Men have dominated the world of outdoor adventuring and guiding for so long, that it’s easy to overlook the increasing presence of women in all spheres. More women now complete long-distance paddles on the Mississippi, as well as through hikes on the major trails. The world of guided paddling on the Mississippi reflects the trend. In this episode, I talk with five women who worked this past season as river guides on the Mississippi for one of the outfitters or river-focused organizations. I asked each to talk about their paths to guiding, to describe their stretch of the Mississippi, and to spotlight a few places and experiences that highlighted their year. At the end of the conversation, I asked each woman to identify something about their experience on the Mississippi this year that they’re grateful for.
You’ll hear from:
- Amber “Sparky” Lynum from Paddle Bridge in the Twin Cities
- Melissa Sauter from the Mississippi River Water Trail Association in St. Louis
- Heather “Red River Otter” Crosse from the Quapaw Canoe Company in Clarksdale, Mississippi
- Cory Maria Dack and Sarah Lent
In the Mississippi Minute, I mention a few things that I’m grateful for.
Show Notes
The outfitters and agencies mentioned in this episode:
Paddle Bridge (Twin Cities)
Mississippi River Water Trail Association (St. Louis)
Wilderness Inquiry (Minneapolis)
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Transcript
Sun, Nov 26, 2023 9:50PM • 1:19:00
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mississippi river, river, people, guiding, paddling, paddle, mississippi, canoe, water, minnesota, year, area, sarah, friends, camp, learn, grew, kayak, find, feel
SPEAKERS
Heather Crosse, Amber Sparky Lynum, Sarah Lent, Cory Maria Dack, Melissa Sauter, Dean Klinkenberg
Sarah Lent 00:00
I think our path to guiding on the Mississippi River just really comes from a place of love and learning where you can spend over 100 days on this body of water paddling it and going the whole stretch of the river all the way down to the Gulf but there’s still so much more you can always learn
Dean Klinkenberg 00:37
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 32 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. This is the last episode of 2023. But don’t fret, I’ll be back in January with new episodes and I’ve got a lot planned so stay tuned. In this episode, I talked with five women who guided paddlers on the Mississippi River this year. In places that range from Minnesota all the way down to Mississippi. You’ll hear from Amber “Sparky” Lynum from Paddle Bridge in the Twin Cities. Melissa Sauter from the Mississippi River Water Trail Association in St. Louis. Heather “Red River Otter” Crosse from the Quapaw Canoe Company in Clarksville, Mississippi, and Cory Maria Dack and Sarah Lent who guided on different parts of the river during this past year. I asked each of them about their path to becoming guides and to describe their part of the river and to offer a couple of special places that they found along the river and some memorable moments from guiding this year. And I asked them what they’re thankful for from this past year. I edited myself out of these conversations so you don’t have to hear me ask the same thing over and over. Go to the show notes to find links to each of the outfitters and organizations that we talked about during these interviews. Go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and select episode 32. As always, thanks to those of you who show me love through Patreon. Your ongoing support touches me, moves me and keeps this podcast going. If you want to join that community, go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. And if that’s not your thing, you can always buy me a coffee. I drink plenty of that and I appreciate every penny that helps sustain that habit. Go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast. And there you can find out how you can buy me a coffee. And now on to the interviews.
Amber Sparky Lynum 03:10
Hey, I’m Sparky or Amber. I go primarily by Sparky on the rivers. That is my trail name turned guide name, and it’s cool because in Minnesota where I work on the Mississippi River here – primarily out of the Twin Cities. So both Minneapolis and St. Paul. Sparky has a bit of a dual meaning in river communities because we have a local zoo called the Como Zoo. And if you grew up in the Twin Cities, you probably grew up going to this zoo. And there’s a very famous seal at the Como Zoo, called Sparky. And anytime when Sparky passes on, it’s always in the same lineage of the seal family that there’s always going to be another Sparky and seals are cool and that they can go on both land and in water. So having initially gotten Sparky as a trail name from a friend of mine when we were hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail, to then adopting it as my river name and guiding in Minnesota, having this cool hometown tie has been really fun for me to be able to share with guests and identify more with what it means to guide and work on land and in water in the Twin Cities here. I started guiding professionally during the pandemic. I have been working as a volunteer expedition leader with the Appalachian Mountain Club out in New England for a few years just guiding volunteer trips. But I started working as a professional guide in 2020 doing whitewater river guiding in northern Minnesota. There’s not a huge scene here in the upper Midwest, but there is a small scene. There is some pretty solid rapids. I was working on a river that has class two to four whitewater. And really, I was just looking for a way to get outside interacting with people in a relatively safe manner. So for those people who are still looking to get outside, interacting with others during the pandemic, this was you know, a relatively safe and socially accepted way of doing so. At this, you know, scary time when we’re all figuring out what to do, how to live, how to have a somewhat decent quality of life, right. And so from driving to northern Minnesota from the metro area every weekend, I loved doing it. But after a couple of seasons that got hard to make that drive every weekend, especially when I started to realize I wanted to pursue guiding on more of a full time basis, if possible, even at seasonally, right because it gets cold here. And so I then, a few years into whitewater guiding, decided to look at outfitters closer to home in Twin Cities area here found my current outfitter called Paddle Bridge, where I’ve now just finished my second season with them. And as an organization, we just celebrated our fifth anniversary. I grew up doing a lot of harder motorized sports with my family. So in Minnesota here, the land of 10,000 Lakes, it’s actually more like 11,800. Motorboating, jetskiing, which were actually invented on Lake Pepin in Minnesota. And, let’s see, snow mobiling or ATVing. Big sports. People use these vehicles not only for recreation, but also as like accessories to do other sports like ice fishing, hunting, you know, you name it, right, getting out and navigating in the backwoods. So that’s what I grew up moreso doing. I didn’t find my way to softer sports, like backpacking, paddling until I finished college. And it’s sad to say, but until I had the the time and the resources to be able to afford the cost of entry to get into some of these sports. And so I had outdoor exposures throughout my childhood, which I cherish those memories. But it wasn’t until I was more of an adult and I knew who I was, what my values were, that I found ways to interact with our outdoor spaces in ways that felt more in line with myself. So Paddle Bridge, we are a guide collective. And so what that means is we are a group of guides who really want everyone who works for us to feel like they’re able to bring their unique gifts to the table. And we’ll find ways to work with you based on however it is you see yourself being involved – as an instructor, as an outdoor educator, as a paddler, as an advocate, right. And so if you, we have one of our guides who has a background in theater, and he actually says that, even though he no longer works on the stage as much that it’s actually doing kayak work, being an instructor that he feels like he’s most tapping into his theatrical background because it’s a lot of work to know how to command an audience, keep an engaging experience and fun, right. You’re wearing that entertainer hat, and you know, guiding people through safely. And so that’s kind of cool. We have folks that are really passionate about backcountry medicine. And so in addition to guiding with us, they also will host CPR and first aid classes for the community to so that we’re really able to offer and educate people on you know, everything that it means to be safe and have a well equipped, not only like physical toolkit, but like knowledge base of how to feel safe and prepared when you’re going outdoors. I have a linguistic background and I come from the corporate marketing world before I got into into guiding and so what I’ve been able to bring to the table has been catering some multilingual experiences so guiding in other languages. We also have guides that speak languages that I don’t and so we’ve been able to tap into different communities of non native English speakers to offer opportunities for them to get out on the river and to understand that the context of what’s happening, right what we’re sharing. So that interpretive piece of not only what has historically happened on the Mississippi, its impact on our life today. And how this river community is forming to try to inform what the river is, what we want it to look like, and how we want it to serve us in the future. And so finding Paddle Bridge has been, in a way, a bit of a manifestation of what I already knew that I was looking for. And I just had to bide my time and have patience until I found them. And then when I did, it, just it has felt like a very natural fit. So we’re lucky here in Minnesota to have the headwaters start all the way up in Lake Itasca, which is just this tiny little creek crossing, if you ever visit. You can walk across, you know, almost like the stepping stones. So it’s really fun for kids to do. And then the Mississippi flows 493 river miles down into Minneapolis where we guide, though in total Minnesota is home to about 680 river miles of the Mississippi River. And what is special about our section here is that it is the most pristine water quality you’re going to find. It is also very natural and rustic. And so as you’re flowing or paddling from the north into the metro for those, let’s say who are doing the full source to sea paddle right from the headwaters, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, we hear a lot that the northernmost section is the most beautiful because it is the least developed. So opportunities to see wildlife are incredible. There’s also some really tough portages. And the last portage that you’re actually going to encounter if you’re paddling the entire section of the Mississippi is right in the heart of Minneapolis here around St. Anthony Falls, or in the Dakota language, Owámniyomni. And that’s actually the longest paddle. It’s just over. I’m sorry, longest portage. It’s just over a mile. So you go over and around. St. Anthony Falls there, which is actually the only naturally occurring waterfall on the entire stretch of the river. One of my personal favorites is the section between Minneapolis, so beneath The Falls, and paddling into St. Paul there. It’s about an eight mile stretch of river known as the Mississippi River Gorge. And you are traveling on water between two major metropolitan cities. But you don’t feel like it. The high bluff walls really block out the sound from the traffic overhead. And there’s trees dotting the sides of these walls and so it feels very natural. And what’s cool about this section is that the St. Anthony Falls, the Owámniyomni that I referenced, actually carves out this gorge when they receded backwards. They used to be eight miles down river in St. Paul and over the course of 11,000 years receded eight miles back to their home in Minneapolis today. And so carved out this beautiful canyon like stretch of river that is prime for not only seeing waterfowl. So we have a lot of blue herons, egrets, cormorants, but also awesome birds of prey sightings so golden eagles swooping down, hawks, falcons. We’ll also see beavers, river otters returning. River muscles, which are awesome because otters, beavers and river mussels are all indicator species, which are animals that can only survive with with healthy water quality, right? And so seeing them return to this stretch of river here is a testament to the Mississippi’s overall health. Now that this stretch we have here north of St. Paul is no longer commercially navigated, and it hasn’t been since 2015. Earlier this summer, I saw my first river otter ever on the Mississippi River and that was very special because it’s a testament to the health of the Mississippi locally here. And it is so rare to have seen them in recent history because the water wasn’t clean enough that I did not believe my eyes. And so I was paddling in this beautiful little lagoon, just north of downtown Minneapolis on the west side of the river. And I was out with a tour group entering this lagoon. No one else in the group saw it. And I kind of wanted to hold that special moment for myself. Because by the time it got up into the bushes, it was crawling from the lagoon the shoreline up into the bushes. No one else would have been able to see it. And just in case my eyes were deceiving me, I didn’t want to share any false information. So when I saw the otter scurry up, I noticed this large brown mammal, right, but I didn’t see its face. But I did see its backside. So I knew clearly it wasn’t a beaver. Way too big to be a muskrat. And so in my brain, the only logical conclusion was that it was an otter, but because I hadn’t seen one before, just like no, it’s not possible. There’s no way that the Mississippi is healthy enough here for otters to return. So I asked a few other local guides and members of the national park staff, some of the rangers, if it was possible, and they’re like, it’s rare, but yeah, they are returning. And so that confirmed these notions, you know, that I wasn’t quite ready to believe. And so that was very exciting. And then I had some really special moments with guests who I was able to convince to go and swim in the Mississippi River. Because one of the big learning curves that we’re having to overcome here is helping to reframe people’s knowledge of and relationship to the river. They still think of it as being dirty, polluted, unwelcoming, dangerous. And so the best way to help reshape people’s relationship to it is to get them out not only on it, but in it. And so for those who were willing to venture in for, you know, a brake side, swim at a beach in the, let’s say, the river gorge, right. It was so fun to experience their glee and surprise at how friendly entering and swimming in the Mississippi it felt for them. I am thankful to be a part of this growing river community. And I’m thankful that there’s so much enthusiasm and it feels like genuine momentum happening behind and around the river, like people are getting excited about it and talking about it. And that just feels so special to be a part of. And it’s this type of community where anyone who wants to be involved can, right? And what has been special about being involved in this growing community is that there’s just a lot more connection between a mission aligned organization and so there’s a lot more information sharing of however it is you want to be involved or get out on the river. And there’s most likely a means for you to do that. And so there’s, you know, adaptive paddling courses and equipment. There are paddling scholarships and courses available. There are groups so that you don’t have to go out paddling solo, right? So whatever it is that has made, maybe people historically apprehensive, there’s a lot more of just a communal sense of effort to try to overcome some of these these stigmas. PaddleBridge.com, our 2024 Season will reopen likely starting mid May always of course weather and river dependent but typically we’re out here from mid May through mid October. In addition to our public tours, we also offer private tours, custom events, as well as community programming. We work with a lot of communities on getting folks out, to again, help address some of these accessibility barriers as well as paddling courses, and so we do private lessons as well as ACA, American Canoe Association certification.
Dean Klinkenberg 20:10
Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here, interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like 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 river better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series set in certain places along the Mississippi. Read those books to find out how many different ways my protagonist Frank Dodge can get into trouble. My newest book, “Mississippi River Mayhem” details some of the disasters and tragedies that happened along Old Man River. Find any of them wherever books are sold.
Melissa Sauter 20:44
My name is Melissa Sauter and I live in the Central West End in St. Louis, Missouri. And I’m the current president of the Mississippi River Water Trail Association, which is presently where I do most of my kayaking in the St. Louis area through the Water Trail. I do a bit of paddling outside of the Water Trail however. I work with a lot of school groups in the region where I help with their outdoor education and courses and I am a certified kayak instructor through the ACA. So that certification is valuable to the schools around the area when they take their students on paddling programs. There’s kind of a backstory to this. It’s not necessarily a river nickname as much as it is a camp nickname. But my paddling actually started as a camper. I was, I spent many many summers at Camp Don Bosco and once you hit senior camp, we were allowed to travel down to the Current River where we did multi-day float trips in canoes, and my camp name was Sassafrass – short for sassy. But the short version of it is sassy. Since that time, I prefer to think of it as spicy more than sassy because I think sometimes when women are called sassy, it’s not always meant as a compliment. And I’m on a big crusade when I hear my nieces and other girls who are spicy, be called sassy… it happened yesterday, I like to correct that and say they’re strong women who have a voice. And that’s that’s a good thing. So as I said, I’m the president of the Mississippi River Water Trail Association, which means that we work on the Mississippi River along the Water Trail which is 121 Miles starting and Saverton, Missouri, which is just south of Hannibal, and the Water Trail ends at the North leg of the Gateway Arch. Most of our guiding happens, most of my guiding happens, in pool 26 of the Mississippi River, which is in the area that encompasses the the Melvin Price Lock and Dam north up to Riverside Landing in St. Charles. Along the stretch of St. Charles where the river runs mostly east west. It’s kind of the fun part of the river in my opinion, it encompasses Grafton and Elsa and other areas where people like to boat recreationally on the Mississippi. Well, I think that there are a few things that make that area the fun part of the river. First of all, the entire Water Trail has, it has four pools in it. The three upper pools are bookended on each side by lock and dams. And when we say pool we mean the river is blocked off so it it serves more as a lake with a current. And that allows a little bit of a softer, more gentler Mississippi River. It’s also bound by bluffs that are absolutely gorgeous, and a lot of backwater slough. So we have a lot of wildlife. We have so many beautiful birds and fish and reptiles and amphibians and trees and prairie plants and wetland plants that we can observe as we’re going along so the area has a bit of river town feel to it and all that that is accompanied with that including nice restaurants and stores and markets and just a fun fun vibe. And then it also has beautiful, beautiful natural elements to it in the flora or fauna and the geology around the area. It’s not only taken for granted, I think that the bigger thing that I’m noticing is how many people don’t know about it? There are a number of urban areas, both the St. Louis region and then across the river in Southern Illinois where there are large, large metropolitan area. And people cannot believe that I spend so much of my time paddling on the Mississippi River. It’s, we all were raised that it’s dangerous. And that’s not where you go. And I, I boggle a lot of minds when I tell them not only do I spend a lot of time on the Mississippi River, but actually in the Mississippi River. It’s a gorgeous area. So we we guide almost everyone from school groups that started in grade school, middle school and high school, including universities in law, the Washington University Law School, to members of the general public, people who’ve never paddled before all the way to through paddlers. We join in on their through-paddles. And another thing that we…a very special thing that we got to do this year is we opened up a universally accessible kayak ramp, and we hosted the national group of Team River Runner, which are veterans that have various disabilities and hosted their Super Bowl football game and then took them through the lock and dam. So we we guide brand new people, young people, people of all ability levels, down the Mississippi and through the locks and dams. One of my favorite trips of the year that we do is when members of the Water Trail Association, either volunteers, members, or board members go down one of the pools to do our site surveys. That includes starting at the beginning of the pool, and stopping at every access point, every campsite, every put in, pull out, rest area and just check it out, see if it needs any work. See if we need some replacements and signs or fire rings, because our goal in the water trail is for people when they’re passing through this section of the river to have a very comfortable stay and have places where they can camp out whether you want to camp out for one night or if you’re starting in Minnesota and going all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. This is a destination and we’re going to really focus on that especially next year. But the pool surveys are always fun because it’s a time when those of us who really love to be on the Mississippi River can actually spend a few days on the river enjoying it as we intend other people to do. So I first of all, we do paddle and sit-in kayaks. We have some sit-on-top but most of our kayaks are sit-in. And many people who come down to the shoreline and get ready to get into their boat are a little surprised to see that they themselves for the first time ever, are going to sit inside a kayak. We are all trained at the Water Trail, including myself as kayak instructors and as safety boaters. So we have a lot of confidence that they can do it. But sometimes it takes a little convincing that they are able to get into that kayak, paddle it out onto the water and bring it back and get back out regardless of their ability or experience level. And then the other thing is obviously that they are on the Mississippi River and in the Mississippi River. That is a new thing for so many people, whether they’re new to the region, or they’ve been living here their whole lives to be able to walk away that day and say I was I was paddling in the Mississippi River today. One time I had one kiddo who went in the water that that day and was surprised to find themselves in the water, and by the end of the getting him back into his kayak and joking around with him, I said to him, “now do you think your mom is gonna believe you when you go home tonight and you tell her that you were swimming in the Mississippi River?” And he could not stop laughing about that. He’s like, “No, she is not going to believe me whatsoever.” I don’t think that he swims a lot to begin with that even in a pool. So the fact that he was swimming in the Mississippi River was going to be really a crazy thing in their family for sure. We have an inaccurate perception in the area, that the Mississippi River is dangerous and dirty. And I can attest that it’s, you do have to know what you’re doing, but you do you you need to be careful you need to have your life jacket on, but it’s not a bad place to be. I love it. It’s freshwater. And it’s, I’ve paddled all around the world and it’s one of the prettiest places I’ve paddled. The section I get to paddle in every every week in the summer. I can tell you every time while I do, I had to have a saying that any day with a paddle in my hand is a great day. I’m very thankful for all of the people that have made themselves available to help build the Water Trail a lot in the last few years. And being president, I have a great appreciation for the amount of time that people are volunteering to the organization to make all of our events and agendas happen. And I can’t say enough about the board and the volunteers and how much help they give me and the Army Corps of Engineers to make everything happen. I’m also so thankful every time I see a bald eagle or turtles, softshell turtles that are coming back from the the they’re not endangered. Some of them are in danger, but some of them are also, you know, just a little bit in trouble. And I just feel so fortunate to be so close to home and get to see the things I get to see. We have a Facebook page and a website. In fact, after we talk today, I’m going to go on to the website and do some updates for what we have planned for 2024. The easiest way is to is to go onto our website which is MississippiRiverWaterTrail.org or go on to Facebook and search “Mississippi River Water Trail”. That will take you to our updated list of events or you can email me at [email protected]. I check that email very regularly and I’m happy to ask any questions for through-paddlers or people who just want to find out how they can they themselves can get on the river.
Heather Crosse 32:17
My name is Heather Crosse, and I work for Quapaw Canoe Company owned by John Ruskey, and that is based in Clarksdale, Mississippi. We do also have outposts in Memphis, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. I am a river guide and a canoe builder. My river name is ‘Red River Otter’. And firstly, it was ‘River Otter’ because I’m a little bit like a river otter. I love swimming. I’ll jump in any water and very playfully flip around, crawl and climb trees. But then I actually happen to be from the Red River in Alexandria, Louisiana. I’m actually from Colfax, Louisiana, but the Red River went right through my hometown of Colfax. The Red River, me and my dad used to fish on it. So John calls me Red River Otter. Um, honestly, it was a bit of an accident. And I’ve only been a river guide for a year and a half, only with this one company with Quapaw. And it’s because of my connection to John. I am a musician. I’m a musician and music teacher specializing in blues, which is how I moved to the famous blues crossroads, Clarksdale Mississippi. So I’ve been here a long time. I moved here in 2008 and I knew about this canoe company and watched it grow and was kind of a fan of John’s, but I was very busy with with music. And so during Covid I became unemployed, and I was isolated away from Clarksdale for three years. So I came back here and being a Quapaw guide is my new job. And I have gone back to being a musician and teaching music. But now I’m also a river guide and all musicians need a secure job anyway, you know, and it’s seasonal. So I’ve been juggling the two things for the last year and a half. But I was a paddler from Arkansas. I had kayaked. Very, very much into nature my whole life. I would say it is my second passion and music was my first passion and I was kayaking and hiking and camping and swimming a lot in. I lived in Hot Springs, Arkansas for 17 years. So that’s kind of what happened. It was like John was my fan come into my shows. I was his fan. One day I said, “hey, I got back into paddling. You know when I was unemployed during Covid.” He’s like, “what you paddle?” I’m like, “yeah.” We didn’t really know each other real personally. So next thing you know I’m going on community paddle. And then we met up and paddled another time. And he was, I didn’t know this, but he needed guides. He wanted a female guide to reach the young ladies that, the young girls actually, around here when we do the girls camps. And so anyway, I came out of out of unemployment, Covid, 48 years old. I learned a new job skill, I’m scared to death. I think I’m too old and wimpy or whatever. And so John Ruskey believed in me and even made me a captain. I can captain one of his large canoes now with a lot of people in the canoe and a lot of gear. So it’s very empowering. You know, overcoming, like, insecurities from unemployment, and then being an aging woman and learning a new job skill at 48 is probably a scary thing for anyone. So, yeah, interesting turn late in life. And I just, yeah, John believed in me and gave me an opportunity. And I grabbed it. And now I’m so yeah, I’m really, I mean, I’m gonna stick with it the rest of my life, it’s also a good way to stay in shape. And ironically, a lot of my old job skills because I’ve done much more than just play music, I’ve always had to have other jobs to fund my night habit. And so yeah, ironically, some of my other job skills really played in. I’ve always been a big team player, I’ve been a leader of a band that helped me rise up. I was a waitress and bartender for like 17 years. We do food service out there. So I mean, I’ve always hiked and camped, and you know, so really, it was a good fit. Actually, I love our part of the Mississippi because it’s, we have a we’re right in the wild section. So I am definitely a nature girl, I want to go hide in the woods. So I like our part being able to go out there and not see a city, or, you know, we do have a few houses in our region on the river. But it’s just we’ve actually really go camp out on a sandbar for you know, three to five days and feel like we’re in a complete, like on a deserted island somewhere in the ocean. We even have waves, you know. We do have the barges, which you know, is interesting, but other than the barges, it’s very wild. And I like the, I guess I grew up in Louisiana, I’m totally a southern gal, only lived in the South and being a blues musician and I studied literature of American South in college. Was an English major. So you can see how all of my whole adult life I was very interested in the history of South and knew a lot about it. And just think about, you know, reading Mark Twain and learning all those early blues songs from my mentors. It was a lot of it was tied to this Mississippi River and this specific section of it. So for me, it’s very magical to be out in it. And, you know, you when you read things or you visualize when you don’t have knowledge, you know, you have pictures of in your mind and your imagination, but now, I’m actually out there in it, living it and I do I mean, I know I’m in what I’m in 2023, but you know, I picture like what it would have been like back, you know, in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s. Some of the stuff that I’ve read about and sang about and yeah, so I’m a little partial to our, our section. I like the wildness and the history. I guess I like our like Montezuma Landing and Quapaw Landing Island 62 and Island 64 because they’re huge islands with you know, vegetation. We get to go pick mulberries and dewberries like in the spring, and it’s great camping and it’s just like you can kind of, you know, hike all up, camp for a few days. You can hike all over the island and just really explore a lot of different different kinds of woods than I had ever seen in Louisiana and Arkansas. So I’ve crossed over the Mississippi River in a tour van over and over again, you know going to gigs between Mississippi and Arkansas and just I didn’t know that there were sandy beaches. I mean, I feel ignorant, but I had no idea there were sandy beaches. I never actually thought of I had jumped in the Mississippi River before but I never thought of it as a safe place to swim. Now I’m, you can’t keep you know, I’m jumping off the boat in the middle of the river and acting a fool and trying to ride driftwood logs. So I mean it’s definitely facing a fear,you know. There’s a lot of fear instilled in, especially people in Clarksdale, for instance, they think we’re a little crazy going out there. And that has been a fun thing is to help other people face their fears, you know, of this big Mississippi River. So for me when I’ve only been here a year and a half, so when I first started, it was March and it, it was extra high water like it was over, like up to the levee. And then last fall, and this fall, we had record low where I’m finding fossils and stuck in the wing dams. And that’s been really fun to share with people as well, they get it get them excited about that. But yeah, for me personally, to see, the extreme difference has been very educational. And the low water is really cool. Because it’s like, now we know what’s under the Mississippi River, you know. But my most memorable…I love bringing kids out there. I love working with kids, I teach kids music. So just watching kids that aren’t used to it, you know, I take it for granted, I grew up playing in the woods. But kids, most of the kids that we’re bringing out, they’re not used to woods or camping, or anything like that. Maybe never even paddled or camped out before setting up a tent or built a fire. So I really love educating kids on that you know how to get back to nature and how to how to function out there. And they almost every kid has some sort of change of heart out there where they they end up loving it. First they’re like what is going on, we want to go home and take a shower. Then you can’t like get them out of the water, you know, or out of the boat. And so that having the teaching the kids is the most magical, but I have unique experience with being a local blues musician here. I might be on the river with a group of people from another country. You know, like Norway, for instance, have some Norwegians that I brought out there that I know from blues from the blues world. And it’s just it’s such an extension of what I already do here. playing blues music for people from another country in the Ground Zero Blues club that Morgan Freeman owns. Then maybe the next day, I’m taking them out on the river and showing them all of that experience. And it is all tied in. I mean all the blues music. So one of those trips has been there…so we do this annual thing called Magic on the Mississippi. It just happened in October and it was so magical for me personally. It’s done by this British adventurer Dave Cornthwaite. He was the first man to paddle the Mississippi River from source to sea on a paddleboard. He’s British and he brings a crew, usually of British people. This year, we had 14 people and two were actually American. We had someone from Jackson, Mississippi and a man from Memphis, Tennessee mixed in with these British people. And so Dave, and his whole thing is that he’s kind of a motivational speaker. So it’s, it’s a really positive experience. It’s like bringing the concept is bringing all these people together to have a bit of a healing and a fellowship. And obviously, they have a little passion for nature, they wouldn’t let him bring them out on the Mississippi River. And so that this year that it was a really special group. It’s just watching people, they end up you know, we end up being a family actually. We spend six days out there together. We’re paddling every day, we’re setting up camp, we’re doing three meals a day on a campfire, feeding everyone and everybody just seeing everybody come together. All these different people from different countries even that don’t know each other and you don’t know what burden is on their soul. What are they bringing what what do they need to find here, you know. It just seems like I get to see that magic happen where these people open up and they might tell you what their struggle is and you make a lifetime friend and then you get to watch them transform in six, seven days, you know. Overcoming their fear or face facing something. I watched people do a paddle board on the Mississippi River that had never paddle boarded and they’re learning to paddle board on the Mississippi River. That’s that’s a pretty big deal. I mean, it was for me. And so that that was extra extra special this year. And then of course, I believe you’ve already heard a little bit about my my second favorite was recently we just did a 350th anniversary of Marquette and Joliet with Father Jim. And we had a random client Sue Slaw. A lady named Susan that was on the river with us one day last year she came back and did a three day with us on this and we had Sarah and Cory from Minnesota who were the the women on the water. They were doing from source to sea in 2023. So I met them last year and we had a dinner in our home and so they come back this year to spend time with us. And they’re big singers so really hit hit it off. But it was just a really interesting trip because it Father Jim, you know, had an agenda. And then we had a random client that wanted to go on the river. And then we had Cory and Sarah who are coming to learn from John and, and have fellowship with us and, and they have so many stories and skills, they were wonderful, wonderful to work with. And now I’ve turned them into bass players. So that was a really magical trip because look at the the different mix of people right there in a small group too. And we all just got along everyone was so respectful. A very spiritual experience a spiritual journey, each one of us I think, and we all bonded and now you’re bonded. When you share something like that on the river, I think you may be bonded for life, because of the experience you shared. And you always remember these people and catch up later in life, you know, you never know we might talk in 20 years and have a great memory. I’m thankful for the healing that I’ve received through all of the people and and the river of course, nature being out there is very therapeutic for me. Because I, I travel the world and play music and I’m around like, you know, thousands of people in an audience that I may never get to know personally. And so I use nature as kind of my escape and my healing. And this is a very, I’m very thankful for John, giving me this unique experience. It’s beyond anything I could have you ever imagined having. But yeah, I guess I’m most thankful for for John believing in me and giving me this new element to my life that I can do for the rest of my life. And I’m thankful for all the beautiful people that have touched my life this year. Please, please as soon as you hear this, just go to the website. It just I don’t understand, so go to the website. Okay. Island63.com or rivergator.org. We do have a new website that got revamped this year. But yeah, it’s best to go on there and really like search your soul and picture yourself doing the things that we’re doing. There’s so many videos. There’s been so many documentary films that John and his his right hand man River, Mark “River” Peoples have been in. I even got to be interviewed this last year and a half some of you haven’t even been re released. But um please go on there and explore the entire website and watch some of the videos and and don’t be intimidated because John’s really good about if you read his writing. It’s like he tells you this is for anyone, you know. It doesn’t matter, we we don’t care if you’re handicapped. We don’t, we want to bring you out there. We will find a way to make it work. So yeah, Island63.com Quapaw Canoe Company. Come join us.
Cory Maria Dack 48:21
Hi, my name is Cory Maria Dack. I am from Duluth, Minnesota though I was born in Ecuador and call Quito home as well. And I am a canoe guide on the Mississippi River and in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota and I’ve been guiding for almost 17 years now.
Sarah Lent 48:40
Hi, I’m Sarah Lent. I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota but had lived out in Montana and East Glacier, Montana for about six years and they’ve kind of lately split home between Minnesota and Montana. I’m a park ranger and then have been guiding on the Mississippi River this fall.
Cory Maria Dack 49:00
My journey to becoming a guide was pretty unconventional. I didn’t grow up doing things outdoors like going to summer camps or going canoeing. We weren’t really outdoorsy, in part because of equity barriers. My family didn’t have the financial resources to go camping, to rent canoes, to rent paddles and lifejackets, to go to summer camp. So my first time ever on a canoe trip, I was 24 years old and it was staff training to be a canoe guide in the Boundary Waters for a summer camp called Camp Vermillion where I worked. And I had started working at Camp Vermilion when I was 21 as a camp counselor. So you know, have your kids stay with you for a week in a cabin and play capture the flag, do arts and crafts, make s’mores. And then within that community there was a small group of people called guides and the guides would take campers into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, on the border of Minnesota and Canada, on five day camping trips where you’re paddling and portaging all day long, and sleeping in tents and cooking over fires, and all of that good stuff. Kind of a next level up of remoteness and ruggedness. And I ended up sort of building up my skill set from being completely green, from being pretty intimidated by being a camp counselor, to being pretty intimidated at the thought of guiding, to deciding to give it a try. And I thought to myself, I’ll do this one summer, it’s really out of my skill set. I felt pretty out of place because I hadn’t grown up doing this stuff. A lot of my co workers like they had all grown up canoeing the Boundary Waters, and they all were wearing North Face, and they just seemed like they came from a different planet. But I felt like I deserved a chance to experience this place that so many people loved. And I thought maybe I’d do it for one summer. But here I am, 17 years later, still going.
Sarah Lent 50:58
For me, I got into guiding, I guess I didn’t really grow up doing a lot of camping or backpacking or outdoor things, but I was always a very adventurous kid. And I think just a very adventurous spirit. And after I graduated college, my plan was to go into law school. But when I graduated, I didn’t want to go right into law school. So I just found a guiding job in Alaska and worked as a kayak guide for a summer. Absolutely loved it and loved getting to connect people to nature and to a place. But one thing I just really didn’t like the company I was working for. It was very focused on money and on just volume. It didn’t really care about how deep of a connection people were making. Didn’t also really care a lot about their experience. And so when I finished that I wanted to do something where I was still working in the environment, beginning to connect people that were living in from the community and just on a deeper level in a more meaningful where it wasn’t just tourism, make money, kind of you know, quick turnover. And so I found through AmeriCorps, a position with Glacier National Park. Started as an AmeriCorps position where I was working for Glacier National Park, but on the Blackfeet Reservation and doing a lot of work of just even though Glacier National Park is the homeland of the Blackfeet, a lot of people did not feel welcome there because the Park Service kind of separated them and disenfranchised them from their homelands. So I started working there, and then it turned into a permanent job and doing education and working with kids and doing environmental education. And then I left the park service and through a roundabout way it was doing a job in social media, and then got laid off and found myself on a through-paddle on the Mississippi River. Baptism by fire, but really fell in love with the Mississippi River and wanted to come back to guiding and gain to learn more about the river and gain to share that river with people.
Cory Maria Dack 53:00
In 2018, one of the companies I guide for, Wilderness Inquiry, based out of Minneapolis, we had a contract to guide a hundred day canoe trip down the Mississippi River, called the River Semester, which is kind of like a study abroad for college students, but instead of going to Ecuador or China, you spend the semester on the Mississippi River. And I was contracted to be one of the guides on that trip. And when you spend a hundred days paddling down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to Cairo, Illinois, you can’t help but wonder what does the rest of the river look like. I started thinking about through-paddling that year and I planted that little seed and let it percolate over the years and grow and I decided that I wanted to do a through-paddle in 2022. But I really wanted to make sure that my through-paddle and whoever was with me had some purpose and passion behind it. And was going to be a vehicle for helping other people feel safe in nature and on the water and in wild spaces. Because I think if you have the privilege to go down the entire Mississippi River source see that worked okay in my career because I worked seasonally. So I took this time to go on an adventure in between seasons of work, but a lot of people can’t take a few months off to paddle the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. So I think that is a privilege that my friends and I had and I think we have a moral responsibility to use that privilege for good and to help others. I also, being an indigenous Latina, being an immigrant, being a fat bodied person, I have worked in this field my whole career feeling like I was one of the only brown people or one of the only fat bodied people, and I really wanted my trip to help other people and underrepresented demographics see themselves on the water and think that they could do it too. So I decided to have this river journey have the theme of decolonization, or we call the decolonizing through-paddling, which is kind of a play on words. To decolonize something is simply to look at all the different systemic violence that happens in the world – be it racism, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, anything ableism and see how the things we do and the things that we say how those things are informed by these oppressive systems, and try to counteract that. So, for example, we decided that we wanted our sources see to be really based on meeting people up and down the whole river, and being in relationship with them and the different communities along the Mississippi River. Now, shortly after we finished our through-paddle, some people broke the Guinness Book of World Records for a speed record. And I think that’s super awesome. I have no shade for that I was cheering them on. I just specifically wanted to do something that was very based in relationship building, because I think that is one of the best ways to decolonize our hearts and our minds. And that relationship was between us and the people on the river, but also the river itself and the land that flowed through. And we also work closely with a lot of water protectors, you know, people who have their own volition or often under Native American leadership had come out to fight pipelines, that were going to cross the Mississippi River, or just to be in relationship with different native communities along the river. So we partnered with Native Lives Matter in the Twin Cities, to have a big welcome ceremony for for all people at the confluence of the Minnesota and the Mississippi River. And that confluence, which is so sacred is called Bdote. And that’s the source of all life and all creation for the Dakota people. But colonizers came and put a concentration camp on that spot and called it Fort Snelling. If you’re a Minnesotan, you’ve been to Fort Snelling. Almost every sixth grader in the state goes there and it’s sort of portrayed as a fun, colonial days kind of vibe. You go there, and people are churning butter, you can buy rock candy. And there’s no mention of the concentration camps that were there. There’s no mention that that place is actually called the Bdote and it’s the source of all life for the original caretakers of that land. So I felt strongly that we couldn’t just paddle by Bdote and give it a wave and keep going and I had a bunch of friends from Native Lives Matter who said they wanted to work with us to have kind of an event or a ceremony. So it’s really beautiful. Because we put together a ceremony where you could either paddle your canoe around a little bit of the Minnesota River down to the confluence of the Mississippi, and the Minnesota River, or you could hike along the land. And we’d all go to the confluence together. And I asked a lot of my friends with resources, aka canoes, paddles, and life jackets. And many of those people were white, if they could show up by lending out their canoes, paddles, life jackets. I really want to make sure that native folks and black brown folks, other folks that have a harder time with getting access to these resources that they had a chance to get in a canoe, or kayak, if they wanted for the first time ever. And my friends really showed up. And it was amazing, because I had white friends that had no idea that that place was really called Bdote and I had black, brown and native friends who had never been in a canoe before. And so there’s a lot of learning and healing in that space that kind of cross pollinated with one another in a really beautiful way. And my friend Rissa who’s from Native Lives Matter, she did a smudging ceremony and we offered tobacco to the water. And she talked about the realities of Fort Snelling being a concentration camp. And then she said, it, we need to talk about this. We need to acknowledge this happened, but we also are here for healing, and to come together and to create a better future moving forward. So it was just this really, really beautiful example that got at the heart of why we wanted to run this trip the way we wanted to do it.
Sarah Lent 59:43
Yeah. So we had actually a fall guiding on the river, and then working for Quapaw Canoe Company, doing everything from day trips to multi day overnight trips on the lower Mississippi River, which is one of the really amazing things about Mississippi River overall but the lower River especially because it’s not dammed and it is free flowing waters, just how much the river changes. We first paddled through the lower river in January and the water was at a really high level. So the currents moving really fast. All of the wing dams and dikes are underwater or partially below water. So it’s creating all these wild water features like whirlpools, and huge eddies and sometimes rapids around the dikes that you don’t expect and then you hear the water rushing. And then this time when we were guiding in the fall, it was giant sandbars, and the water was very low. And you know, all these back channels that are no longer open, but also creates amazing camping spots. So you can be camped out on the sandbar in the Mississippi River, but it looks like you’re on a beach in Florida sometimes, which is just I think, an amazing and wild thing about the Mississippi River, is it’s always changing, it’s always showing you something that’s unexpected.
Cory Maria Dack 1:01:00
Sarah and I started paddling the Mississippi River. I started with a different paddle partner on August 21st and then Sarah joined me. Was it December 4th? Sarah joined me on December 4th and Sarah, and this was in the Quad Cities area, and Sarah went with me all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. So we did well over half the river well over 1000 miles together. And when we paddled through Clarksdale, Mississippi. John Ruskey and Heather Cross and Mark “River” Peoples, who all work for Quapaw Canoe Company, they welcomed us in with open arms, and we stayed with them, and they fed us and we had a really lovely time together. And I felt really called to go back there someday. And Sarah and I talked about it and we thought it would be great to work for John, to work for Quapaw and to be mentored by him and “River” and Heather. To be mentored by the people who knew the river up and down in that area like the back of their hand. The way that I know the Boundary Waters. And to be with the lower river, not in the depths of winter, not on day 115, when I was so exhausted from being on this trip for months and months. We also wanted to get to know Clarksdale, which is just a great place to live and to listen to blues legends, and we had all these reasons to go back. And I also have been in this career for a long time. And although I’m only 41 I’m kind of an octogenarian in my career field. You know, all my coworkers are 23 because most people kind of retired from full time guiding, the way that I full time guide, when they’re like 24 or 25. And I love and feel so honored that I get to mentor so many new canoe guides. And also I was ready to be the mentee for a little bit. So I really wanted to go to Quapaw, especially after some after this amazing adventure that Sarah and I had together. This beautiful, it was “brute-iful”. It was beautiful and brutal. It was a “brute-iful” through-paddle. It was amazing. But it was sometimes a sufferfest. And I really wanted to go back and be at peace with the river, spend more time with Sarah, and be mentored by John and the Quapaws. And that’s exactly what happened. Guiding with them was such a treat and really restorative. And it’s allowed me to heal from some of the more traumatic parts of my through-paddle, which allows me to sink in deeper to all of the life giving beautiful, amazing things that happened on our through-paddle.
Sarah Lent 1:03:41
I think our path to guiding on the Mississippi River just really comes from a place of love and learning where you can spend over 100 days on this body of water paddling it and you know, going the whole stretch of the river all the way down to the Gulf but there’s still so much more you can always learn. So wanting to go back and learn a specific stretch of river from people that have been on it for years and are still learning themselves but to be able to, you know, when you’re on a through-paddle, even if you are trying to be intentional and take your time, you’re also moving down the river, the current keeps pushing you along. So you don’t always get to spend time learning how to navigate this channel or how to read the water in a certain way. So again, to come back and spend a little more time in a specific area and learn more about how to read the water, it was a really special thing to get to do and it’s a part of both guiding and being able to share what we know about the river and take people on this amazing journey that we’ve been on ourselves but also to reflect on our own and get to learn more.
Cory Maria Dack 1:04:44
I am so proud that we are women on the water. I’m so proud to be a brown woman. To be an indigenous Latina. There are so few people of color who are guiding. There are not many women guiding on the Mississippi, especially down here. There’s more, I think, up north because Wilderness Inquiry does a ton of guiding on the Mississippi as there are other companies as well. And I’ve got a lot of female and femme co workers up there. But we received a lot of feedback on our through-paddle from a lot of the incredible river angels who we stayed with, that they’d never seen two women doing a through-paddle. They’d seen some women but always with a man. To see two women without any men was really rare. And then I always dug a little deeper because a lot of these folks were white folks that were able to see this lack of, I guess you could say gender representation. And I listened to them talk about that. And then I would say, how many people of color besides me, have you seen do this? And then they’re like, wow, no people other than you or one person other than you. So I feel really proud to be a woman of color, who is a guide, and that Sarah and I get to guide together and I think we we come correct, you know, we really are excited to keep learning. Like Sarah said, we don’t have this cocky attitude, which is honestly a colonizing attitude where we think just because we paddle the entire river sources see that we know everything about it. No, we are not experts on any one section of the river. I’d say we’re experts on through-paddling in the winter. But every section of the river has people we can continue to learn from. I’m so thankful for Sarah. Sarah came to me in the depths of despair. When my first paddle partner had to go home, I really thought I might have to call off my through-paddle because my only boundary, my only boundary was that I wasn’t going to continue alone. Even though it was pretty brutal winter, we were up in the Quad Cities, it was around Thanksgiving, I still felt like I could keep going. And I always said, I’m gonna listen to the river. You know, if someone comes forth, and they’re willing to go on this trip with me, I’m going to keep going. But if not, then the river and my ancestors are telling me come back later, you know, you need to get off the river for now. But where on earth was I going to find someone crazy enough to jump on 1000 mile canoe trip in December with a total stranger? Sarah Lent. And I’m so glad because now I have a lifelong friend. And we continue to have adventures together, whether we return to the Mississippi Rive to guide trips out of Clarksdale, or we go to the DMV together to get me a renewed driver’s license, we find someone who can do both, you know. And I think in a trip that was born to respect and uplift, person to person connections and connections to the land in the water and community, having Sara become part of my community has been such a gift.
Sarah Lent 1:08:06
I’m also thankful for Cory for joining, you know, getting to experience a through-paddle in the Mississippi River. For joining on this amazing journey. And it proves just how much relationships you can build while you’re spending time in a canoe with others or standing around a campfire or camping on a beach. Any of that, again, learning and paddling together. I think another thing I’m really thankful for just on the Mississippi is it’s kind of cheesy, but the sunrises and sunsets you wouldn’t expect that as you, maybe would expect it, but just some of the most amazing sunrises and amazing sunsets that you’re treated to every morning. And I think that’s a unique thing too about when you’re camping or spending time in nature, is you do find yourself rising and setting with the sun. So waking up to these just glorious sunrises and the way that you know, the river stretches on so far, there’s some bends and twists, but some stretches where you can see for miles down the river and it just is all illuminated by the rising sun.
Cory Maria Dack 1:09:10
I’m so grateful to have gotten the chance to see the entire country north to south using only my arms is a really cool way because you really get to see it mile by mile in a way that you might not see it when you’re taking a nap in the car on a drive or on a train. And the experiential education that happens on the river is really unparalleled. Oh, by the way, I learned how birds migrate because I paddled with them. We migrated with them. The way we learn to identify different types of birds. The way we learned intimately how the lock and dam systems work on the river because we locked through all of them except for few we had to portage around. The way we learned how all of the corn and the grain in Minnesota and Iowa gets put on a barge, which goes all the way down to the chemical corridor in Baton Rouge, which then gets put on a giant ocean liner and then a very specialized pilot captains that boat out to the ocean, and then that ship’s captain takes over and takes that boat across the ocean. We got to see that happen firsthand. We made friends with a river pilot, a riverboat captain who kind of adopted us. His name is Joey Cargo. Shout out to Joey, after we finished our source to sea, and he had also done it through-paddle in 2020. He first of all gave us a lot of great advice on how to navigate these ocean liners we were going to paddle by from Baton Rouge to the head of passes at the end of the river. So not only was he an instrumental font, fount of information, he then invited us to go on a big boat with him after through-paddle. And then we got to see the river from about 20 stories higher than we had been in our little canoe. So to truly understand different parts of global economy, and global agriculture in a way, even though I grew up in Minnesota, where the Mississippi has a prominent water feature, right? I still didn’t know any of this. I studied music and english in college, and I did outdoor rec for grad school, but I wasn’t paying attention to commerce on the Mississippi, so you just learned so much. And then I think another great gift the Mississippi gave us is just to be patient with yourself. Because the river is so clear in what she wants to do. She flows, she moves. Sometimes she’s turbulent. Sometimes she’s still, but she’s always pushing forward. And the metaphor there is so important when you’re trying to have personal growth. And when you hold up that mirror to yourself, and you might not like what you see. To give yourself the grace and the patience that the water gives herself as she flows to the ocean is a thing I’ll always get to take with me.
Sarah Lent 1:12:19
Like I’m also thankful that people want to spend time on the Mississippi River, that I have the opportunity to guide and take people out on a river that I really loved and learn to love through a amazing through-paddle and through a journey. But people want to get on and spend time on the river. Sometimes you say “Oh, I’m going to guide canoe trips on the Mississippi River in Mississippi”, and people look at you like,what isn’t that a big, muddy, polluted dirty water? Isn’t it full of dangerous barges? Aren’t you going to die if you go in this river? And there are, you know, dangers that you have to be aware of on the Mississippi River. But it’s also this amazing place where you can experience such great beauty and adventure and you can learn how to navigate the water work with barges. There’s so many opportunities for personal growth to learn to challenge and to just experience a amazing world of nature that you wouldn’t know exists still there. Yeah, you can follow me at Lent.Sarah on Instagram. I’m not the best about posting adventures. But yeah, the best way is to follow Cory.
Cory Maria Dack 1:13:24
If you want to read about our through-paddle, you can Google “Women on the Water 2022”, and our website will pop up and you can go through a bunch of old photos and old blog posts. We should really do an update at some point because we made it to the end and I don’t know that we posted about making it to the ocean or not because we were just so exhausted. Or you can follow me on Instagram. My handle is @CoryMaria13. That’s C-O-R-Y-M-A-R-I -A and then the number 13. And I update pretty regularly from all the different adventures I go on. And whenever I’m with Sarah, I tagged her in those posts and you can find her that way too.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:14:14
And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. On a frigid November night in Rock Island, Illinois a few years ago, Piper and I met a group of friends on our living room, the Blue Cat Brew Pub, where a man I’d never met, a 90-something lawyer and local legend bought me a beer. Thanks, Stuart. With a full bodied stout steeling me against the first bitterly cold day of winter, Piper and I walked the block to the Figaro, a French restaurant with a tapas bar, a cultural melange in a region that is a cultural crossroads. We went right for the bar of course, where we were greeted by Jerry, Dave and Cassie, all people who had befriended me over the years of visiting the Quad Cities. Behind the bar, Darrell, another Blue Cat regular, was tricked out in threads befitting a bartender in a French restaurant. In immaculate white shirt and black bow tie, accessorized with just a hint of indifference. We pushed a couple of high tops together, settled in and started making the hard decisions. Of all delicious items on the menu, “what do I want to eat?” I hadn’t had a good bowl of French onion soup in years, so I opted for that over lobster bisque. A wrenching choice but one that was affirmed with a bowl of rich, cheesy warmth steamed in front of me. A few minutes later, five orders of escarago, one of them mine, arrived. We apparently had a communal craving for garlic butter sauce. I rounded out the meal by choosing an entree I wasn’t familiar with, ‘Moroccan Bastilla’. It was a wondrous dish, moist, shredded chicken, inside a delicate but crispy pastry shell, dusted with cinnamon. I didn’t leave a crumb on my plate. We saved dessert for the Blue Cat. Another stout in my case, served by the best bartender in the Quad Cities – Bob. Every time I think about that night, I smile, especially since those places we enjoyed, the Blue Cat and Figaro have since closed. And a couple of those people who made that night so delightful are no longer with us. Time may take people and places from us, but it doesn’t have to dim the memories. Life on the road can be entertaining and immensely rewarding, but there are times I feel isolated and disconnected from home and the world around me. Thanks to these folks and the kindness of many others, some who became friends and others whose names I never learned, those rough times were easier to weather. Strangers and new friends offered me comfort and companionship when I was far from home. In the years I’ve been getting to know the places along the Mississippi I’ve met so many people along the way. In many areas, I don’t have to drive more than an hour to connect with someone I know. So with Thanksgiving just around the corner, I’d like to say thank you to all the people who have made my life on the road more interesting and more meaningful. From Terry in northern Minnesota to Jessica in Louisiana and the dozens of people in between them. I’ve been on the road long enough that I got to know several people who have since passed away, including a couple of people from that special night in Rock Island. I’m thankful for the moment I got to share with Bill in Grand Rapids, Bob and Cassidy in the Quad Cities, Greg and David in St. Louis, Rolf at Camp Douglas, Wisconsin and my dear friend Lucille in Bellevue, Iowa. May your lives be blessed generously with friends, new and old, like the people I’ve met. I wish you the pleasures of good food, community and feeling valued during this holiday season and beyond. Peace to you all, and I’ll see you in 2024. 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 set at certain 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.
