Mile 727.3 - The Wreck of the Raft

RBD 727.3 The Wreck of the Raft

The Lower Mississippi is a 1,000 mile long graveyard of wrecked vessels and broken hearts. I’ve added at least one to the pile of wreckage. In February of 1983 the river was seasonally high and cold, and flowing fast, furious even, full of the flotsam and jetsam associated with winter high waters: foam, logs, barrels, bottles, docks, cans, lost barge ropes, and us, a couple of kids on a rugged raft. My best friend from high school Sean Rowe and I had just spent the previous five months on a 12x24 foot raft that we built from found materials and oil drums below the Minnesota bluffs above Lacrosse, Wisconsin. A guy named Shimshak let us build it in his back yard. He had a bar across the river in Lacrosse. Anyone ever been to Shimshak’s Tavern?

Months earlier we had drawn a crude chessboard with magic markers onto the floor of the raft, and carved the pieces out of willow branches as a way of passing the time. That fateful morning we jumped into a game of chess on board the raft as we floated under the three lower bridges of Memphis. Our chess games passed many long pleasurable miles of the Mississippi. There is nothing more pleasant than the sensation of a raft on a river, floating along effortlessly and enjoying the scenery sliding by with the same comfort of watching a good movie in a lounge chair. Topping off this cozy arrangement was an open fire which we tended in a 55-gallon steel drum cut in half and filled partway with sand. Fire, water, forests, open skies, and a game of chess. What else could you ask for? We were as happy as two catfish in crawdad hole. We were embroiled in one of these legendary raft chess games as we rounded President’s Island and rolled southward in the billowing muddy blossoms of the powerful river. The wind was out of the north. It was sunny and cold, typical February weather. Everything seemed aligned and in our favor.

The major difference on the river between then and now is a giant tower planted along the edge of the main channel to support the thick throbbing electrical TVA transmission lines. Standing over three hundred and fifty feet tall, the tower rose above a square of 4 megalithic concrete pylons which were anchored into the bedrock hundreds of feet below river bottom. We sighted the steel truss tower as we came around President's Island, five miles upstream. But we paid it no particular attention, and resumed the game of chess around an open raft fire, sipping cups of hot coffee. Who would worry about one or two pylons in all of that water? The river was high, and probably a mile wide at the time. How are you going to hit anything in a mile-wide river?

But we did. Fate had a hand in the matter. As we floated along unconcerned and infatuated with our game the river brought us past the grain elevators and smack dab directly into the fast waters plowing into the tower. Only a hundred yards upstream the tower loomed ominously overhead, too close. Much too close! We leapt to action on the sweep oars and pulled like mad. We probably pulled the wrong way. Then again maybe we pulled the right way and it didn’t matter. This raft was very ungainly and slow to propel. On a good day it would take us three hours of pulling to cross the channel. We frustrated the patience of many a lockmaster down the Upper Miss, including one especially impatient fellow who jumped on his go-cart and burned out his engine trying to tow us through!

It’s hard to remember now what exactly happened and in what sequence of events. All my memories of that day are like a stream-of-consciousness reel in an avant-garde movie with a hand-held camera that rolls and tumbles through space and time, and then flips over, and then goes completely dark. The river pushed us directly into one of the concrete pillars. I can’t remember now which of the two upstream pillars it was, the right or left, but regardless which one it was, we hit it hard, with so much force we both were both knocked over and everything loose skidded across the deck. The raft had come to a sickening halt, not budging one direction nor the other. We could neither crawl up the rounded wall of concrete, nor could we push the raft away from it.

As all paddlers know, the power of water on a vessel trapped in the current against a stationary object is insurmountable except by mechanical means. We experienced more horror as one end of the raft was sucked down, and the other pushed up the pylon, and all our possessions like our journals and my camera and a 12-string guitar were swept overboard, along with all of the familiar raft comforts that had become our home, the cast iron pots and pans, the barrel fire, the chess pieces, the ropes, the sweep oars, our food supply -- we had just resupplied in Memphis: some chickens, a ten pound bag of potatoes, a bag of onions, cooking oil, eggs, and some jars of peanut butter all lost -- and then we too were tossed into the frigid February waters, and the raft was snapped like a saltine cracker around the base of the pylon where the river hit it, and everything became dark and quiet and cold, and we were sucked down by the alternating vortexes and explosions of the river and it felt like my whole life was passing through me and around me.

I've always been attracted to water. As a child growing up in the mountains of Colorado I always sought out a place to splash around and get wet, which wasn't always easy to do. My friends and family thought I'd gone astray when I left the big mountains for the big river of the Lower Mississippi River Valley. But here in the willow-thick riverbanks and deep woods and endless expanses and expressions of pure muddy joy I've found what seems to be my life's calling. It’s the one place where everything makes sense. It’s the one place where I find peace and solace, and many other paddlers and river rats feel the same. It’s the one place where the opposing forces of nature seem to mix in some kind of rough harmony. It’s the one place where heaven comes close to earth. Here on the river, the lifeblood of mother earth. And now fighting for my life submerged into a watery crossroads strung between a major TVA power line and the most powerful river in this quadrant of the earth I could feel the wonderful turbulent surge of creation being edged by an equal awesome force of destruction, the two intertwined and rubbing sides in opposite directions, spinning me round and round, and now my life was in the balance between the two, caught in the tightrope between life and death deep within the violence of the angry winter waters.

We all have someone in our lives who opened up the door to the wilderness for us. Think on it a minute and thank them for that gift. My parents were outdoor lovers and adventurists, especially my father, but my mother also. They wouldn’t like to think so, but they led me, somehow, to that raft and to this river. I am amazed now when I remember the adventures we had and the great risks they took with us and with their lives. And yet those same risks opened our eyes to a parallel reality that exists just outside the safety of our comfortable homes, just over the riverbank off the highway, back in the woods beyond the last line of fences and private property signs. My parents would pack my family of ten into our green van and make crazy camping vacations deep into the Baja California or up the Canadian Rockies (where my father family lived) into Alaska. My mother is Colorado born, 5 generations deep. I would have to say that more than anyone my father opened my eyes to the beauty and thrill of the great outdoors... something that was repeatedly carried on through my older brothers who continued to backpack and cross country ski and involve me in the same throughout my childhood. There was something slightly out of control about these family adventures, but that is one of the universal aspects of the wilderness, isn’t it? That is, being awestruck and governed by something larger than yourself, something chaotic, which is sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightening. And yet out of the chaos emerges profound beauty and renewal. Anyone who has spent any time on the Mississippi River could easily share those same feelings. At turns frightened and enlightened. If you don’t let the fright get the best of you, don’t let it transform into paranoia, that helpless feeling that will confine you to the couch, then the shock of fright opens up a pathway to learning. Fear leads to amazement. Amazement becomes wonder. And wonder opens your imagination to the endless possibilities of the universe, which seem to be expressed and re-expressed in infinite varieties of forms here on the restless face of the mightiest of all rivers.

My older brothers alternately terrorized and then tantalized me into a soulful love of the outdoors. One of my strongest early memories is my oldest brother Frank holding me by my arms over the lip of the Grand Canyon and grinning devilishly. I knew he wouldn’t let me go. At the same time I was unable to hold back the terror of the unknown. I think I was 6 or 7 years old. Later he prodded me down the Bright Angel Trail for a frigid swim in the freezing waters of the Colorado River, and then carried me back out on his shoulders by the light of the full moon. Westerners in general have a different ethic about the outdoors than southerners. I grew up at the edge of Arapaho National Forest in the Front Range of Colorado, which rises from the Great Plains like a tsunami wave, and this was the playground for my friends and family. Everywhere we travelled throughout the Rockies and Desert Southwest we hiked and camped and swam. On road trips when it was time to camp we simply turned off the highway into the nearest National Park and picked out a place. I grew up with the feeling that the outdoors belonged to everyone, not only to those who can afford a hunting camp over the levee.

It was much later, when I grew into the difficult teenage years, that I rediscovered my love of water, and became more involved in its meaning and importance, not only to myself but all Americans, and really to the benefit of all people on the face of this planet. Water connects us all, for better or worse. The wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate, while floods are becoming more frequent and catastrophic, and seem to be alternating with severe droughts. The recent push to remove the New Madrid Floodway seems absurd in this light. So when Sean and I scuttled any ambitions for higher education (much to the dismay of our college counselors) and instead built our giant wooden raft and floated down the Mississippi River out of the Minnesota woods, it was the start of a journey that resonates loudly today. It saved me. It almost killed me. Five months later when we lost all of our earthly possessions and became shipwrecked on a muddy island in Northern Mississippi, and I became infected for life. I became infected with the muddy river. I was struck by a ray of light that still guides me to this very day and illuminates the way down the difficult dusty road of business and an ever rewarding life as a river-rat.

We should have died after wrecking our raft in February 1983. I wasn't wearing neoprene like I do now in cold water. The wreck threw us in the river, Sean on one side of the pylon and me on the other, we popped up and called out to each other, “Sean! Sean!”, “Here I am Johnnie!” We pulled pieces of wreckage together and tied it best we could with our ropes. My guitar was floating close by so I pulled it in. A daypack with some essentials that later helped lead to our rescue. We saved some frozen chickens we had bought that morning in Memphis. We heaved ourselves as far as we could out of the numbing currents, which meant getting our chests on one of the barrels, which kept flopping and twisting in the boils and eddies of the main channel and we floated past a mid-channel bunch of islands along the appropriately-named Dismal Point Dikes. A low ceiling of grey-blue clouds with feathered edges had slid in and now covered the sky and the wind was gently moving out of the north. Everything was peaceful after the drama of the day. We swirled around Cow Island Bend and into the State of Mississippi where a spectacular land mass called Cat Island divides the river in two like a blunt sword. We were reaching the end of our physical abilities to stay warm. We no longer felt cold. It would have been so easy to let go and just float away into the liquid hands of the mother river, and if we had at that point it would have been painless and pleasant. The void awaited us as closely as the skies above and the river below. Sunset was approaching. The river gurgled along smooth and unperturbed. We were both at the weakest and possibly the lowest points of our lives, barely hanging on by a soggy thread. I’ve never shared this in such detail before today, but it seems now that I had reached a state of some kind of fluid nirvana. Everything was gone that I had previously known and had sustained me, except for the wreckage of the raft, and I was ready to let it go. It was that easy. I could have let go then and died peacefully, and without regrets.

But then the sun descended below the cloudy ceiling. A last stream of sunshine edged out underneath the grey mass, gathered strength, and then glistened outwards from over the extensive Arkansas floodplain to our west and bathed Cat Island and the endless forests of Mississippi in a wedge of yellowness. And as the wonders of Cat Island grew bigger downstream, a brilliant sense of beauty and harmony hit me with this last ray of warm yellow sunshine and jolted me out of my coma. It was the mystery and beauty of the earthly elements of this mid-continent wilderness, illuminated now by the low angle February light that filled the Mississippi Valley and flooded the Cow Island Bend with glorious array that shocked me alive and ignited in me a tiny spark of purpose. We were illuminated with the same streaming amber light and I gazed at Sean’s face and our surroundings in wonder, and it felt like we had entered the land of milk and honey. The noise and pollution of Memphis and the TVA tower and the crackling power lines and the terror of the crash and swirling cold waters were all a distant memory. All that remained was Sean and the river, the woods and the sky. It seemed too good to be true. If there is a heaven I am sure we found it. But I was troubled by two thoughts. The first came to me as I gazed downstream upon the sands and forests of Cat Island now softly glowing against the cobalt blue sky by the setting sun. I found myself wondering what it would be like to walk across the island and imagining what secret places were there contained within the sandy undulations and pristine pockets of willows, cottonwoods, sycamores and sweetgums and oaks. The sand looked so soft and warm and inviting. It looked dry. I could see flocks of birds darkening the edges of the forest where they met the water, probably red-winged blackbirds settling down for the day. And as my curiosity about Cat Island grew so did my troubled mind that I might not ever be able to explore this place of beauty. My feet yearned to touch those soft dry sands. The other thought that troubled me was Sean’s baby-faced innocence, also glowing in the last light of the day, peaceful and angelic. I realized that he had reached the same state of bliss that I had. I could easily let it all go at this moment and die peacefully. But I couldn’t let him die. He was simply too beautiful to let go to waste.

The river smashed us against the tower and tried to drown us. Later she came to our rescue. Somehow, by some miraculous current of water amidst the now two-mile wide torrent of winter water we were washed out of Cow Island Bend towards the top of Cat Island and floated into some shallows. After fifteen miles we were washed up well into the mid-stages of hypothermia. It seemed like a dream. We were close to catatonic, moving slowly, thinking slowly, and reacting slowly. Sean and I and the wreckage we managed to hold together touched ground. We were able to place our stony cold sodden feet on solid sand on a shoals and drag ourselves to the nearest dry ground, a line of trees clinging to the top end of one of Cat Island. I’ve gone back several times since then and camped at different water levels and tried to reconstruct the sequence of events, but it’s all very muddy now. I remember sloshing to shore numbed from head to toe. I remember the shape of the island, the trees, and seeing the open channel far upstream, and the endless lines of trees on the opposite shore above Star Landing. The image of a towboat over the top of the island, far away in the main channel of the river is framed in my memory. It was dusk. It was windy and cold. Operating on sheer survival energy we pulled ourselves up a short muddy bank full of tree roots to the forest floor and fell to the earth. It felt so good to lie down. We were well beyond the shivering point. Everything was peaceful and dreamy. We no longer felt cold. But we had each other if nothing else. We encouraged each other to action and somehow located a stash of dry weather-proof matches amongst our salvaged gear and coaxed a pile of tinder and kindling into a flame, and then a smoldering fire. The outside of the wood was wet, but the inside dry. By dark we had a raging fire going as we added piece after piece of driftwood. It seemed like our only remaining purpose in life was as fire-makers, and that was probably our salvation.

Another miracle that led to our survival: A passing tow had somehow spotted us floating downstream in our mess of raft wreckage and slowed its engines and then cut them completely and floated along with us as we were washed into Cat Island and then went into reverse as we crawled up the shore and built a fire. It was the towboat I had noticed earlier now glowing with its running lights which were reflected across the face of the river. Unbeknownst to us in our fight for life the tow pilot had radioed the Coast Guard, who were now racing downstream in one of their workboats. How much time passed before they arrived, and what happened after they found us, I’m not certain to this day. Even though we had a fire going we were getting colder and colder. I think the heroic tow pilot stayed with us and had thrown his spotlight beam on us for the Coast Guard to follow. Also, I am sure our fire would glow like a lighthouse over the cold dark river. My only memory after that point is falling into the open Coast Guard vessel and looking into Sean’s contorted face as we sped back upstream to Memphis, and his voice, “it’s going to be okay, Johnnie,” he kept repeating that over and over. Water has equal ability to sustain life and snuff it out. While we were being rescued as survivors a thousand miles away on the Atlantic Ocean the US Coast Guard brought in 24 bodies and 3 survivors from the sinking of the coal collier Marine Electric with 7 missing and presumed dead off the shores of Virginia.

The infinite mystery of the sky is matched by the infinite depths of the river. It seemed as if the river had let me live one more day for a reason. Over the years I have come to see that the river is a similar to a beautiful woman. She seeks attention. She withers under neglect. And she thrives with good quality attention. Especially the kind that paddlers can give. How do I know this? Simply because every time I go paddling on her waters I am rewarded in some way. It might be with an amazing animal encounter, an osprey plucking a fish out of a muddy back channel or a coyote swimming to an island, or it might be an enthralling experience such as paddling through a thunderstorm, or it might be simply a vision of cracked mud forming some incredible patterns in a mid-island depression around footsteps left by deer and wild hogs and turtles. Every time I go out, even if it’s every day of the week, I return home with some new knowledge, or vision, or artifact. The river has become my teacher and I her student. Her ever-changing landscape is also my playground and my church. For this dynamic floodplain to survive she needs taking care of. She takes care of us. Can’t we do the same for her? Shouldn’t we do the same? Paddlers tend to be more caring, more thoughtful, and more appreciative of the river than others. Fishermen for instance often trash out their fishing sites. I find this incomprehensible. Paddlers commonly pick up trash and quietly remove all evidence of their passage. You could say that everything I do is simply a mirror to help reflect and magnify the great beauty of the wetlands and the great power of the big muddy river. The beauty is inspirational. The power is humbling. Both factors work together and create one of the most rewarding natural landscapes found anywhere. And it’s right here. That's the amazing part. Right here in the gut of America. She literally defines the center of our country. She forms the borders of all the states along her path, the only exception being her birth state Minnesota and her end state Louisiana. And here along the Lower Mississippi her floodplain literally created the landscape that we call the Delta when it deposited layer after muddy layer of alluvium that became arguably the richest soil in the world.

The Coast Guard rescued us and then quickly ridded themselves of us. I remember entertaining the thoughts of a hot shower and nice dry bunks at their Memphis base. But after a short debriefing the captain in charge instructed one of the rookies who plucked us off Cat Island to drive us to the Baptist Mission. Poor guy, he had wanted to leave us in the lilly white Germantown Baptist Church, which of course doesn’t have any mission. We spent several tedious hours looking for the address we had passed in downtown Memphis just a few blocks from the river. He was embarrassed when he realized the mistake. It was right there in the neighborhood of the county jail and bail-bondsmen. It was full of winos and druggies and vagabonds and lunatics and us. We went from being river refugees to homeless refugees at the Poplar Street Mission. Neither of us wanted to frighten our parents so we buckled down like men and sustained our fates. We were allowed hot showers, and good food, with a healthy dose of preaching of course, and after dark we whispered to each other under the blankets and tried to re-piece our lives. After several days in Memphis we hitch-hiked to New Orleans and began new lives anew as rivermen on board the Mississippi Queen Steamboat, thereby ending one river life and beginning another.

For years afterward I had recurring nightmares of overturning boats and going underwater. My psyche played out this drama over and over, and slowly I realigned my life with the river. Ten years later, in the mid-90s I happily forwarded a photo and caption from the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Sean, who was then living in Miami. It was a cathartic mailing. The news was that a TVA tower had been dropped with a whitewater crash into the Mississippi River south of Memphis. It had been removed as a “hazard to navigation.” I could now breathe a huge sigh of relief. The tower was gone, and we were still present. I still experience a feeling of apprehension every time I paddle downstream out of Memphis and around President's Island. And periodically I still have crashing boat water nightmares. But my daily existence has been repeatedly realigned by the big river and that raft trip.

Life is a great mystery and we are the players. Who knows where the cycles of life will bring us in the endless spinning of tales and tapestries and flowing of energy. I have no idea. But I do know one thing: that wherever you go and whatever you do, you need water. And rivers carry the only water we can drink, the fresh water which comes springing out of the ground or falling from the sky. The rivers are the lifeblood of mother earth and one of our basic sustaining elements. And so when trash our rivers, we are trashing ourselves. But when we take care of the rivers we are taking care of ourselves. It’s that simple. In 1998 I left my indoor life for good and started Quapaw Canoe Company to share the great beauty of the Lower Mississippi River with the world. Canoes and kayaks are the only reliable way to access the most spectacular places on the river. And when done right they are also the safest. They are also the least destructive and the most rewarding. Paddling is not for everyone. But even for someone who doesn't know how to paddle we've developed systems to open the river. This is made possible with the big voyageur canoes we hand-craft at our Clarksdale location. Thirty foot long canoes carved from Louisiana Bald Cypress using the ancient full belly high end birch bark design of the North Woods Indians via French Fur trappers of the Great Lakes. By applying rigorous standards for safe paddling, the same standards employed by Outward Bound and the Boy Scouts, we have created a means for intimately enjoying the incredible power and beauty of the Lower Mississippi River and return home to our families to share the stories and photos. And that's what it’s all about, isn't it? It’s in the sharing with others that these feelings and meanings aren't lost in subsequent generations of Americans. So anyway to make a long story short, all of these experiences have led me to where I am now, writing the Rivergator, so another generation of paddlers can safely enjoy the powerful and beautiful waters of the Lower Mississippi, and the vivacious wooded floodplain which it created isn’t completely lost to commerce and industry. The river which is loved by naturalists will become the classroom for our children. The river celebrated by painters will become the river of dreams for our youth. And the river praised by poets will become their spiritual sanctuary alongside our sacred canyons and hallowed parklands.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation owned by the U.S. government, provides electricity for 9 million people in parts of seven southeastern states at prices below the national average. TVA, which receives no taxpayer money and makes no profits, also provides flood control, navigation and land management for the Tennessee River system and assists utilities and state and local governments with economic development.

TVA owns and operates one of the largest and most reliable transmission systems in North America, serving some 9 million residents in an 80,000-square-mile area spanning portions of seven states. TVA's transmission system moves electric power from the generating plants where it is produced to distributors of TVA power and to industrial and federal customers across the region. Since 2000, the TVA system has delivered 99.999 percent reliability.

TVA, the first utility to build 500,000-volt transmission lines, operates and maintains one of the largest single-owner transmission systems in the United States. Its 16,000 miles of line are enough to span the nation more than six times. The TVA boasts 16,086 circuit miles of transmission line. 103,485 transmission line structures. 509 power stations and switchyards. 237,000 acres of transmission right-of-way.

(from TVA website)