Paddling for Jesus

Bear season just began here in northern Minnesota. Sitting here in a quiet and shady glade of fir trees on my "lunch break" from a thus-far standard 8-hour paddling day, I can hear the gunshots across the water. I try not to wince, try not to think about it. I can only hope that the meat of a large percentage of the poor murdered bastards goes to feeding families genuinely in need.

The Mighty Miss. Here she is but a narrow channel, no wider in places than a country road. But her girth makes no matter. She puts up a mighty good fight. (My shredded shoulder muscles, sore as never before, testify to that.) Or challenge, I should say. She's not fighting us at all. In fact, I'm told she's carrying us. But you wouldn't know it to look at her. Not up here 'round Bemidji, Cass or Lake Winnibigoshish (translation from the native Ojibwe: really big oh shit). Where she's river, she doesn't appear to be movin at all. Where she crosses big lakes like the "big shit," she's high seas and wind on our bow. Not good.

But we're doin' it, Captain Frank and I. We're really out here canoeing it, the river my friend called "the aorta of the nation." And we're N'awlins bound! Telling folks that sure does make their eyes bug out, which is fun. Due to a 60 day drought, the river's the lowest it's been in fifty years. As a result, we could do no more than gander at the headwaters at Lake Itasca. There was simply no navigable river, no river at all to speak of, between there and Lake Bemidji. So we launched our expedition from the north shore of the latter. That was Wednesday.

On Friday it rained frogs, baby turtles, catfish and crawdads. The rain and wind and waves were bad enough to drive us off Cass Lake, childhood home to my great friend and brother Bruce. But by dint of strange circumstance, I've had no way of contacting Bruce for an entire week. The circumstance? Burning Man.

In all the years I'd been going to The Burn since its infancy in the early 90s, Bruce had never joined me. I see not just a little irony in the fact that while I was a drowned rat perhaps a mile from the homes of his brothers and father and who knows who else up here in northern Minnesota where I've never been before and ain't likely to return to, the one year I wasn't in Black Rock City, Nevada, Bruce the Swami was.

So it's Sunday now, meaning we've been on the Miss for five days, and only four of them in the boat. Yesterday we gave the Miss a miss, so to speak, opting instead to bask in the hospitality of the annual Dorman Family get-together, to hear their stories, collect their dreams and politely accept and eat EVERY course of a literally endless feast offered us by Grandma Rose Dorman and sister Dottie and brother Raymond, to name just a few. (Lots more about the Dormans, here since 1865, when I'm not typing on this frikken thumb keyboard.)

Yes, that's right the dream "catching" has begun. Hard at first, it has become fun already, and an interesting challenge, oh boy. More on that when the memory stick get's thru the mail, too.

In sum, I think we've covered roughly fifty miles so far in perhaps 25 hours of paddling. But we're just gettin' warmed up, just like the river herself, who moves slow in this early hour of her long day's journey to the sea. If Mark Twain is anyone to believe, there will be stretches down below St. Louis where we'll be doing 100 mile days with our paddles in our laps, so swift will be the current. And her girth down south? Sometimes a mile wide.

I am sore as a Grand Canyon packmule carrying three sacks of canned goods and a fat man on my back. But I'll live. That's the beauty of these adventures I undertake of late. After surviving the first one, you just know you can do anything. And just as humans adapt to horrible conditions and pitiful lives, so too can we adapt to the pains and pace of incredible journey(s).

As the sun, stalwart ally of all depressives (to say nothing of the whole of the human race) sinks slow and unhurried into the forest, off to Nevada and California to touch the hearts of friends and family there, I too must set. My thumbs are weary. Muscrats play and fish in the a mile-wide marsh through which wends a narrow channel, an offshoot of the Miss, and the low cirrus clouds on horizon light up a pink eternity. I would so like to write more. Small steps.

With gratitude to Trimble Outdoors, Nextel and Backpacker Magazine who sponsored this phone a year ago and continue their support, and a sense of wonderment and thanks for whatever cell tower is providing the scarce and barely usable signal that isn't strong enough to make a call (no bars) but will carry these words tonight from me to all of you. Ciao from the remote reaches of Outer Little Miss. - RSM

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