Few people see the Mississippi River the way John Ruskey does.
Ruskey runs Quapaw Canoe Company in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He and his team of guides lead tours of the river in wooden dugout canoes, paddling like French pioneers from the 17th century and Indigenous people long before them.
Since leaving his native Colorado to explore the river in 1982, Ruskey has come to refer to the Mississippi as his “mighty queen” and himself as a “worker bee on the river.”
One of the Quapaw Canoe Company’s popular trips is an excursion to a chain of river islands between Mississippi and Arkansas that formed around the 1829 wreck of the steamboat Montezuma. Today, there’s no evidence of that shipwreck, just a forest of water oak, wild pecan and sycamore trees.
“Over here on this side of the levee is a totally wild landscape in which we’re a visitor,” said Ruskey, digging his toes into a sandbar in the middle of the river.
To him, the Mississippi is “a creative force” that sculpts the landscape and rejuvenates the people who experience it up close.
“The river is life,” Ruskey said. “For me personally, it’s the one place in all my travels that I’ve felt totally connected and at peace and exactly where I should be.”
But the river can also be destructive. In 2016, it flooded Ruskey out of his home along the Sunflower River, a tributary that runs through Clarksdale. After 40 years of paddling the Mississippi, Ruskey has developed a humble respect for the river’s whims.
“She’s our queen,” he said. “She’s commonly thought of as that ‘Old Man River,’ but we think of her more as a sprightly young lady who doesn’t like to be told where to go, but is very spirited. And usually when you try to tell her what to do, she’ll do exactly the opposite.”
Climate change is making that queen even more capricious. Scientists have documented increased rainfall in the Mississippi River Basin, as well as extreme droughts.
“In April, down here, we experienced the fastest rise that I’ve ever seen,” Ruskey said. “We’re probably going to see more and more things like that: big, radical changes that test the strength of everyone in all of creation.”
Ruskey has developed a philosophical framework for dealing with those extremes, somewhere between a stoic’s ambition to live in the moment and Henry David Thoreau’s statement, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
“I’m talking about the happiness that comes from a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose and a sense of hope, because of the nature of the river and her great extremes between drought and flooding,” Ruskey said. “Within that cauldron, by the absence of human encroachment, life is possible and will always continue in a place where you just allow life to continue.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean human life. I asked Ruskey to imagine what the river might look like 150 years from now, less time than it took the river to make a bottomland forest out of the steamboat Montezuma.
“It’s going to become more and more wild. Humans, we’re going to have less and less control over the river,” Ruskey said. “Pretty soon, the levees are going to break somewhere along the route because we can’t maintain it in the new world. I’m pretty sure that the river’s going to reclaim everything that it’s lost in the past 150 years.”
We head back to shore, contemplating that once-and-future wilderness, paddling past a flock of terns riding a piece of driftwood like it’s a ferry boat.
As an eagle coasts under the broiling sun, Ruskey reaches into a drybag for his Taylor guitar. He sings us back home with a song he wrote called “Sky is a River”:
Sky is a river
The river’s a sky
Don’t ask my why, let them flow on by
The tune feels written for just this moment, as the muddy waters deliver us downstream.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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