Pin Drop: Big Muddy National Park

No, that doesn't actually exist. Maybe it should.

Sheltering from gales in an old crevasse in Arkansas

Last week, I said I planned to skip this week’s newsletter, and that’s still mostly the case, since touring for The Great River is eating my time and attention. But, amid the tour, I took three days to canoe the Mississippi, and I never want to miss a chance to share the wonders of this overlooked treasure of a wilderness.

Specifically, along with the Quapaw Canoe Company—and a crew of old and new friends—I traveled from Quapaw Landing, on the backchannel of Island 63, to Terrene Landing, just north of Rosedale.

Sunrise at Scrubgrass Bend

That means we brushed against Big Island, the sprawling mess of forest formed where the Mississippi and White and Arkansas rivers meet—a former haven for moonshiners and other outlaw types. John Ruskey, the owner of Quapaw told me, that some river rats are talking about making Big Island the center of a new national park. That’s a long-shot quest, but I think even discussing the idea is worthwhile: it’s a reminder of what we lost when we hid the Mississippi River behind levees and talked about it so fearfully that people stopped going.

It’s been years since I’ve overnighted on this stretch of the Mississippi, perhaps the wildest and most beautiful reach in the South. I was discussing the river with a fellow paddler in Helena, Arkansas, and we stumbled on an apt comparison, a way of giving the Mississippi experience context. There’s something almost Alaskan in it, oddly. It’s the bigness you expect being out in the bush on America’s last frontier. And yet here you are, in the midst of the country.

Anyway, greetings from the Mississippi. Hope you’ll come visit.

A riverside reading at Scrubgrass Bend

I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming—including a glance at the no-good-very-bad week of environmental news that unfolded while I was out on the river.