In July and August I did not get on the Mississippi River even once. I walked along the river almost every day, but never put a boat in the water. Last Wednesday I finally went fishing from my canoe and, with the first cast, wondered why I’d waited so long.
I initially stayed off the river because of poor air quality. In La Crosse and in much of the Upper Midwest, fires in Canada turned extended time outdoors into a health hazard. On days when the Air Quality Index was not in the red, 90℉ temperatures, high water levels, and strong winds kept me from going out. Also there were almost no fishing boats on the river. The fish weren’t biting (partially due to the high water), and while I don’t need to catch fish to go fishing, a positive fishing report probably would have got me out.
There are two other reasons I’ve been slow to spend time on the river, and I am not pleased with either one of them. First of all, the logistics of paddling are becoming progressively more difficult for me. The most challenging task is the transporting of boats. My days of easily tossing around canoes and kayaks are over. Every outing requires four awkward handlings of a long and clumsy watercraft. There is getting the boat on the car in the first place, taking it off the car at the river, putting it back onto the car after the paddle, and then lugging it back into the garage at the end of the day. This is enough exertion that I feel it in my back and shoulders. If I do not hurt immediately, I will the next day.
The second reason I’ve been paddling less often is that I am increasingly locked into my daily routine. I fear I have turned into an inflexible old man. My schedule is to write until 10 or 11, workout at the Y, eat lunch, take a nap, and walk my dog in Riverside Park. If other pursuits, even those as pleasurable as fishing and paddling, interfere with my routine, I feel a bit off. John Muir once wrote that writing interfered with his time outdoors. I sometimes feel the opposite and view a day on the river as time away from my writing. Even though I agree with Muir in principle that experiences worth writing about should take priority over the actual writing, I don’t like anything (e.g., dogs, wives, riverways, or trails) to keep me from my computer and my pen.
I tell myself that walks in Riverside Park are a good senior citizen substitute for paddling. This, of course, is self-deception, but I have noticed that there are benefits to walking along the river that I don’t get from paddling. For example, a walk in the park gives me a heartfelt appreciation of where I live. When I paddle the backwaters of the Mississippi River, I am at peace and I am in awe of the natural beauty, but I do not feel a sense of place. Apparently I need a human element for that to happen. When I walk along the river in town, I see paddlewheels, barges, wharves, and cafes. I feel the human history of my rivertown, and I think, “Wow, I live on the Mississippi River.”
When I spent two years among the redwoods in northern California, I never stepped out of my cabin in the morning without feeling the mystique of the trees. When I lived in San Francisco, I marveled each time I wrote the name of the city on the return address of an envelope. Now it is life on the Mississippi that stirs me, but it is more the symbols of the working river than the river itself that gives me pause. I wouldn’t have predicted that.
Recent Comments