Day 0: False Start

Would you willingly turn your own plans upside down in the blink of an eye?

A decade ago, my answer to the question, “what’s next?” was the Mississippi. Back then I was a senior in college and had just cycled across the U.S. from Yorktown, Virginia to Florence, Oregon and up the coast to Seattle. At the time I thought my cross country cycling trip was a “once in a lifetime” adventure. Surely, from there, I would graduate, work as an engineer at one company for the rest of my life, get married and have kids, and the rest would be down hill from there.

Only with my wildest imagination could I imagine doing something else like that more than once. Afterall, people told me as much.

But here I am, on the eve of setting off once again on a “once in a lifetime” adventure. This time is not my second, but my third iteration of the cross country variety.

Somehow in between I managed to walk across the country.

Why the Mississippi?

Well, again, if you asked me 10 years ago, I was still in college. A graduate of the Harvard on the Hocking, (Ohio University), I couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to take the Hocking River which flows by campus to its logical end… the Gulf Coast of Mexico.

The Hocking empties into the Ohio River, which flows into the Mississippi, which eventually reaches the Gulf Coast.

That’s my connection to the Mississippi River.

I was going to call it “The Golf Course to the Gulf Coast”, since the 9 hole Ohio University golf course runs along the banks of the Hocking as well.

Now, years removed, I feel almost no desire to start at the golf course of Ohio University. But, that twinkle in my eye for a cross country river adventure never left me.

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On my way Minnesota, just 800 miles to the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, I read a sign that turned all my plans upside down.

The Mississippi River is not the longest river in the U.S. That title belongs to the Missouri River, which is even more impressive when you consider the Missouri empties into the Mississippi and therefore could just as reasonably be entitled to an extra 1,500 miles to its name.

The Missouri is muddier, windier, and wilder. It’s a tougher challenge. And at least to me, it’s more historically significant as its the river Lewis and Clark travelled to explore the Louisiana Purchase when they set out, upstream, from St. Louis back in 1804.

By some stroke of dumb luck I had driven into the early morning hours only to unintentionally park a few miles from the headwaters of this mighty river.

With all my gear in tow, I got to thinking, “Should I just kayak this river instead?”

The problem is I spent precisely 0 hours preparing for the Missouri River, which presents its own unique challenges to any successful journey.

Fortunately, a guy named David Miller wrote a book which is referred to as the Bible for paddling the Missouri River, “The Complete Paddler”.

The problem with that though is the book has been out of print for over a decade and the soonest I could get a copy delivered to me would be a couple weeks.

With a little extra effort though I was able to click through the amazon book seller information to see the seller was located only 90 minutes away! One late night email and next day phone call and I found myself in a grocery store parking lot in Anaconda, Montana holding a copy of the Bible of the Missouri River. Thank you Scott!

My triumph was short lived however, as within hours of buying the book, smoke from a lightning induced wild fire began to billow overhead.

Just 30 miles downstream from the headwaters of the Missouri, directly in my path, lay the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Time to chalk this one up as uno reverse card and continue on to Minnesota to start the Mississippi after all.