and looking or relistening to and kind of organizing the interviews that you did. I wonder, in that process of relistening, did it change any of your initial impressions. As you go back and listen to things, did your impressions shift at all from what you thought you came away with?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 50:18

Um, I mean, I think they’re fuller. I definitely think during the initial journey, there were so little time to process. And everything was just kind of on the surface of understanding. So now I’m listening to every single word and every single thought, and I’m able to connect things a lot more between locations, you know, so upriver and downriver. And see that some of this stories that maybe I thought weren’t as meaningful, actually have a lot of meat to them. Because I just missed some of those details. I might have been tired that day and I wasn’t listening as intently as I should have. But the camera listened, thank goodness, you know. And so that was helpful. I mean, we tried on the journey to, you know, write up as much as possible and to put that out on a blog. And I tried to write some individual pieces, on particular voices, but it was very challenging. Our schedule was very tight.

Dean Klinkenberg 51:52

Right, it’s hard to get a blog post going when you’re running 20 miles. So as we were recording this, today is October 21, 2022. You have a big event coming up on November 1st. Tell us what’s going on on November 1st.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 52:12

Yeah, so we are launching the new storytelling website. It’s interactive, media rich, and it will contain, on November 1st, the first chapter covering the Headwaters region of content that I have been putting together. And every month following November, I’ll be releasing another chapter. There’ll be nine chapters in total. So we’ll go from Headwaters to the Gorge to the Driftless, and on down until we reach the Gulf South in July. So it’s kind of exciting, you can journey along with us once again. And we’re really excited because this is the full content. It is video footage, raw footage from those interviews. It is audio clips. It is the photos, it is, you know, first-hand quotes and material from these people who shared their stories, you know. It has, you know, taken me time to really dig deeply and kind of connect the dots between, you know, what they talked about and all the issues facing the river today. And I think even though the stories were gathered, you know, three years ago now, they’re still very relevant, and connected to what’s happening on the river and in our lives. What’s happening in the world, it’s not just about the river, it’s just about being human.

Dean Klinkenberg 54:06

Something we should all be good at, by this time, I would hope. So RelayofVoices.com is out there, right?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 54:14

That’s right, it will go live on November 1st. And then at 6 pm that evening, we will have the launch event on Zoom. So we hope anyone and everyone will join us for that.

Dean Klinkenberg 54:30

And I will post the link in the show notes to register for that event at 6 pm on the first. If you’ll just send that to me again by email then I’ll post that on the show notes. So when the website is live, then I just want to you know, make sure that we’re clear about this. So I’ll be able to go to your website and watch interviews with the people that you met and talked with along with the whole trip and I know that the first chapter is gonna just be the Headwaters region for the first chapter.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 55:02

So the first chapter is 16 different locations along the Headwaters region and there are several voices containing different stories within that, more than 16 different interviews. And you can navigate the whole river. It’s an interactive map that you can navigate. But you’ll notice as you go beyond the Headwaters region that the locations will tell you “Coming Soon”, or “Coming in December of 2022”, or “Coming in February of 2023”, depending upon where they’re located.

Dean Klinkenberg 55:50

Well, I like the, the fact that it’s kind of a gradual rollout too, because there’s a lot of content to absorb, and you know, I’ll have time then to go in and listen to stories from the Headwaters region and not feel like I have to rush through to get to the end of the river by certain time. I can take my time getting to listen to the stories from each of these chapters and each of these regions and have some time to kind of sit on it before the next set of content is available. I like that.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 56:16

It definitely is a lot of content. It’s a lot of material. And every story, you know, is very rich. So I think it is a good way to kind of take your time through it. And I think that like the river, the stories become kind of, not muddier, but more complex as you travel further and further down river. So just know that the Headwaters, you know, Minnesota is so nice. And most of the people on the stories we met there, you know, kind of have that quality. But as you get further and further into the narrative, things start to get a little more challenging. I hope you’ll keep tuned in and keep reading as we release the further chapters. You know, especially, as we get into the Driftless, and the Delta, all of the, you know, the chapters as we go further. There’s just so much, you know, depth in the stories and the, and the overlaps that happen, that you’ll see coming out.

Dean Klinkenberg 57:54

Fantastic. I’m so looking forward to this. You know, we’ve talked about this, you know, amongst ourselves before, too, but I get a little tired of the fact that there are certain narratives that are the only stories we seem to hear about the Mississippi, particularly in popular media. And if I hear one more story about people walking to Tower Rock, yeah, I think I’m, I might break something. But yeah, so I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be really special about this site is that they’re going to be multiple hundreds of people who are going to be talking about their relationship with the Mississippi, what the river means to them. And I hope people take time to really go through and listen to those stories. And think about what it means about having a relationship with this big river. So other than RelayOfVoices.com, are there other places, social media, for example, where people can follow your work?

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 58:50

Yeah, we’ve got our website, ahouseunbuilt.com, which has a portfolio of all of my work past and present. And then we’re on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as ‘Relay of Voices’. And then I am just as ‘vebradford’. So you can find me there and I can send you those links to include in the show notes.

Dean Klinkenberg 59:23

Well, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with Relay of Voices. And I’m looking forward to this launch on November 1st and losing some time listening to stories about the river.

Victoria Bradford Styrbicki 59:35

Wonderful. Thanks, Dean. This has been great.

Dean Klinkenberg 59:37

And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. A few weeks ago on a hike through an infrequently visited trail through bottomland forest, I found myself repeatedly dodging spider webs that spanned from tree to tree. These weren’t just any spiders. They were big, about the size of the palm of my hand, and they lurked in the middle of webs that stretched four feet or more. I was pretty sure they were orb-weaver’s, entirely harmless and not at all aggressive, but the sheer number and size of them creeped me out as I detoured around there silky traps. Those southern forests sure grow some enormous spiders. So naturally, I dug into researching orb-weavers to settle my anxieties about them. Orb-weavers are diverse and ancient group of spiders. Scientists have identified nearly 3000 species and the oldest one probably emerged about 150 million years ago. Their bodies are often brightly colored, and they come in many shapes and sizes from the palm-sized ones with spiky legs that I manuevered around, to thumbnail-size creatures with geometrically shaped armor. Orb-weaver’s are silk artists. They spin a new web nearly every day, starting the process by shooting a string of silk into the wind. After the silk attaches to another object, the spider crawls to the middle of the string and drops another line of silk to form a Y shape. Then they go round and round to finish the web. When prey gets snagged in the threads, usually insects, but they have been known to eat small frogs and hummingbirds unlucky enough to get caught in their web, they paralyze it with a quick bite, then encase it and silk. Once their prey is dead, they vomit digestive juices on the body, then chew and suck out juices. By late summer they’ve grown as big as they’re gonna get and turn their attention to mating. Male orb-weavers don’t spend much time in a web. Instead they prowl around looking for a mate. All those orb-weavers I encountered were probably females. When a pair gets busy mating, it’s usually the end of the line for the male. If they copulate for five seconds or less than they might get away and survive to meet again. However, if the pair copulates for 10 seconds, which gives a male a much better chance to pass on his genes, that male is a goner. The female will eat him once they’re finished, female orb-weavers then lay hundreds of eggs and then they die. The little ones will emerge in the spring and start the process all over again. As to my anxieties, they really are unnecessary. Orb-weaver’s aren’t the least bit aggressive unless you’re an insect or a small frog. They flee when they’re threatened. The only time people get bit, and their bites sting but it’s not venomous, is when someone tries to handle one, which is something I will never be doing. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you helped keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.