In July 2002, Trapper and Mandy Haskins set out an epic trip to row a handcrafted boat down the Mississippi. The boat performed great, but the grind of dodging industrial traffic around Baton Rouge wore them down, so they ended the trip at New Orleans. That decision turned out to be hard for Trapper to live with, so a few years later, he and his family put the boat back in the Mississippi where they’d left off in 2002. The last 100 miles presented more drama and challenges than they had imagined, but they made it to the Gulf. Trapper wrote a book about the experience called Crooked Old River that releases on April 13 (2024).
In this episode, I talk with Trapper about his childhood experiences with the Mississippi growing up in Memphis, how he got interested in boat building and the idea that sparked an interest in rowing down the Mississippi, how he and his wife prepared for the trip, his love of history and how that added to the experience, the circumstances around ending their trip early in 2002, and then going back years later. Trapper talks about how the trip changed him and how traveling on a river can encourage introspection and reflection.
In the Mississippi Minute, I look ahead to a busy summer of Mississippi-themed books to read. From sweeping histories of the river itself, to novels that reimagine river life from new perspectives, you’ll have plenty to keep you busy this year.
Show Notes
Other Mississippi River-themed books coming out in 2024:
- James: A Novel by Percival Everett
- Cahokia Jazz: A Novel by Francis Spufford
- Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana by Virginia Hanusik (April 30)
- The Wild Mississippi: A State-by-State Guide to the River’s Natural Wonders by Dean Klinkenberg (May 21)
- Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt (June 11)
More about Boyce Upholt’s Mississippi Party Pack
Support the Show
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Transcript
38. Rowing down the Mississippi with Trapper Haskins
Sun, Apr 07, 2024 2:10PM • 1:14:01
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
river, boat, mississippi, book, rowing, day, trip, canoe, mississippi river, years, place, trapper, memphis, people, rowboat, life, miles, read, barges, felt
SPEAKERS
Trapper Haskins, Dean Klinkenberg
Trapper Haskins 00:00
Yeah, we spent three weeks in a canoe on the upper part in, we started in July of 2002, and then the plan was to be in the Gulf of Mexico by about Halloween. So we planned for it to be a three month trip and it took 16 years.
Dean Klinkenberg 00:38
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 and 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 38 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. In this episode, I talk with Trapper Haskins about his forthcoming book “Crooked Old River” in which he describes his experience rowing the length of the Mississippi in a boat he built himself. Now there are a lot of books about river trips like this, many of which were, let’s say fairly mediocre. But Trapper’s book really stands out as one of the better books in this genre and really just a pleasant read in general. So in this in this interview, we talked about his childhood experiences with the Mississippi growing up in Memphis. How he got interested in boat building and the idea that sparked interest in rowing down the Mississippi. How he and his wife, who rowed with him, prepared for the trip, his love of history, and how that added to the experience of spending so much time along the river and the circumstances around ending their trip early in 2002. And then the decision to go back to the river many years later. So Trapper also spent some time talking about how the river trip changed him personally, and how traveling on a river can encourage introspection and reflection. Trapper is a good storyteller, which is something you quickly learn when you read his book or listen to his music. And I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to this interview too. I sure enjoyed the conversation with him. As usual, you’ll find the show notes at MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast. Thanks to all of you who continue to show me some love through Patreon. Your support keeps this podcast going and inspires me every day. If Patreon isn’t your thing, hey, buy me a coffee. I’m a regular coffee drinker and I appreciate every little bit of support. Curious how to do that, go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and you’ll find instructions there. And now on with the interview. A deckhand and a dishwasher, a shipwright and house carpenter, a street musician and cubicle dweller, Trapper Haskins has earned his keep in myriad ways since leaving school in his hometown of Memphis more than 20 years ago. Today he and his family live in Thompson’s Station Tennessee, where he works as a furniture maker, finish carpenter and freelance writer. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, WoodenBoat and American Songwriter. And we are here today to talk about his new book, “Crooked Old River” about his source to sea trip down the Mississippi in a rowboat. Welcome to the podcast Trapper.
Trapper Haskins 04:00
Thanks for having me. Honored to be here.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:03
I have one very important question to start us off with. And that is, when was the last time you ate an open face peanut butter and hot sauce sandwich?
Trapper Haskins 04:15
I have not had one since since the river trip. We sort of oh, we overdosed on those.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:21
Did it matter what kind of hot sauce you use for that?
Trapper Haskins 04:24
We had Valentina’s Hot Sauce, crunchy peanut butter and white bread that was allowed to bake in the sun.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:38
That sounds like one of the more creative dietary choices I’ve come across for river trips, so I may have to stash that idea away for a future trip of my own.
Trapper Haskins 04:47
It’s easy to pack away and carry and as long as you can keep the bread from going moldy. It’ll you know that’s a that’s a snack that will last.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:57
So you grew up in Memphis. I’m just kind of wondering when you were growing up, like, what was the Mississippi River of your childhood like?
Trapper Haskins 05:07
Yeah, so I was born and raised in Memphis, neither of my parents worked anywhere near the river. My mother was a school teacher, and my dad was an insurance guy. So we didn’t really go down and visit the river too often. But there is a park that’s downtown Memphis called Mud Island, where there’s a scale model of the Mississippi River. And we would go down there in the summertime. And I’m sure you’ve been there, but the park is situated right next to the Mississippi River. And so you’ve got this 2000 foot scale model of the Lower Mississippi River, just adjacent to the actual Mississippi River. And that was what sort of sparked my imagination and sort of led me to fall in love with the river. But you know, as a kid, we were warned not to go anywhere near the actual river. Because any kid in Memphis knows, it’s dangerous, and you’ll slip in, in the whirlpools will take you and, you know, all sorts of terrifying things. So we didn’t go, we didn’t go near or in the actual river.
Dean Klinkenberg 06:12
So it’s interesting, given what you ended up doing a few years later, but like you, in spite of this, you know, scale model, you really had this image of the Mississippi as a big scary beast, essentially.
Trapper Haskins 06:25
Yeah, we did. And then of course, you know, in school, you’re reading, you know, Mark Twain, you’re reading Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer and all that kind of stuff. And so they’re, even though it’s, it’s this scary thing that it was this, those books sort of invited you, I think, to come closer to the river and some, you know, some of those early Disney movies with, you know, think and…, you know, you’ve seen the the keelboat guy, you know, all that romanticism of the river, even as a kid, your parents sort of scare you off of the river. But those sort of things invite you to get a little closer to it. And it just sort of get just sort of gets in your it’s in your mind, you know.
Dean Klinkenberg 07:07
Absolutely. I remember, I don’t know how old I was maybe 12 or so, there was a local theater playing Tom Sawyer, Hollywood made the typical sort of Disney version of Tom Sawyer. And this was at a time when you didn’t really they weren’t real strict about checking movie tickets. So we were able to get through the movie a second time, okay. But I do remember, like, just watching that movie, it seemed like such a romantic thing to be on a raft floating down the river. I think a lot of the other details about the story were kind of lost on me at that age.
Trapper Haskins 07:39
Same same. It was just it was just that image of the just the just the freedom of it, you’re just on your own little boat drifting down the river, you know. And so we used to visit this place, Mud Island, where they had the scale model. And I clearly remember being a kid about eight years old, at the snack bar getting a popsicle, and we’d eat the popsicle. And down the middle of the river, and the kids would always, we would drop our popsicle stick in the river, and then we would just follow it down because this is you know, it’s a it’s a quarter of a mile bathymetric chart of the river and there’s, there’s water flowing through this model, you know, so it’s sort of this. It’s like a living sculpture, you know, there’s a million gallons of water flowing through this, this, this scale model of the river and so we would drop our popsicle sticks in there, and just sort of pretend that those were, that was Huck Finn’s raft or whatever. And we would follow it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, because this Mud Island River Park starts at Cairo, Illinois. And four tenths of a mile later, you’re at this large public swimming pool, which is the Gulf of Mexico. And so you know, over the course of a, you know, a couple of 1000 steps, you could go from Cairo to the Gulf and follow your own little raft all the way to the, to the wide open sea. And so that was that was I did that over and over again as a kid.
Dean Klinkenberg 09:04
Well, that sounds fun. I think Mud Island is maybe in a little bit of a transitional state today. But you know, that’s, that’s for another day. I know. They’re trying to figure out a future for that area, and it needs a little bit of love and care, I think right now.
Trapper Haskins 09:20
Yeah, my understanding they are they’re doing a renovation right now. I think they’re in the middle of that renovation. So I don’t know how I don’t know how visitor friendly it is at the moment but.
Dean Klinkenberg 09:33
So were there any times when you were a kid when you went on the river?
Trapper Haskins 09:40
The first time I remember going actually on the river would have been when I was in college. I went I went to Mud Island to try and get a job. Get a summer job. And they hired me on the spot and I was excited because here I was going to you know I was gonna get to be like a tour guide at this place that sort of was was sort of the whatever the cradle of my sort of ideas about the Mississippi and then when I found out it was minimum wage and they were part time hours, and I quickly decided not to take that job. And then on the way back home I stopped by the Memphis Queen Line I think is the name of it. Would have the Island Queen, the Memphis Queen, there’s a couple of different river boats or sightseeing river boats. And I got hired as a deckhand on one of those. And so I think that I think that would have been my first time on the river would have been as a deckhand on one of those sightseeing river boats. Well, that was a that was a, that was an eye opening experience for me, you know, being a kid who you know, love the river love the history of the river, and whose only experience with it had been this, you know, this model of it now, here I am out on the real thing as a as a deckhand, you know, as a paid paid rivermen, you know, and so sort of felt like a step up for me. So that would have been the first time that actually got on the river. And that would have been the last time I was on the river until we took, my wife and I took, the rowboat trip. So the only time I’ve been on the river before our trip was as a as a deckhand for a summer in Memphis.
Dean Klinkenberg 11:18
You said it was eye opening? How so?
Trapper Haskins 11:22
Well, you know, when you drive across the bridge, any of the bridges, it’s a big river, but I don’t you can’t really grasp how big the thing really is, until you’re in the middle of it. And you’re looking from one bank to the other. And that’s what, that’s when you realize this thing is massive. It is absolutely enormous. And I mean, it’s unnerving. As a first timer on the boat, it can be unnerving on a riverboat. And so you think of anybody in a canoe or a kayak or a rowboat, It’s it’s a daunting, dauntingly large river.
Dean Klinkenberg 12:02
Absolutely. Especially from that perspective of those smaller boats. So at some point then in your young adulthood, you got interested in boats interested enough to move up to Maine to learn how to be a boat builder. So tell us a little bit about that. That period, like how you got interested in boats and boat building.
Trapper Haskins 12:22
Yeah, after so after that summer job on the river boats, I wanted to stay with boats. So I was I was an English major at the University of Memphis or Memphis State at the time when I was going there in the 90s. And I got a job at a local boatyard. They had fiberglass sailboats there. A friend of mines dad bought a sailboat so I got to go out on one of the local lakes around Memphis. And it was fun. It was I enjoyed it, and I wanted to stick with it. And I was working in this this fiberglass yard and I was learning to repair and refurbish old fiberglass boats, but there’s always been something in me and maybe it maybe it comes from the days at Mud Island where I’ve always sort of loved the anything that I get interested in, I sort of get attached to the history of that thing. And so, for instance, locally, here in Nashville where I live, I love baseball. And so I play in a vintage baseball league. We play by the rules of 1864. So it’s Civil War era baseball. And that has been the story time and time again with me anything that I fall in love with, or anything that I have a passing interest in, I just sort of like to chase the history of it. And so when I got interested in sailboats, you know that the history is invariably going to lead you to New England and all the wooden boatyards up there. And being an English major at Memphis State, I had come to the realization that didn’t want to be an English teacher. I didn’t want to be an academic. I didn’t want to be indoors. And so I learned or I decided that I would like to learn how to build wooden boats. It was you know, I was 21, 22 years old, dropped out of college and got married to my sweetheart and two weeks after the wedding, we we packed up a Ryder truck and moved up to Rockland, Maine where I went to The Apprentice Shop, which is a two year apprenticeship learning to build lobster boats, sailboats, row boats, all plank on frame in the traditional fashion. So that that was in 2000. We moved up there to do that.
Dean Klinkenberg 14:29
Well, that’s a good way to test a marriage right out of the gate. And it gets better from here.
Trapper Haskins 14:38
Yeah, I think her parents probably had some questions around that time that we were that we actually decided to do that. But um, but while I was there, you know, one winter night I was in the library. So the school there has a library and there was a book called American Small Sailing Craft by Howard Chapelle. And they were workboats from East Coast fish boat, East Coast fishing boats, West Coast, you know, Gulf Coast, scow, schooners, and stuff like that. And on one of the pages, I turned the page and there was a Mississippi River yawl. And this was an 18 foot rowing sailing boat that was used as a tender on the steamboats. It was used by hunters and trappers and fishermen in their daily work. And it may have had something to do with the fact that it was December and there was three feet of snow on the ground. And I had never seen more than a dusting of snow in my life. But I got a little you know, I have to admit, I got a little homesick. And I stared at that page for a while and just decided this is this is what I need to do next. We need to, I need to, build this Mississippi River yawl. This is 1800s rowboat, and, and go home that way. That’s how I need to go home when I finished my apprenticeship here.
Dean Klinkenberg 15:52
Wow. So the idea of the river trip itself really started when you saw that boat in the in this old catalog?
Trapper Haskins 15:59
Absolutely. Yeah 100%. I mean, I had, I had visions of building, Mandy and I, you know, a small sailboat or so it was kind of kicking around. But you know what I wanted to do, because I was there for two years. And I was about a year into this. This program when I was thinking, what I want to do after this work in the boatyards, we want to you know, talked about going down to the Caribbean, we talked about that. We talked about the kinds of things that early 20 year olds with no kids, no mortgage, and real romantic visions start to talk about, and it but when I when I saw the Mississippi River yawl, it was it was just apparent to me right away that this is I needed to do it. And so we set out building that exact boat.
Dean Klinkenberg 16:44
So just tell us a little bit about the boat itself then like a few of the dimensions how long it took to construct it.
Trapper Haskins 16:51
So it’s a it’s an 18 feet long, and the beam, so the width of it at its widest point, is about four foot 10 inches. It has two rowing stations. So it’s four oars is there’s room for two oarsmen and there is a sail, but it’s not a very big sail. And there’s not even a rudder on this boat. So when you put the sail up, you steer the boat by taking one of the rowing oars, and you stick it in a notch that’s on the stern of the boat. And so you steer the boat with one of the with one of the oars. And there’s a seat in the back in the stern and there’s a seat up in the bow. But once you put two people and a whole bunch of camping gear in there, there’s not a whole lot a whole lot of room to move about. But there is there’s a similar boat called an Ohio River yawl, which is similar dimensions. It just has the oarlocks are a little bit different on the Ohio River version. And in the museum there in Marietta, Ohio, they’ve actually built a couple of the Ohio River yawls. So I got to see some of those or some pictures of some of those. But there weren’t any at the time that I knew of any Mississippi River yawls. So I was just going off of this picture and the dimensions in this book. And it and my wife so my wife and I built it took about a year and a half, because I was a full time apprentice at this at this apprentice shop. And so my instructor was fortunately he caught into the idea. So he let me use his garage as an extra. You know, there wasn’t room in the boat yard so I built in his garage on nights and weekends. It took probably a year to a year and a half and my wife sewed the sail. And I did most of the woodwork. And then we both we both painted it. It was a labor of love for sure. And I’m looking at sitting in my backyard right now on a trailer we still still have all these years later that that was in two. We launched her in spring of summer of 2000. Just a couple of years, a couple of months before we started the actual river trip.
Dean Klinkenberg 19:06
Wow. So how would that boat have typically been used in the 19th century?
Trapper Haskins 19:12
So the the the trappers and the fishermen would use them and I’ve heard that they were used as lifeboats on the on the steam boats, but they’re also used as tenders. You know, a lot of these, the steam boats would come down river and maybe if somebody wanted off the boat, they weren’t gonna actually land the steamboat at the at the bank, they would just put the passengers in there and row them to shore. While we were on the river, actually, we met a fisherman and he says to me, this guy is in this aluminum John boat over by the bank and he said I recognize your boat. And it kind of startled me and I was like, wait, what how do you recognize my boat? This was probably a 70 year old man and he said my brother and I used to fish out of a yawl when we were kids. And I said, really? And he said, Yeah, we would, we would row up river all day, setting our lines out trout lines or their nets or whatever. And then they would camp out at night. And then the next day they would float down and collect the catch and go sell them at the market and then do the whole thing over again row back up river and row down river, and then I guess they maybe they sail down river if there was if there was a a favorable wind, but you’ve been on the river, you know, the winds, they kind of they kind of clock around a little bit. So the sail, you know, we didn’t use it nearly as often as we thought we were going to in fact, I will say when we when we started the trip, I sort of had visions of just Huck Finning it, we were just going to use the oars to sort of stay out of the channel and we were just going to float down the river but you know, in the summertime when you’ve got what’s it may have been running two miles an hour that summer that we were on there in the in the in the wind, you know, got a headwind blowing out of the south and so we ended up rowing. Gosh, probably eight hours a day. We rowed an awful lot more of the time than I than I bargained for we ended up rowing.
Dean Klinkenberg 21:18
Right. I mean, I think a lot of other folks discovered pretty quickly that a sail on the Mississippi really isn’t much use. There aren’t a lot of times you actually get to unfurl it and take advantage of the winds. Right, normally, people end up cursing Lake Pepin for too much wind.
Trapper Haskins 21:30
No. We, we only set the sail two times. Once the day that we left Burlington. It was just perfect. The wind coming over the stern. And it was it was a perfect day for. And then we tried to hoist it in Dallas City, Illinois. And it was it was pretty apparent real quick. There was way too much wind to have that to have that kite up in the air like that. So we quickly pulled it down. And I will say the the irony of ironies is that we got on the Lake Pepin, which is this, you know, nice, huge expanse of water there. And I thought, well, this is going to be the place to set the sail. And if there wasn’t a breath of wind the whole day. We ended up having to row Lake Pepin. Yeah, and that’s what we had been warned about. Like it’s gonna get dangerous. If the wind pipes up. It’s a really dangerous place to be. And we, I mean, it was like, it was like rowing over, you know, like water looked like it had been lacquered. It was just completely glossy and calm. And I thought, well, this is this is unfair.
Dean Klinkenberg 22:42
Yeah, apparently somebody just wants you to get that exercise.
Trapper Haskins 22:47
We got fit on that trip. I’ll tell you that. That’s a it’s, that’s a good weight loss routine is to row 2000 miles. You’ll shed some pounds doing that.
Dean Klinkenberg 22:57
I bet. Maybe I’ll put that on my list for this summer. I could lose. I could use losing a few.
Trapper Haskins 23:03
Yeah, me too.
Dean Klinkenberg 23:05
So 2002, then is when you started the trip is that I think, is that right?
Trapper Haskins 23:10
We did, yeah. So we were you know, I built this boat thinking that we would do the whole river. Being somebody from Memphis, I thought, well, the river’s, it’s huge, you know, and then I ordered all the maps and charts and stuff. And I got to look at a picture of the Mississippi where it first starts, which I had never seen before. And it was apparent very quickly that we were not going to put an 18 foot rowboat at the headwaters of the Mississippi. And so what we the compromise that we ended up coming up with was we borrowed a canoe to do that first 500 miles from Lake Itasca to Minneapolis. And, you know, it was it was crazy for somebody from Memphis to think about fully one, almost a quarter of the Mississippi or no, 1/5 I guess, is above Minneapolis. There’s just or I guess that’s a quarter of, yeah it’s 502 miles, I think from Lake Itaska to St. Anthony Falls. And it was just astounding to me to think that that much of the river is north of Minneapolis. And but I had I had it in my mind that we were going to do the whole thing. And so I could not conceive of just starting the trip in Minneapolis. So we borrowed a canoe to do the first 500 miles and then we swapped over to this rowboat and that’s when we that’s when we we started that that portion of the trip. So the boat’s name is Oxbow. We named her after the old you know, the old river channels that are you know, turned into lakes. But yeah, we spent three weeks in a canoe on the upper part in, we started in July of 2002. And then the plan was to be in the Gulf of Mexico by about Halloween. So we plan for it to be a three month trip. And it took 16 years.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:18
And we won’t go into all of the spoilers about you know how that trip got interrupted all that we will get to I think in a minute, I want to hear a little bit about that decision to end where you did the first time around, but I was just thinking too like so you said, this boat is what around 500 pounds or so? Oxbow?
Trapper Haskins 25:36
500 pounds, so it’s, it’s there pine planks on oak frames, it’s all solid wood as it would have been built back then. And it’s the day we launched it, it took 12 of us to carry that thing down to the water. I mean, she is not she is not a Kevlar canoe. I mean, she is she is beefy. She’s quite beefy.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:54
Right? So trying to portage that boat around one of the dams up in northern Minnesota would have killed you right there anyway.
Trapper Haskins 26:01
It was not gonna happen. Yeah, there’s, I don’t remember how many dams are are north of Minneapolis. But there there were quite there’s quite a few times where you have to unload everything. Carry the canoe around reload it. And that just there was no way that was going to happen in a in a 500 pound boat and in the water is just so constricted up towards the headwaters region that it’s no place for, for a boat with nine foot oars. I mean, you just can’t. It’s not made for that.
Dean Klinkenberg 26:32
Right. So all right, so you had a canoe for the first portion. And then in Minneapolis, you were able to get in Oxbow and, and get going. What was that first day like?
Trapper Haskins 26:43
Oh, it was, I would say luxurious, because you get out of a canoe and then you get into a rowboat that’s almost five feet wide. And all of a sudden, you’ve got all of this room. And so it was spacious. But the other thing is that was the first real city, I guess that we were kind of going through, you know, St. Paul, there’s all those, gosh I don’t even know what it is, gravel and grain and all those facilities on the side of the river there. And you know the difference between a rowboat and a canoe is you’re looking backwards in a rowboat. And so it was a little daunting, I would say, heading into all of that industry, when we were looking the other way. And so the first day in the rowboat, Mandy actually sat facing forward, she sort of called out directions to sort of you know, there’s a, there’s a tow boat heading up river and, you know, head off this way, head off that way. But after the first day, we sort of got comfortable looking over our shoulder and sort of gauging the closing speed of some of the barges and stuff and got a little more comfortable with it. And within I would say within a couple of days, we were like a we were clicking like a metronome. It was pretty we got we got in time pretty good and and it it. I love canoeing, but I really I really love rowing. I just like the sway of the motion. It was. It was fun. I was glad to be in glad to be in the rowboat. I’ll say that.
Dean Klinkenberg 28:15
Yeah, because that is one of the challenges. It’s certainly like the barge traffic and the recreational boat traffic can be daunting enough in a canoe and trying to dodge all of that, but you typically see what’s coming. And so you had to train yourself to look over your shoulder pretty regularly and yeah.
Trapper Haskins 28:35
Every couple of every couple of dozen strokes or whatever, we would look over our shoulder. But I guess the I guess the the flip side of that is if you’re in a canoe, you really don’t have a sense of what’s bearing down behind you and the barges that are coming down river can be moving quite a bit faster. So I guess I guess being in a canoe you’ve got to look over your shoulder to see what’s what’s hidden downriver?
Dean Klinkenberg 29:03
Absolutely. There are plenty of stories about people in canoes who are surprised at how quickly a barge snuck up on them because they can be surprisingly quiet too when they’re behind you.
Trapper Haskins 29:12
Yeah, yeah and all of that when the wind is blowing in your ears man the it’s hard to hear those it’s hard to hear those things so we yeah, we kept we kept an eye out but the other thing is the boat only draws probably four or five inches of water even when it was loaded with all of our gear so we did generally try and stay I was either to the side of the channel or out of the channel completely I don’t know that there were many days we’re running the middle of the channel there even though you get most of the current there it seems like we tried to sort of skirt the channel a little bit.
Dean Klinkenberg 29:50
In that part of the river when you get past St. Paul and like down toward Dubuque in the Quad Cities there are quite a few side channels. Did you wander away from the main channel at times? The back channels.
Trapper Haskins 30:01
Yeah, every chance we could I love that part of it just, it just seemed like a, like a door to another place. You know, this little side channel it would just veer off into the wilderness it looks like and you just sort of take that you take that side route and there’s no barges. There’s no people. It’s just wildlife everywhere. And it’s it’s surprisingly quiet. And it’s just yeah, if I could have done the whole river in those side channels, I probably would have done that. Yeah, we would do that sometime can’t back in there when we can find a sandy place. Yeah, I mean, I think that those it’s, they’re just such a such a treasure, that those are just all of these undeveloped islands back in there. And all those braided channels that sort of, you know, are off on the sides there. I love that. And I love the bluffs. You know, being a kid from Memphis, you just think, I mean, Memphis is on a bluff, but it’s not, it doesn’t compare to the Driftless area, or the, you know, the hills that are along the river right there. That was, that was a pretty shocking sight for me in a good way. I thought it was beautiful. I just I love the Upper Mississippi. And I’ve never I knew nothing about it until we until we did it.
Dean Klinkenberg 31:18
That’s one of the things that I enjoyed with your book, too, is there’s so many of these parts of the river that it was your first time seeing them. And it was fun to sort of experience that first time through through your eyes and, and through your writing. So I appreciated that a lot about the book.
Trapper Haskins 31:35
Yeah, yeah, we got to, you know, when we did this, it was it was 2000. So there was no YouTube so we couldn’t watch any videos on it. The only there was no Facebook. So there was no like paddlers group, or anything like that. The only thing I had read about someone doing the river was Old Glory by Jonathan Raban.
Dean Klinkenberg 31:57
Yep.
Trapper Haskins 31:58
That was the only book that I had read about the about a river trip before we did it. And other than that, I didn’t know anything about we just sort of went into it blind, which I think was kind of it was, you know, there was a steep learning curve, but but I had no preconceived notions about what it was going to be. It was all, everyday was new to me.
Dean Klinkenberg 32:24
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 guide books 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 Mississippi. My newest book, The Wild Mississippi goes deep into the world of Old Man River, learn about the varied and complex ecosystems supported by the Mississippi, the plant and animal life that depends on them. And where you can go to experience it all. Find any of these wherever books are sold. And I was curious about that, because now there’s so much information available. There is the Facebook paddlers page, there are other books out there. Sometimes I feel like people are overpreparing for the trip. And then maybe I wonder if they are losing the or the that openness to newness and novelty and wonder, by overpreparing for everything. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Trapper Haskins 33:32
Yeah, I have had the exact same thought and in you know, those paddlers groups that are on Facebook, and I’m a member of some of them, I think they’re they’re a great asset for people. They help they can help people assist people when they’re in in trouble. I do think that the I do think that there might be it can invite you to, like you said, prepare too much, read too much. And you can end up in this like paralysis by analysis, where you try and like, you know, plan out where all you’re going to camp and all that kind of stuff. I mean, we would, we would start looking for a camping spot about five o’clock in the afternoon. And as soon as we saw when we would stop there was no you know, and God bless the river angels that that help people. I think it’s super, super cool. But like I said, I think that there’s there you can come to a point where you rely on that stuff too much. And it becomes a if you have an itinerary, I guess. I think that sort of strips some of the magic for lack of a better word, or it can strip away some of the magic from a trip like that because part of what’s part of what sort of life changing about these not just this trip, but that these kinds of trips are you not only learn so much about yourself, but you learn so much about an area that you knew nothing about and didn’t over prepare for and didn’t look at pictures and YouTube videos of every step of the way. You just sort of got out there on the water and trusted that it was. It was going to work out and it does most of the time.
Dean Klinkenberg 35:14
Well, you got a book out of it. So I mean, you get, you did finish it. So like you, obviously you did a few things right. So for you, then yeah, what were some of the core like the most important preps are preparations that you took before you started the trip? But when you think back on it now? What was your approach to preparing for it?
Trapper Haskins 35:35
What did we do we um, well, as far as preparing for it, we didn’t do any sort of training. I will say that. The day we launched our rowboat, which again, was just a couple of weeks, maybe a month before the trip. I think I had rowed one boat in my life and Mandy had never rowed. And so that that little maiden voyage around the harbor there in Rockland was it was a comedy of clattering oars, because we couldn’t get into time together. And so there really wasn’t, there wasn’t any physical training. As far as preparing for it, we had both camped before, but never done any kind of river trip, in a canoe or otherwise. And so we just, I think we bought a dry bag, and got a bunch of camping stuff from the local camping store. And you know, we kind of brought along what we thought we should bring out, you know, there’s a, there’s a couple of things looking back on it that I’m like, we brought one of those water purifying straws, you know, we never ended up using that, because there’s enough places to stop and fill up, you know, we’re carrying jerry cans. Each of them was five gallon, so we’re carrying 10 gallons of fresh water. We never had to drink out of a mud puddle or anything like that. And we brought a compass. I don’t know why, we didn’t need the compass. But yeah, just mostly just camping stuff, is what we brought, you know, camping stuff, and a just some audacity and very, very little skill.
Dean Klinkenberg 37:14
But also you brought, I presume, some sense of confidence that you’d be able to figure things out along the way, too.
Trapper Haskins 37:20
Yeah, we and we had done some camping before. But this was definitely a test for us. Because it was more what I would call back country camping than we had ever done before. I mean, we had car camped and done that kind of stuff. And yeah, it takes a little, it takes a little and maybe bravado or maybe just some just some ignorant confidence, I guess. I don’t know, we just felt like it was we just felt like it would work out. You know, you can’t, yeah, we just didn’t want to plan too much. And that and I will say that goes for most things in our lives. Just try not to plan too much. Just Just do it.
Dean Klinkenberg 37:21
What so it’s not specific to a river trip, in your case. And it’s just kind of a life philosophy maybe.
Trapper Haskins 38:11
Yeah, yeah. I would say much to the much to the dismay of my in-laws, and sometimes my parents. Yeah, we just sort of go for it some time.
Dean Klinkenberg 38:20
So what was what was the rhythm like from day to day then once you got going in Oxbow? Was there a certain kind of pattern that you got into day to day?
Trapper Haskins 38:31
Yeah, we would. We I think when it was all said and done, we averaged about 30 miles a day. Like I said, we were rowing probably eight hours a day. We would wake up in the morning to have coffee and breakfast on the sandbar until we realized we could just get in the boat and actually make some miles while we’re doing this. So then we started just eating breakfast in the, in the boat while we floated. And then we’d row for several hours and just, you know, just sort of fall into that, that sort of like, trance like state that you can fall into and you’re just you just get into this rhythm. Like I said, we were moving like a metronome. So it was just, you could kind of get lulled into this just sense of otherworldly whatever it’s like you just you just sort of the time just passes. And then we would always stop for lunch. And then try and pick out a, we tried to pin down where we were on the chart and then find the spot down river. And we would just float for 60 minutes and see if we could get to that point. And then that’s how we would determine how quickly the river was going. You know, if we if we started eating lunch at this bridge right here, and we’re rounding this point, you know, 60 minutes later and we’re not rowing and that point was two and a half miles away well then the river is going two and a half miles an hour. So that was sort of our daily thing to sort of figure out how fast the river was going, was to float for at least 60 minutes a day and, and see how far the river would take us. And then like sort of late afternoon, we’d start looking for sandbars, which, again, that wasn’t that that was another thing that not knowing what to expect. I think that I, I think that I anticipated camping in the mud a whole lot more than we did. Because you just think of, you know, the Muddy Mississippi and the muddy riverbanks and, you know, if you in Memphis, if you go down to the river bank, it’s all it’s mud and rocks, and it’s not real pleasant. But then being actually out on the river, I was just astounded at how many beach like sandbars there are, and so about five o’clock we would just start looking for an ideal spot to camp and sometimes you’d find them and sometimes you wouldn’t sometimes you’d end up on a you know, like on a low sandbar and, and worry that if the river was rising, that you might get swallowed up in the night. And that, that came close to happening more than once. But yeah, that so that was sort of our sort of our rhythm of things. And yeah, you’re just kind of you’re just, you’re just a rising and falling with the with the sun. You know, there’s no, I love that’s what I love about camping is just sort of you get into the rhythm of sort of the celestial rhythm instead of like, you know, artificial lights and television shows and those kinds of things that could keep you up past midnight, you know, just that doesn’t, doesn’t happen so often on the river,
Dean Klinkenberg 41:45
Right. Well, in that time of year, you’ve got long days too, especially up in Minnesota when you started 11 o’clock before it’s fully dark. And then it’s light pretty early.
Trapper Haskins 41:55
Yes, I do remember when we were in Minnesota, we had to, we bummed a ride to Walmart because we didn’t know that it got cool at night. And so we all we had was shorts and t-shirts. And it would get down to you know, it gets down to 55 degrees 60 degrees at night. And so we ended up bumming a ride to Walmart to get a to get a sweatshirt in northern Minnesota because that was that was another surprise was just how cool it gets up there even during the summertime at night.
Dean Klinkenberg 42:28
Yeah, I lived in Minnesota for a few years and I still got surprised by that. I did just a couple day paddle around the headwaters in August, and when I woke up my first morning, it was in the low 40s. Wasn’t fully prepared for that myself. No, but up there, you know, it’s kind of normal. So one of the things that I liked with the book, too, is that you obviously have a big interest in history. And there are lots of places throughout the book where you write a little bit about some of the history of the places as you’re passing them. Were you sort of aware of those things when you were paddling down the river, were you thinking about, oh, this is where this happened. Or this is where x, y or z happened. Were you kind of cognizant of the river history as you’re paddling down, or rowing down?
Trapper Haskins 43:02
No, no, it’s not supposed to be that way. A lot of them not all of them, but a lot of them because we did have there was room enough in our in our boat where we carried a whole bunch of books. And so you know, as we’re going down river, I remember reading, we read Undaunted Courage. And so that whole scene about them going up the Missouri River and the Corps of Engineer camping across the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Missouri. Those sorts of things. And I did have a couple of just history of the Mississippi Valley books with me. And then some of that was just information I’d held on to over the years in Memphis. I would always sort of read about Mississippi River history, and it just always had a well, you know, as I said earlier, if I get interested in something I just sort of get attached to not only that thing, but the history of that thing and the history of its history. And so when I first got interested in Mississippi when I was working on those river boats, the sightseeing paddle boats in Memphis, I remember reading some history of the Mississippi just trying to just sort of taking in all the stuff that sort of had happened around like the wreck of the Sultana, you know, all of the incredible depth of history, a lot of which is literally buried. Yeah, I had read a lot of that stuff over the years. But then after the trip also went back and read, you know, because we would pass someplace and I would be like, man, this something happened here. There’s, there’s, you know, there’s some ruins here or this place has an interesting name and I would go back and and read it. In fact, you may have, there’s a book called, it’s called Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River. And it was put out by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1970s. And it’s, it’s a pretty incredible book, because it gives the, you know, you’ll be rounding, some point that has some name, you know, whatever, whatever bend or whatever point. And this book Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River, it gives the history of all those names and why they’re why this is called this bend, and why this is that point. And those sort of things just fascinate me. Because, you know, it’s those are what we have left to kind of tell the story of the river that’s there today, is the names that were attached to all those places. Right. Somebody probably needs to do that book for the upper part of the river too then. I know a guy.
Dean Klinkenberg 44:58
Interesting. All right. So let’s, so 2002 then you know, your your expectation is going to be a source to sea trip, and kind of started taking a beating by the time you got to Baton Rouge especially. And yeah, made a decision to stop the trip and get off the river at New Orleans.
Trapper Haskins 46:22
Yep.
Dean Klinkenberg 46:23
Can you just tell us a bit about what was going on at that time? Why you changed your mind about going on to the Gulf?
Trapper Haskins 46:29
Yeah, we I mean, as late as Natchez, we were still intending on going the whole way. But anybody that’s been on the Mississippi, especially anyone who’s started north of Louisiana at any point, and has seen how beautiful it is through there, and then gone through Baton Rouge. It really, it changes dramatically. Like I say in the book, it’s it feels like it feels like a set change. It’s like a, you know, all of a sudden, there’s this incredible industry with these refineries, chemical plants and all this stuff that’s on the river, on the banks of the river. But not only those industries, the attendant ships that that come up river to feed those those refineries. They, I mean, if you think it’s daunting to be on the river with a tow boat, you know, pushing 42 barges when you’re on the river with a boat that’s 1000 feet long and standing something like six stories in the air. It is, you’re invisible. If you’re in a rowboat, or a canoe or a kayak, you’re invisible. And we had our share of ships honking at us. We had our share of longshoreman on the docks yelling at us to get the hell away from the banks don’t come between this towboat and this dock, and what are you doing down here? And are you trying to get yourself killed and all that kind of stuff. And on top of that, it had been raining for probably two weeks straight. And some of our clothes were starting to get a little moldy. And it was just it just felt like the I don’t know, it just felt the joy of the thing was sort of dissolving. And we met a tour and we met a ship pilot who told us point blank, you are absolutely crazy if you continue going past New Orleans, the traffic doesn’t get any lighter. In fact, it gets heavier. And he sort of really read us the riot act about trying to do what we were doing. And I think that that coupled with the fact that it had sort of lost its fun. When we got to New Orleans, it sort of felt like well, this is this is a this is a fitting finish line. You know New Orleans is a party city. It’s a celebratory city. This seems like a good place to end if we’re not going to go to the Gulf. This seems like a good place to end. And so at the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, we left the Mississippi and rode into Lake Pontchartrain and called some family in Tennessee and we hauled the boat out of the river, 90 to 100 miles short of the Gulf about about three months after we had started in that summer of 2002.
Dean Klinkenberg 49:39
Right. I kind of what crossed my mind reading about that particular stage too is that it seemed like for so much of the trip, like even if you had a hard day, you had the beauty of the river around you and maybe that helped kind of refill the tank a little bit from day to day having that but by the time you got to Baton Rouge, it was just a slog and you’re kind of constantly under assault. Maybe you just didn’t have those moments of the river beauty to refill your tank enough to find the will to keep going.
Trapper Haskins 50:08
Yeah that’s that is precisely how it felt it was like at the end of the day instead of instead of like taking in the sunset and just really enjoying how beautiful the river was at the end of the day the our thoughts were like how many more days do we have to do this? How many more days it was just, yeah, we were sort of worn down by the time we’d run that gauntlet from Baton Rouge to New Orleans which which is why a lot of people nowadays I think go the the Atchafalaya out that way which which I would love to do one day. But but that particular trip we were we were married to the Mississippi so we we stayed on the river til then.
Dean Klinkenberg 50:52
And I just like the my own editorializing here, river pilots always say you’re crazy for being out on the river, or small boat, they act like sometimes they act like they own the river and anybody else doesn’t belong there. It’s baloney. Like there’s there’s plenty of room for everybody, even those of us in small boats.
Trapper Haskins 51:10
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think at that time. I think that he, I think that him telling us we’re crazy to go on, was sort of giving if I’m, if I’m thinking back on it. I think that that was giving me license to say, okay, this is far enough, you know, because I had his eye had his authoritative opinion, telling me, you can’t do it. And so that gave me the, you know, the ability to tell myself, okay, we can’t do it. We should get out right here. New Orleans is New Orleans is a good place to stop. So yeah, so we did.
Dean Klinkenberg 51:48
it’s one of those interesting life moments, isn’t it? Because at that point in time, it felt like that was the right thing to do to stop the trip. But the decision kind of ultimately didn’t sit so well with you. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Trapper Haskins 52:03
Yeah, I. I, when we finished it, or when we got to New Orleans, I was, you know, like I said, I told myself, I was satisfied that I didn’t have anything more to prove. But then it started to, for some reason, it started to kind of wear on me in the in the following years that we just had never seen it, you know, it never seen the end, you know, I’d come across some picture of Port Eads. You know, I’d see some map of Louisiana and that that, that hand reaching out into the Gulf, it was like, I’d always wanted to see it. And I never, never got a chance to get down there and see it. And it kind of wore on me for a little while. And then, so we did that trip in 2002. I was in my 20s. Well, fast forward, you know, 15 years later, whatever. I turned 40 years old. And I had an office job by this time. I had, you know, I had a woodworking business. And when the economy sort of stuttered for a while there, I went back to school, and I started to work in it in architecture firms. So I was a cubicle guy doing doing CAD drawings. And I was I was in a place that I never thought that I would be, you know, the whole reason I left being the whole reason I left school was I didn’t want to get a job where I sat inside, you know, doing that sort of thing. And here I was, with an office job, two kids, a mortgage, a car payment, and, and then I turned 40. And it sort of felt like, the way I explained it to my wife was that it just felt like the levee broke, you know, and I started really struggling with anxiety and some panic attacks. And really just this overwhelming existential dread that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing, or I wasn’t doing what I was meant to do, or however you want to phrase it. It was it just made my life sort of an emotional hell there for a little while. And I started seeing this seeing this therapist to kind of talk through it a little bit. And I remember him asking me, he’s like, what do you what do you think it is that you really want? And what I want that I think at that time more than anything was just to kind of reconnect with who I saw myself as, which was someone who was creative, built things, did things. I wanted to sort of be an adventurer again. You know, I felt like my life had stalled out. And a few weeks into being 40 I just, I just couldn’t live with I couldn’t live with the idea that that was going to be my life until retirement was that I had sort of, that I had sort of given in to this life. And so I told him, I want to go back, I want to, I want to go finish the river. And we still had the boat, the boat had been sitting in the side yard for 15 years. But the thing about a wooden boat is, if it’s not in the water, it’s not good for the boat, you know, you take a, you take a wooden boat and just put it out in the side yard, it’s not going to, it’s not going to last very long. And so I had discussed it with my wife, and she told me, I’m fine with where we stopped it in New Orleans. But if you need to go back, I totally understand I see what you’re going through. If that’s what it takes, then let’s do it. And then I said, I want to take the kids and she said you’re crazy.
Dean Klinkenberg 55:51
How old were the kids at that time?
Trapper Haskins 55:54
At that time, they would have been, I think 9 and 11. So this was this was in 2018. So they were 9 and 11 at the time. And and she agreed that they could go as long as we didn’t we didn’t camp out on like we weren’t trespassing anywhere or anything like that. So I pulled the boat into the garage because we needed to paint it. The paint was all chipping off and stuff. So I pulled the boat into the garage to repaint it and kind of get it ready oil it to spruce it up a little bit. And that was when I realized that the entire bottom had rotted was rotting off. I could put my hand through the through the bottom, you have to just peel away the wood. And I realized was going to have to rebuild it. And so so my kids helped me rebuild the boat, which was sort of it was a surreal experience for me because at 9 and 11 they were closer. They were closer to the age that I was when I initially built the boat when I was 22 than I was then at 40, 41. You know they were they were closer to that age. So the two of them helped me rebuild the boat. And Labor Day weekend of 2018, we put the boat back in the river exactly where Mandy and I took it out 16 years prior.
Dean Klinkenberg 57:15
Fantastic. Now, as much as I would love to have you tell the stories about the what it was like to get back out there and finish it, I think people should read the book and find out for themselves. Some of the obstacles you ran into and what you had to go through to finally finish that trip. But you did get there you did finally get Oxbow to the saltwater the Gulf of Mexico.
Trapper Haskins 57:40
We did. We did. There were days I didn’t think it would it was gonna happen. But but we did. We did.
Dean Klinkenberg 57:47
Tell us about that moment a little bit.
Trapper Haskins 57:50
Yeah, I think in the book, I describe it as I remember my wife asking me, How do you feel? because she was doing the trip for me. She you know, like she said she was okay with you. She had made peace with where we ended it years ago, she didn’t need to go back. And so she was sort of observing me at that moment. And she I remember her asking me how do you feel? And I felt like, I could either double over crying or that I could just burst out laughing It was just the it was just the most chaotic. The most chaotic swirl of emotions, you know, I it’s something that I thought that I would have done in my 20s. And here I was in my 40s and in the same boat with the same girl and just just a lot less hair on top of my head. I guess. We got there and it was it really was a dream come true. I mean, I know that. I know that phrase gets, you know, tossed around a lot, but it really was. Yeah, it really was a dream come true.
Dean Klinkenberg 58:58
So you know, I know I sometimes like chide reporters for asking that question. Well, how do you feel now that you’ve done x, y or z? And I so I don’t want to go too deep into that. But I am curious, like part of why you wanted to finish this was to reconnect with that part of yourself that yeah, that freedom, that sense of freedom and adventure. So what’s life been like since you finished this trip?
Trapper Haskins 59:24
Well, so I left the left the architecture firm that I was working at so I no longer work indoors. Or in an office I should say, I reopened my woodworking business so I do custom furniture and I do trim carpentry. I played music for years but while I was working in the office, I had hung up my guitars and I didn’t didn’t really play much of any music but since we finished the river I put out another record in 2020 actually a few weeks before COVID which is a great time to put out a record when all my, all my shows got canceled. But yeah, so we put out a record called, called Blood in the Honey. And there’s actually a song on there called ‘Oh, St. Dymphna’. That it’s not about the rowboat trip, but it’s about dealing with. It does mention a rowboat in there. And St. Dymphna is the patron saint of not mental disorders, but like anxiety, depression. She’s the patron saint of that. And so the song is called Oh, St Dymphna, and that’s a song about sort of reconnecting with the river. And the song mentioned St. Dymphna in a rowboat. But I’ve been playing music, another cool river thing that we’ve done. And this is, this is an incomplete project at the moment. But my daughter and I, we got a 360 camera, one of those like Google Street cameras, and we rigged it up on our canoe. And the local river that runs through our part of Tennessee is called the Harpeth River. And it’s 115 mile river that empties into the Cumberland. And so we did the entire river with a 360 camera. And if I was more adept with I.T. stuff, it would already be online. But I have tens of thousands of 360 photos that I’m trying to get put up onto Google Maps. So you’ll eventually be able to like drop a pin on the Harpeth River and it will take you down to a 360 view. And just like you could travel any street in America, through Google Maps, you will eventually be able to travel the Harpeth River and there are people that have done sections of the Mississippi like that. So if you go to the Headwaters region to the Mississippi, you can drop a pin anywhere on the river, and it will take you to a street view of the river. Without which if we’d had that back in the day, I never would have thought that a, I would have known better than to think that a rowboat could…
Dean Klinkenberg 1:02:00
Right. Well, that’s great. It’s a little reassuring to me, like what I what I like about what you just described to us, like, you know, you have this larger personal purpose for getting back out to finish this trip. And a lot of times I think people expect this to be some kind of silver bullet that’s going to fix everything. And it doesn’t fix everything. But it sounds like it really sort of helped you re-find your way.
Trapper Haskins 1:02:28
Yeah, it definitely. It helped kind of jumpstart some of those some of those things that had been dormant in me because I’ve always sort of had that sort of creative vigor. And the vigor was gone. I think I still had like a, there was still it helped to kind of reignite that creative spark that I sort of always saw myself as having. So yeah, I don’t think it was a silver bullet. But it absolutely was a catalyst for doing some some other creative things that I’ve done since then. Yeah.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:03:03
I don’t know if you’ve had much chance to think about this particular aspect of it. But what is there about a river trip like that, that sort of almost begs for self examination. And for those moments of personal transformation?
Trapper Haskins 1:03:20
I, I think part of it is just the just the time that you have out there, the time and the quietness, I mean, you’re not, you can’t paddle a canoe or row a boat and scroll social media at the same time. So you really, the you really don’t have anything to distract you. Other than your own thoughts and your surroundings. And so if you’re any sort of introspective person, just think it’s natural that you’re going to start asking larger questions about your life when you’re out there. But I think I think that the I think that the the time that you have and just the space, you know, you have to cover so much space. And when you are in our day to day world now, you know, we’re commuting 30 miles to go to school, or to go to work or whatever. And when you’re on the river, I mean, 30 miles is, that’s a day. And so just the time and the space, everything sort of breathes a little more out there, I think. Yeah. Great, I wanted to ask you about this too. I think in the book near the end, you wrote a little bit how you prefer, say, let’s call them the flatter, wetter landscapes over the mountains. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I’ve got so I grew, I grew up in Memphis and my best friend since the first grade, we’re still in close contact with one another. And he’s one of these guys that he took off from Montana at some point with a backpack and just kind of fell in love with the Rocky Mountains and he’s just always waxing poetic about how beautiful the Rocky Mountains are and all of the summits out there. But I’m the I’m the opposite I want the lower place I want just the I want the swampy kind of low lands, I just think that there, there’s this I don’t know, understated beauty is there’s a more subtle beauty to it to me. You know, when you’re when you’re in a mountainous sort of landscape, you can see these proud peaks from miles and miles and miles away. But if you’re in the if you’re in the bauyous or in some wetlands, you know, it takes a little bit of work to get to a sort of like hidden you know, there’s there’s little places that are hidden in the mountains. It’s like nothing’s hidden. It’s all right there on the skyline, you can see everything. And I just I like the I like the slow languid waters and just the the the wildlife and just the smell. I just love everything about wetlands and low, low places. That’s, that’s where it’s at for me.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:06:08
Absolutely. I completely agree. And I think one of the things you may have written in the book, too, it’s just the idea that the kind of places that you get rewarded for paying attention, like you will the mountains are big, they’re hard to miss, right. When you’re in a prairie, when you’re in the wetlands, it can look pretty similar to the horizon. But the beauty is really in the details. And you’ve got to slow down and look around to really appreciate all of the beauty within.
Trapper Haskins 1:06:36
Yes, you’ve got to you’ve got to pay. I think the line in the book is is that that it rewards the watchful and the willing, because you do like you said, you’ve got to work for it. And you’ve got to really just slow everything down and pay attention because like you said, it first glance, it all looks the same. But there’s just you know, there’s just something something special around every bend.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:07:02
Tell us a little bit about the book, then Crooked Old River. When is it going to be available? And where can people find a copy?
Trapper Haskins 1:07:09
Yeah, so Crooked Old River, it’s going to be coming out April 13. And it will obviously be on Amazon, like every book. Or you can get it through my website, which is just TrapperHaskins.com. And under the Store tab, it will be there. I will say being a songwriter, you know, I’ve written three minute songs my whole life. And so writing a nearly a 300 page book, I thought, well, this is going to flex those same muscles, and how long could it possibly take? So this being my first book, I really thought it was going to take about two years, but it took it’s taken, it took four years to write and then another year to edit. Now I know you as you as an author understand that. That endurance, the endurance sport that is writing. That was a that was sort of a lesson for me. But but it’s it’s done now. It’s been edited. And the cover of the book is a photograph that was taken of us on the river by a couple that was doing the Great Loop, which is down the Mississippi around the the Gulf Coast and East Coast, through the canals and into the Great Lakes. Anyhow, this couple was doing The Great Loop. And we were talking and they were taking pictures of us. And we still had our apartment in Maine. And so they hollered, ‘what’s your address?’ before they motored off and we told them and when we got home to Maine that picture was waiting in our mail pile, so that’s the cover of the book was taken by another couple that was doing a trip down the river.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:08:44
People on the river are happy to give.
Trapper Haskins 1:08:46
All the time.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:08:48
Fantastic. And I would assume like if people buy directly through your website, then it’s a little better deal for you than if they buy it through Amazon?
Trapper Haskins 1:08:57
Yeah, so it’s the same. It’s $19.95. So it’s the same price through Amazon or on my website, but the ones through me it’s it’s a better deal for me and those are signed copies. The ones that come from TrapperHaskins.com
Dean Klinkenberg 1:09:10
Alright, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Okay. Are you active on any social media channels? Anyplace people can follow your work more regularly?
Trapper Haskins 1:09:18
Yep. On Instagram, Twitter, X, whatever you call it, Facebook. I’m just @TrapperHaskins anywhere online. I do have a YouTube channel where that’s generally music and I’m not. I’m not nearly as active as I should be on there, but you can find me on there too. But yeah, everywhere. It’s just Trapper Haskins, h-a-s-k-i-n-s.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:09:41
Alright, links in the show notes check there folks. Trapper thank you so much for taking the time today. We went a little longer than 45 minutes as I thought we might but I really appreciate your time and I really enjoyed your book.
Trapper Haskins 1:09:54
Well, thank you so much as a as a regular listener to your show it is a, it is honestly, it’s a huge honor to be on your show, so I appreciate you having me.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:10:12
And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. Well, goodness, this is gonna be a good year for Mississippi River themed books. There are a couple of books out already and more coming this spring and into the summer. Two novels that are out already that have been attracting a lot of attention. One is called James by Percival Everett, a novel that retells the story of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim. So I’m really looking forward to digging into that one. A novel that I just started reading that’s only recently been released is called Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spofford. Not sure exactly how to pronounce his name. From the book description, it is a quote, “Noirish detective novel set in the 1920s that reimagined how American history would be different if instead of being decimated, indigenous populations had thrived.” This novel is set in the place we call Cahokia. That today we treat as an archeological site but in the novel treats it as very much alive city. In the podcast, I interviewed Trapper Haskins about his book, Crooked Old River. That book is coming out on April 13 2024. It may already have been released by the time you listen to this episode. My book, The Wild Mississippi, a state by state guide to the river’s natural wonders releases on May 21. I have more to say about that in the next episode of this podcast. Virginia Hanusik has a book coming out called Into the ‘Quiet and the Light, Water Life and Land Loss in South Louisiana’. She’s a photographer who focuses on architecture of water and land and this particular book focuses on what’s happening down in South Louisiana and looking forward to reading that book and looking at her amazing photographs. And ‘Great River the Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi’ by Boyce Upholt releases on June 11, with a sweeping environmental history of the river which has already been very well reviewed. So Boyce is also offering a Mississippi River Party Pack of snacks and drinks from Mississippi river towns to anyone who purchases or pre orders his book, plus at least one other of these Mississippi River theme books that release in 2024. Go to his website for details on how that’s going to work. So, I’d love to know what you think of these books as you have a chance to read them yourself. Drop me a note at MississippiValleyTraveler.com/contact and let me know what you think about these books. 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 help 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 guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series 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.
