Ordinary folks describe how they know the Mississippi River and what the river means to them.
“I’ve been fishing the Mississippi ever since I was a really young kid,” Pheng Xiong told me. “I’d say probably like 8 or 9 years old.” He’s 28 now. That’s 20 years of tossing a line into some part of the Mississippi River, mostly between St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Lake Pepin. His father took
In 2014, Norman Schafer started a Facebook group to showcase pictures of high water on the Mississippi River. When the waters receded, he realized that a group called Mississippi River Flood Photos was going to have a limited appeal, so he dropped “flood” from the name. Over the next couple of years, the group
Fiona Fordyce is no stranger to big rivers. She grew up near the Missouri River just upriver from its confluence with the Mississippi. “We were tossed in the river as babies,” she joked. As a child, she and friends would hop into inner tubes and float down the Missouri River to Pelican Island where they’d
On March 1, 2013, Sharon Day gathered with four other Native American women and two Native American men at the Mississippi Headwaters. It was a cold morning, just six degrees (F), when they dipped three five-gallon water jugs into the emergent river. Josephine Mandamin, the Anishinaabe woman who founded the contemporary water protector movement, led
