“We lost our heart to this mighty river that could scare us to death, but also welcome us back every year with its familiarity, beauty and promise of another wonderful week of adventures.”

The difficult-to-describe, but oh-so-real pull of the Great River called others to join the voyageuses over the 13 years of their journey. Anne Sherve-Ose described the company thus: “We were a diverse group of paddlers. One of us is married to a Nigerian, another a Burundian. One was a native Frenchman. There was a widow of an Ojibwe chief. By occupation, they were five teachers, two students, a nurse, a real estate developer, jewelry artist, and a gerontologist. Two live on farms. All loved the outdoors and were willing to take on a challenge.”

At St. Louis, in 2012, a fourth paddler answered the call of the river. She is Janet Wangsness Amos, and her river vehicle of choice was a kayak. She stayed with the sisterhood all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about kayaks, Sherve Ose said, “I’d say a kayak is safer than a canoe because of the closed deck. I had no qualms at all about her joining us in a kayak. There were no kayaking mishaps. It’s more difficult to get in and out of a kayak because it’s lower in the water, but she handled it fine. She was accustomed to paddling on rivers however, not long distances on flat water; her wrists got tired.”

— Photo by Debbie Lenox-White
Janet Wangsness Amos joined the expedition in 2012. She made the entire trip solo in her kayak, pacing the canoe with the other three voyageuses. In the background is an ocean-going freighter.

The site that became St. Louis, a patch of high ground slightly above the floods that visited the river each spring, was well-known to native peoples, who’d lived there thousands of years.

In 1764, bearing a charter from King Louis XV of France, Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau camped near the confluence of today’s Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and named it St. Louis, after King Louis IX, who was not only King of France, but a Catholic saint. The camp immediately became a center of the French fur trade, which reached up the Missouri as far as Montana. The founders dreamed of a great center of commerce and French culture to rival the leading cities of New France: Montreal, Quebec City and New Orleans.

Did they succeed? St. Louis was chosen by another dreamer, Thomas Jefferson, as the place where Lewis and Clark would begin and end their exploration of his 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States.

Today’s 630-foot-high Gateway Arch, executed in gleaming stainless steel by Eero Saarinen, who also designed the first building of the Des Moines Art Center, marks St. Louis as the symbolic and literal “gateway to the west.”

Just 10 road miles from downtown St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the river, is a curious sight: a collection of 65 mounds. The largest, Monk Mound, is pyramid-shaped and rises 100 feet in height, the largest earthen structure in either North or South America. As many as 20,000 people lived here in ancient times, and there’s evidence human sacrifice was practiced. These weren’t the Maya or Aztecs, but the Illiniwek, namesake of today’s State of Illinois.

Setting aside local history for the moment, do you wonder, reader, if there was a typical day on the river for our intrepid paddlers?

Mornings began with 6 a.m. wake up, followed by breakfast of granola bars, oatmeal and cocoa or tea. They tried to cast off no later than 7.30 a.m. to take advantage of cool morning weather, the best time for energetic paddling. As the day wore on, and the heat rose, their pace slackened, and more breaks were required.

Every day there was an agreed-upon 30 to 60 minutes of quiet time during which talking wasn’t allowed. Sherve-Ose recalls, “during those minutes it seemed the sun shone brighter, the birds sang louder, the trees were more interesting, and the current faster. I felt totally one with the world around me, and wished it would go on forever.

“If there was a town up ahead, close to the river, we focused our energies on reaching it and finding cold pop or ice cream. We all paddled in long sleeves every afternoon because of the likelihood of sunburn,” she said.

By three or four in the afternoon, it was time to find a campsite. “We camped every night, preferably on a sandbar in the middle of the river. Sandbars are flat, have lots of driftwood for fires, are free from carousing locals looking for a good time, and offer excellent swimming.”

Immediately after landing, they set up tents, then went for a swim. After that, it was time to eat. “Each person was responsible for a certain amount of communal evening meals. In the early years, we had all varieties of pasta, tacos, rice and potatoes, usually followed by a dessert, such as pudding or no-bake cheesecake. There’s no way to keep anything cold for more than 24 hours, so everything was either dried, or in cans. After-dinner entertainment was another swim, a game of cards, hiking, arts and crafts, or writing in travel journals.

Resuming the journey, it’s hard to miss the transformation of the river south of St. Louis. The volume of water grows by 45% after the Missouri River empties into it near St. Louis. Here, too, the river flattens out, and its natural curves and oxbows, removed by the Army Corps of Engineers north of St. Louis, return. This, at last, is the broad, muddy river of our imagination.

Broad and muddy doesn’t mean tame. Sherve-Ose said: “There’s always a surprisingly strong current. There are 4.5 million gallons of water per second flashing before you (at) New Orleans.” She continued, “when one is in the water (swimming or boating) and going the same speed as the water, one can be lulled into thinking ‘this isn’t so bad!’ But when she runs up against a stationary object, with the full force of the river is behind her, that is when she fears for her life, and rightfully so.”

The locals offered constant advice about how to stay safe on the river. Sherve Ose cites the most common; “Stay away from barges, watch for cottonmouth snakes, don’t toy with alligators, stay out of the main channel, watch for debris in the water.”

The most common hazard faced by our brave canoeists? “Poison ivy plagued us every year, which is the reason I wear long pants and boots instead of shorts and flip flops,” she said.

Year 11 began at Memphis in March. There was solid logic for the early start. Sherve-Ose tells the story in her own words; “… some in our group were worried about the southern heat. We decided to beat the heat by paddling over Spring Break. We figured the end of March in Tennessee and Mississippi would be like the Appalachian spring. Bad decision! That was the coldest, windiest year we ever had. I had a particularly hard time, because my body doesn’t handle cold well. We frequently stopped to build fires to try and warm up.”

If the weather was cold, Sherve-Ose found genuine warmth in southern hospitality. Here are a few examples of how “river people” helped the travelers along their way:

“Danny Rees, and wife, Colleen, let us stay in their house, near Cape Girardeau (Missouri), gave us a tour of nearby historical sites, and cooked us a big breakfast before we set out next morning.”

“Paul in Paullina, Louisiana, brought us pop, watermelon and fresh pineapple in his golf cart.”

“Robert L. Davis, the Greyhound bus driver, invited us to his house for a Sunday barbecue the following year. Unfortunately, we weren’t in the territory on Sunday that next year.”

The paddling season of 2014 came to an end when a true southern gentleman, J.B. McMullen, manager of the Greenville, Mississippi Yacht Club, graciously allowed the voyageuses to store their canoe and kayak at the club over winter. It was, to say the very least, a contrast to the “welcome” the ladies of the river received at their previous yacht club outing.

Next time: From Greenville to The Gulf of Mexico