Brian Baiamonte
James Fox-Smith on the water.
When in need of a little breathing room, I like to put a kayak into the Mississippi River and get lost for a while. The Saturday of Easter weekend was such a time. On Good Friday we threw a birthday party for our sixteen-year-old daughter, and while the idea of inviting a couple dozen teenagers to swim and cook homemade pizza seemed reasonable during the planning stage, the reality (and the resulting mess) left the middle-aged members of the household ready for a bit of “me-time” by next morning. Down to the St. Francisville ferry landing I drove, my old touring kayak perched on the roof and, from a deserted riverbank beneath a cloudless spring sky, set off into the wide, brown yonder.
If your goal is to feel small and insignificant there aren’t many experiences like sitting smack in the middle of the Mississippi in a watercraft about as large—but not as seaworthy—as a medium-sized alligator. The experience was heightened by the fact that the river has been really high this spring. All the water that’s been making Midwesterners miserable had to go somewhere, and by mid-April quite a lot of it was passing St. Francisville, flooding the half-mile of road leading to the old ferry landing and lapping at the porch steps of houses at the bottom of Ferdinand Street. My kayak, designed for long-distance touring, is fifteen feet long but only about eighteen inches wide. These dimensions help it slip through the water with minimum resistance, but leave it unstable enough to make an unexpected sneeze, let alone the wake thrown by a thousand-foot-long barge tow, exciting if you’re not paying attention. Since my appetite for solitary thrillseeking stops short of actually swimming in the Mississippi, this has the effect of focusing the mind on the task at hand. But despite having spent years exploring its lower reaches this way, I’ve never found the Mississippi River to be the treacherous, churning maelstrom that it is popularly made out to be. At the surface it’s generally placid. Sometimes, when making your way through the inside of a bend you’ll encounter huge upwellings or lazily turning whirlpools that’ll make your little boat buck and shudder, hinting at the implacable power of half a million cubic feet of water moving south each second. Other times, alone in the middle of a mile of silently moving water, you’ll find yourself gently lifted by swells so deep and regular they feel as if they might have traveled a thousand miles to meet you. It’s a queer, otherworldly feeling, a primal tonic for the ennui of modern existence … or a houseful of teenagers, for that matter.
Set out from St. Francisville, and after an hour’s vigorous upstream paddling you’ll be presented with choices: make a pit stop on a conveniently-situated mid-river island to enjoy a sandwich and a beer while watching for the next tow barge to trundle into view, or turn into a canal that leads into Cat Island Wildlife Refuge to go gliding through the flooded woods. The third option is just to stop paddling, dangle your feet in the water, and let the river take you home. Given the exertions of the previous day this option seemed best. Where it passes the island the river funnels into a narrower channel through which it writhes and mutters before settling into a long, placid stretch all the way down to the Audubon Bridge and beyond. Looking downstream, this five-mile vista of brown water and emerald-green spring foliage laid out beneath an impossibly blue sky made for a study in contrasts. Then came another marvel: moving up the flyway were flocks of birds presumably migrating northward after winter. Tiny and white and too high for me to make out what they were, they moved in wheeling V formations: five or six distinct flocks strung out north to south, all the way to the horizon. It felt like getting a glimpse into the primordial past: birds following the river—the path hard-baked into their DNA—a remnant of a time when the teeming multitude of birdlife in the lower delta left early explorers lost for words. Feeling fortunate I sat back in my tiny boat, watched wave after wave pass overhead, and proceeded to get thoroughly sunburned.
At its essence, this is what we mean by “embracing your place.” Living in Louisiana might have its frustrations, but if you’ll just take the time to look carefully, there’s no end to the wonders it’ll reveal—sometimes in unexpected places. Wherever you live, I’m pretty sure life works like that. You’ve just got to bloom where you’re planted.
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