Beyond Cairo Point, the eastward-turned tip at the bottom of Illinois, the Ohio River poured into the Mississippi, but the collision of the two great rivers only crumpled the surface of the water and spread ripples across the mile-wide confluence between Missouri and Kentucky. It was December 7, 1985. The cold front that had surrounded LUNA with ice that morning had cleared the sky and the sun had raised the temperature a few degrees above freezing. The Lower Mississippi, easily twice the breadth of the Ohio, pulled me toward a breach in the horizon where the umber-hued woodlands hung cantilevered over the river's reflection of clouds. Above the toe of my left boot is a bridge over the Upper Mississippi River; above the right boot is a bridge over the Ohio River. The low land between the bridges is Cairo, Illinois.
Photographs by the author
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Readers of this adventure might enjoy Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck: flatboat build, flatboat history, and the trials of flatboating today. An outstanding read.
Funny how when one spends big bucks on a boat with a berth, one then needs to spend even more on marinas, and/or motels. But when one says “Ok I can travels 1000s of miles on something I built in my backyard, I can travel nearly for free.”
Has to do with the Law of Conservation of Mass. The bigger a thing is, the more it takes to maintain. I learned to live this out when I went without a house or car for three years, worked an average of one day of labor a week, and ate in restaurants nearly every day.
Very expansive feeling, isn’t it Chris, when you know the only things you need to support are within an arm’s reach of yourself?
After reading this, I wanted to meet and talk more with Johnson, and hoped that James found some joy along his path . I had so many questions throughout your engaging and brilliantly written essay, Chris. One that I have, is “What motivated you to set out alone in the winter, knowing there would be so many challenges?” This adventure seems much more risky than biking to the Grand Canyon in August!
I would love this to be turned into a novel as I am drawn to the human-interest part of all of this.
The book about the cruise of the Jack de Crow from central England to the Black Sea is a great rowing adventure story albeit the rower was a professor of Old English Literature and so probably imagined some of it.
Where’s the complete article?
And the build process?
Here are links to the second and third parts of the story:
A Sneakbox on the Mississippi
A Sneakbox on the Gulf Coast
For a glimpse at the construction of the boat:
Driftwood and Windfalls