Down the Mississippi

John Ruskey spent the month of November-before the really cold weather set in-paddling a canoe down the Mississippi River. The Mighty Mississippi is his passion, and he has spent the past 15 years trying to educate others about its recreational potential. He paddled 413 miles of the river last month.

Here’s how he had described the route in advance: “Through Osceola, near Dyess, near Wilson, past West Memphis, past the mouth of the St. Francis River and Helena, and the base of Crowley’s Ridge, home of the Mississippi River State Park. We’ll camp on Buck Island and Choctaw Island, both public use islands managed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. We’ll continue canoeing downriver past the mouth of the White River, the Arkansas River, Big Island and on downstream past Lake Village and under the new Highway 82 bridge, and on below Lake Chicot, the largest oxbow lake in the entire Mississippi Valley. We’ll parallel Macon Ridge as we canoe on by Eudora, the last city in Arkansas as we enter Louisiana.”

Ruskey operates Quapaw Canoe Co. out of downtown Helena and Clarksdale, Miss. His latest project is the website www.rivergator.org, which provides information on those 413 miles of the river with maps, photos and detailed descriptions. Ruskey often tells those who accompany him on trips: “The river is the rock star here. We’re just her roadies.”

“In most American minds, she’s a messy rock star,” blogger Wolf E. Staudinger wrote during Ruskey’s November adventure. “She has a worn, faded and even dangerous sort of celebrity that makes nervous parents cover the eyes of their children. Ruskey has tried to clean that image up with a variety of strategies. Primarily, he guides fantastic voyages on the real river, with her wild forests and long, white sandbars. He also paints the river. He educates kids on the river. He sings songs about the river. Then he began writing about the river.”

Here’s one of Ruskey’s descriptions of the Mississippi and its tributaries:“Swirling south in giant meandering loops, she dives into the verdant and fantastically fertile Mississippi Delta, mind-boggling swaths of muddy landscapes. … She carves elegant S-curves through deep woods. Her forest was once America’s Amazon, millions of acres of deep woods now removed for farmland. Coming to you from the Pawnee Hills, the Alleghenies, the Kentucky Bluegrass, down through the Missouri Bootheel and along the candy-colored Tennessee Chickasaw bluffs, flowing past the mouth of the wild Arkansas River (more bears than humans) and into the luxuriant Louisiana Delta.”

Kevin Smith, a former state senator from Helena, says that those who grew up along the river were warned to “never swim in that mean monster. It will suck you up.”

“I didn’t listen as a child,being such a fan of Mark Twain,” Smith says. “I went on to canoe the river for almost four months from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to New Orleans. John Ruskey is on a mission to show us that the lower Mississippi River is a canoe and kayak mecca with miles of scenic natural beauty, especially along the Arkansas side. There’s so much remoteness in the back channels of the Big Island stretch that you feel like you are in a national park. This is an area of natural beauty in Arkansas that hasn’t been tapped. It’s a secret only a few of us lucky folks seem to know about.”

W. Hodding Carter, whose grandfather won a Pulitzer Prize when he owned the Delta Democrat Times at Greenville, Miss., and whose father worked in President Carter’s administration, took a trip with Ruskey during the great Mississippi River flood of 2011. In Outside magazine, Carterwrote: “Today the Delta is mostly a depleted, depressed region with a shrinking population. In Greenville, a painful number of businesses are boarded up downtown, and a third of the population falls below the federal poverty level. Bad as these facts may sound, the river has fared even worse. As far back as I can remember, its definable features have been its muddied water and irrepressible Mississippi funk, a suffocating melange of rotting mud, decaying fish, fertilizer and some unidentifiable industry byproduct that is probably best not dwelled upon, at least when you’re swimming in it.”

In a region that others have left for dead, Ruskey’s building on an existing natural asset and creating pride among Delta residents. Ruskey is an unlikely hero for the region. He graduated in 1982 from a prestigious prep school in Connecticut. Graduates tend to head to colleges on the East Coast such as Georgetown, Yale, Penn and Harvard. Ruskey took a different path, building a 12-by-24-foot raft out of scrap wood and 55-gallon drums with the goal of floating the length of the Mississippi River with a friend. The trip took five months to complete.

Ruskey later majored in philosophy and mathematics at St. John’s College in New Mexico. He loved the blues and arrived in Clarksdale at age 26, camping on the banks of the river before being hired by a Mennonite farmer. He was the first curator of the Delta Blues Museum at Clarksdale before starting the Quapaw Canoe Co. there in 1998. It was the first wilderness outfitting business along the lower Mississippi River. Ruskey opened the new outpost at Helena in June 2008. He continues his mission of introducing people to an awesome wilderness that few realize exists.

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 12/11/2013

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