PACKING THE ESSENTIAL

Before you push off for your river run, be doggoned sure you've loaded up one essential item: the courage of your convictions. While most of us will consider a day trip enjoyable or even challenging, we're all lightweights.

I met living proof of this two days ago while some friends and I were wasting an afternoon on the swollen Mississippi just above Memphis. We'd done some repairs to my goddaughter's ski boat and excused ourselves from the tedium of the day by taking the boat for a test run.

We ran north: if the repairs proved useless and we were stranded, the River would carry us down to the boat ramp again. The boat ran well, however, so we spent some time exploring areas that ordinarily would be inaccessable, seeing the proof of heavy rains and flooding in the Midwest: whole trees uprooted and taken by the River, river buoys ripped loose and thrown to the banks, the shattered hull of an eighteen-foot boat now lying half-buried in a sand bar, the hulk of a refrigerator floating along like a small square barge.

The Father of Waters, as the indians used to call it, is no river to trifle with. As we shut down and let the current drift us southward, we chatted about the sheer courage of early settlers who risked everything to explore a new nation. We knew, of course, of the inherent dangers: the lore of the Mississippi is filled with peril from its origins in Lake Itaska, Minnesota, to its disgorgement in Frenchman's Bayou south of New Orleans.

It was near Memphis that the Sultana, carrying Union prisoners, ruptured a boiler and went down, taking most of the passengers' lives with it during the waning days of the Civil War. Our local Coast Guard, Harbor Police and Sheriff's Rescue units frequently are called on to save inexperienced or unwise boaters who challenge Old Man River, and its not uncommon to hear of a body washing ashore. Boaters and fishermen disappear, never to be seen again.

Just looking at the surface of the Mississippi can give you the willies: boils and eddies abound, and as swollen as it is just now, the roaring of water past the river buoys gives you some sense for the immense water volume and force involved. Here the River is easily a mile wide with the massive influx from upstream, and the trees are river-scarred five feet above today's level, proof of how high it was less than a month ago.

As we drifted along, I thought I saw a massive root ball being rolled over and over out near mid-channel.

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