in vain. Only recently has the city publicly acknowledged this conflict in its history. The Mary Meachum monument is small, compared to the Gateway Arch and Shaw’s Garden, and it’s accessible only by taking a back road and crossing to the other side of the tracks.
We drove to the Chain of Rocks Bridge, a span that attaches itself to rocky shoals in the Mississippi. The bridge makes an abrupt thirty-degree turn in the middle of the river. For a time, the Chain of Rocks Bridge was part of Route 66. And throughout its history, there have been many bloody wrecks and even murders on its decks. Erifnus couldn’t cross it, since the bridge has been closed to vehicles for decades. Pedestrians and cyclists cross the bridge freely, connecting hiking/biking trails on either side of the river.
I walked to the middle of the bridge, where it makes its deadly turn, and looked out over the deadly shoals that can shred boats careless enough to try to navigate this section of the river. That’s why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a canal to circumvent this part of the Mighty Mississip.
As I stood in the middle of that bridge, I had no way of knowing that one day soon I’d be paddling into this river in the dead of winter.
Winter Water
The air was cold, a few degrees above freezing. Three of us pushed one long canoe away from shore and paddled out of a swirling eddy into the main stream, thus surviving the most dangerous phase of the trip: the launch into a swift current.
It was early February, and we’d dressed in layers over wetsuits. But the bone-chilling cold reminded us that our canoe was balanced atop a giant swift-moving stream of hypothermia. We paddled away from the Columbia Bottoms access point into the middle of the river. Here, the Missouri is easily half a mile wide, pouring its entire collection of western waters toward the end of its 2,315-mile journey, and the end was almost in sight, a few miles downriver where it greets the Mighty Mississippi.
All three of us were experienced canoeists, and we were confident we wouldn’t fall into the icy river. But I guess no explorer plans to spill or crash or drown.
“The Missouri River moves fast when the channel comes close to the bank,” Mike Clark said. Mike was our guide. If he were boastful, he could boast about his 20,000 miles of river experience on some of the world’s most revered waterways. But even though he’s a world traveler, he makes his home just a few miles from this spot. And why not? He knows what the earliest inhabitants of this area have always known: This meeting of the continent’s two great rivers is a sacred spot, a giver of life for the billions of birds that follow the flyways and for the fish that don’t know the names of these rivers but know the rivers’ distinctly different personalities.
I felt comfortable on this big fast water, except for the cold.
We paddled down the middle of this magnificent waterway. In the distance, above the treeline, the only pollution we could see was smoke and steam from the factories of Wood River, on the Illinois bank, the spot where Lewis and Clark wintered before they paddled and poled three boats 2,315 miles upriver. At that thought, I felt more comfortable, paddling downstream.
Mike Clark steered the canoe from his seat at the stern. He shared his paddler’s philosophy. “Some people judge others by what they say. I judge them by how much they’re willing to paddle.”
No problem for me. I pulled my own weight. And the cold subsided as we got into a rhythm and worked up a sweat. A north wind tried to aggravate us, but Cora blocked its best gusts. Cora, the island on our port side, shielded us from the wind until we were almost to the confluence of these two mighty rivers.
“Heron,” I pointed off the bow at a remarkable bird in flight, with its wide wingspan and long legs and long neck and long beak. Herons are good luck.
In the distance, south of the confluence, we watched a thousand pelicans take low flight and move like a shimmering school of fish to another feeding spot. Above us, an immature bald eagle flew across the water to the treetops along the bank. Our eyes followed the bird to its aerie, a wooden fortress, a monstrosity in the world of birds nests, bigger than your childhood tree house.
“This is in the middle of a metropolitan area,” Mike said. “But out here, we’re away from all that.”
Most of it, anyway. I glanced at the big white columns of smoke and steam from the Wood River refineries, making jet fuel for a thirsty nation. The north wind pushed the steam down the Mississippi flyway.
We stopped on the peninsula to check on the tree saplings that Greg, our bow paddler, had planted last fall. “I figure one in ten will survive,” Greg said, as he bent to examine a protective sleeve around one sapling’s trunk. “But with good conditions, half of them might make it.” A sapling’s life could be cut short by flood or drought. But the biggest predators are deer, who agree with each other that saplings are tasty.
With his left arm, Mike made a sweeping wave toward the north. “Up there is the new Audubon Center, right in the middle of the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary.”
“Audubon picked a great spot,” I said.
“The birds picked a great spot,” Mike said as he pivoted to face west. “Portage des Sioux is up there,” Mike pointed upriver to the spot where Native Americans used to carry their canoes across the narrowest strip of this peninsula, from one great river to the other. By portaging their gear overland, they saved a twenty-five-mile paddle around the point. It was also the site of the Treaties of Portage des Sioux, which hastened the displacement of the Mississippi tribal cultures as a hungry Manifest Destiny moved west.
But the spirits that guided the native inhabitants, they’re still here. The plants. The wildlife. The moon. And the point where two sacred rivers join together.
You can feel it, the life-giving power of these waters. Indeed, there’s only one reason St. Louis grew so populous. The confluence.
We paddled to the point, where I stood with one foot in the Missouri, the other in the Mississippi. Facing that narrow backbone of land that finally allows these rivers to mingle around my ankles, I saw two bronze nameplates, one embedded in each bank. The north plate spells Mississippi River. Just a few feet away, the south plate is covered in mud. As I scraped the mud off the letters that spell Missouri River, it was living proof that Big Muddy delivers on its reputation. You could grow cotton on top of that nameplate.
Mike Clark and I stood for a photo at this point where two sacred rivers join to mix their juices. In the picture, Mike held his sacred paddle, a paddle that has traveled the entire length of the Missouri and the Mississippi, the Colorado and the Amazon, too. Painted on its broad blade is the Rolling Stones logo, the tongue that first appeared on the Sticky Fingers album. You know the one.
The sun set as we paddled down the Mississippi. We stopped on a sand bar and built a fire, boiled some water and drank hot tea. Then we drowned the fire and in the February darkness, climbed in our canoe. We were fearless as we paddled down the Mississippi, black water against black forest, silhouetted in the dim backlight of a major urban center, just over the hills out of sight. The moon rose to guide us to our landing.
Sacred.
Rafting the Mississippi
The days were getting warmer when I got a call from a good friend alerting me that an adventurous soul was about to experience the dream of every American river rat. He’d built a raft, and was looking for crew members to help him drift from St. Paul to the Gulf of Mexico.
Holy Huck! I’m
