-JP

July 25, 2005

Mile 2,140

Atchafalaya River Fisherman

Today was rough. In order to make some big miles before dark, we stumbled out of the tent and were on the river by 4:30 a.m. From what [...]]]> Note: I actually got off my butt and dusted off my Mississippi River book manuscript today for some long-ignored editing. Enjoy

-JP

July 25, 2005

Mile 2,140

Atchafalaya River Fisherman

Today was rough. In order to make some big miles before dark, we stumbled out of the tent and were on the river by 4:30 a.m. From what we can tell from the weather radio, Hurricane Emily is blowing out to Mexico but we have no idea what’s behind her. It’d be nice to have better weather information, but we have what we have.

A sharp chill was in the air when we pushed off this morning. Sunrise wasn’t due for another hour, so Jess bundled up and slept in the bow while I paddled in the stern. Usually I just see the back of her head all day while we’re rambling on about one thing or another, but this morning not a word was spoken once we shoved off. There’s very little development down this way, and it’s very relaxing having the river to ourselves.

The afternoons have been scorching, but I guess it’d be too much to ask for an early frost this time of year. Getting off the water at 2 p.m. is frustrating because we want to keep paddling, but it’s so hot you feel like you’re going to burst into flames if you’re not careful. A dull haze covers everything by the middle of the day, and neither man nor and beast comes out until it cools off some.

We covered about fifty-five miles today and should be in good shape to reach Morgan City tomorrow afternoon. We’ll need to firm up arrangements with our ride home, then it’ll be time to head out towards the Gulf. To be honest, I’m having a hard time getting my head around the idea that we’re almost finished. No matter where we end up, the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers will always be a part of us. Watching a little creek grow into this astounding river has been amazing. What an incredible journey, and I’m blessed to have shared this with Jess.

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-June 5, 2005

Chances are I’m jumping in anytime there’s a good swimming hole around. Nothing else gets the blood moving like jumping into the water wearing nothing but your birthday suit. Yes, I’m a skinny dipping addict.

Last night I went swimming au naturale for the first time since we’ve been on [...]]]>

-June 5, 2005

Chances are I’m jumping in anytime there’s a good swimming hole around. Nothing else gets the blood moving like jumping into the water wearing nothing but your birthday suit. Yes, I’m a skinny dipping addict.

Last night I went swimming au naturale for the first time since we’ve been on the river. It’s just been too damn cold to think about swimming until just the last few days. Maybe not if you’re one of those folks that like Polar Bear Swims on New Year’s Day, but I’m kind of a wimp. It’s been a shame to skip these great swimming holes, but turning into a human icicle ain’t in my vision.

After we setting camp last night, I went for a stroll while Jess stayed back and wrote in her journal. While wandering around I found a cool trail to the river that unfortunately also cut through a healthy stand of stinging nettles.

I couldn’t help myself. Nettles or not I was going for a swim. At first, I tiptoed through and tried to steer clear of them. That was a pointless enterprise, and soon I just plowed through and hoped for the best.

Hope is not a plan. They don’t call them stinging nettles for nothing.

My arms and legs felt like they were on fire. There’s not much you can do about nettle stings beside grin and bear it until the pain subsides. I was doing more bearing than grinning.

Nearby there was a large tree that had fallen into the water. That was going to be my highway to the river. I took off my clothes and laid them on the trunk, being careful to avoid any more nettles in my now unguarded and quite vulnerable state. I’m sure Mom would be proud of her buck-naked son standing in the middle of a nettle patch.

I made my way to the fallen tree trunk and climbed on. I was halfway down when a huge snapping turtle slid off the tree trunk and flopped into the river. This wouldn’t be so bad except he splashed down right where I planned to get in. Not good.

My skin was burning red from the nettles as the mosquitoes turned me into an all-they-can-eat buffet. I had to make a decision and make it fast. Either hike back though the nettles and continue that slow torture or get in the water to rinse off.

I looked over where the snapper plopped in and saw nothing but dark water flowing through the branches. All I could think of was that thing waiting to take a chunk out of my hide.

“Surely he swam off.”

“He’s going to bite me in the nether-regions if I jump in.”

“This isn’t good.”

“No, it’s not.”

“John, you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer are you?”

“Not really.”

I decided to just take my chances. The mosquitoes were feasting on me and I couldn’t just sit there like a human sacrifice. Mustering up whatever courage I had left, I shimmied down the tree making as much noise as I could. I took one last pitiful look at the shore then jumped in.

Man that water was cold! It felt like jumping into a big glass of sweet iced-tea. My chest felt like someone was sitting on it and I couldn’t catch my breath. Worst than anything was the thought of that turtle sizing me up for a snack.

I was feeling pretty skittish about the whole affair. Aside from possibly having appendages bitten off, I didn’t want to explain to Jess how much of a idiot I was for chasing a big turtle into the river. I doubt she’d be too surprised, but I really didn’t want to have that conversation.

I swam away from the hidden turtle and started to warm up. The mosquitoes were chewed on any part of me above water. I’d dive under to escape them only to think about the turtle waiting for me. I bet he’d already called a bunch of his turtle buddies to come over for dinner.

I decided I’d had enough of this torture. Turtle or not, I had to swim back and pull myself back up onto the tree trunk and get out of there. Once out of the water, the mosquitoes tore into me with a vengeance. I grabbed my clothes and made a frantic run for the tent. I jumped inside, just in front of a swarm of the flying beasties.

“How was the swim?”

“Oh, it was fine. Very relaxing.”

I sort of forgot to mention the turtle.

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“You are listening to National Weather Service radio station WXM 99…. Here’s the weather summary…Cold conditions will continue…snow showers and light rain…low’s 30-35, high in the mid 40’s, winds 15-20 mph..”

The cracking, digitized voice from the weather radio was bringing us little good news but is was time to get moving. [...]]]> May 5, 2005

“You are listening to National Weather Service radio station WXM 99…. Here’s the weather summary…Cold conditions will continue…snow showers and light rain…low’s 30-35, high in the mid 40’s, winds 15-20 mph..”

The cracking, digitized voice from the weather radio was bringing us little good news but is was time to get moving. It was time to get this show on the road – rain, sleet, snow, or gloom of night be damned.

Somehow we managed to get on the river a day earlier than expected. We were exhausted from packing, driving up, and all the last-minute running around but still anxious to get on the water. I felt a combination of joy and panic just before the first paddle stroke knowing that there were some 2,350 miles staring us in the face. All of the months of planning, dreaming, and worrying were now behind us and we could just concentrate on paddling.

The Mississippi River begins in Itasca State Park, Minnesota, as the outflow of Lake Itasca. Itasca State Park was established in 1891 to help protect the surrounding pine forests from logging. The Civilian Conservation Corps built many of the current facilities during the 1930’s, including the small rock dam at the end of Lake Itasca where the river begins its journey to the Gulf of Mexico.

At the very headwaters, the Mississippi resembles more a creek than a river. It’s about fifteen feet wide and maybe fourteen inches deep—you could step across it if you wanted to. As we were loading the canoe, several kids ran back and forth a little log bridge that spanned the river. I wondered if they had any idea how big that little creek gets or where it ends up.

Just before we pushed off I took good luck drink from the lake. The water was so cold it made my teeth hurt. As I helped load the last final items with an ice cream headache, the thought of capsizing the canoe went through my head. Usually I’m always up for a swim but that’s going to have to wait until it warms up a little bit. I’m convinced the reason the water is so cold here is because it’s piped in from the Arctic Circle.

No matter what happens over the next ten weeks I’m happy that we just tried to make a go of this trip. Taking a risk to hang your dream out there for the world to see is terrifying, yet fulfilling all the same. The first step is always the hardest, so everything else is gravy now.

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~John Pugh

I’m a slothful individual. I can heat a house with burnt time. I slid just under the tax deduction wire by being born on [...]]]> “A butt at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. A butt in motion will stay in motion if it just gets off the couch.”

~John Pugh

I’m a slothful individual. I can heat a house with burnt time. I slid just under the tax deduction wire by being born on December 31st. Odds are I’ll to be late to my own funeral. You get the idea.

That said, I think the only way to achieve anything is to just get off your butt and start. Just getting a goal and starting toward it is the big thing. Details work themselves out over time so don’t sweat the small stuff to begin with. Any progress is good progress. Just do something.

Tell people what your plans are. Parents, family, friends, strangers off the street, it doesn’t matter. Some will be supportive. Some will say you’re a fool. Listen to the former but don’t ignore the latter. It helps to have people to face up to when you’re scared out of your wits and want to quit. Peer pressure isn’t always bad.

Taking the chance of falling on your face occasionally is good for the soul. When I’m old and greyer, I don’t want the regret of not trying something just because I was lazy or doing busy work. Life’s too short for that. My father worked himself into the grave when I was quite young, and I doubt if given the option he would have asked for more time in the office. This trip down the Mississippi was one of the hardest things I’ve done but also the most fulfilling.

I was a wreck for months before we started. Sleepless nights thinking about details, worries about failure, and nagging doubts about doing the right thing were all part of the process. Once the canoe hit the water everything fell into place. Of all the miles, the first one was the sweetest. Just getting out of the rat race and trying something else was its own reward.

I made a deal with myself at the end of my thru-hike to do something cool at least every five years. That could be hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, biking across the country, or building a house from scratch. Anything to get off my butt and do something besides watch the years go by. If nothing else, I’ll have some good stories to lie to my un-conceived grandkids about.

The first and hardest thing is to get off the couch and start. Once that butt inertia gets going, it’s all downhill from there.

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Mosquito. Oh you @!*^%*# mosquito! My loathing toward you has no bounds. None. You are my nemesis.

No friend would torment me so. Painful proboscis poking. Suck, suck, sucking away at me. There’ll be no quarter for you.

Why must you torment me? I’ve done you no harm, yet. Come hither my pretty. [...]]]> (Jess and I were getting absolutely eaten up in Minnesota! -John)

Mosquito. Oh you @!*^%*# mosquito!
My loathing toward you has no bounds.
None.
You are my nemesis.

No friend would torment me so.
Painful proboscis poking.
Suck, suck, sucking away at me.
There’ll be no quarter for you.

Why must you torment me?
I’ve done you no harm, yet.
Come hither my pretty. Just a little closer.
Steady now. That’s it.

So small.
So insignificant.
Time for you to meet your maker.
Leave me be.

Mosquito. Oh you @!*^%*# mosquito!

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World’s Easiest [...]]]> If you’re looking for the easiest recipe for a one pot dinner ever, here it is. No measuring!

World’s Easiest One-pot Meal
This was the first meal I ever cooked for Jess. We were helping lead a school trip in the Okefenokee Swamp when I saw what she had in her foodbag. Nothing but packages of dried soup, pretzel sticks, wasibi peas, and other unmentionables. That wouldn’t do, so I said I would just take care of the food. Since then we’ve probably eaten this a hundred times. We take this on every trip.

Eyeball measurements are fine. Most of the time I’m lucky if I can find my spoon much less measure anything.

World’s Easiest One-pot Meal (serves two)

12 ounces of pasta (any kind, we like the tri-colored twist type)
4 ounces or so of Italian dressing (about half a small bottle)
3 ounces of cheese (whatever you have. We use cheddar and parmesan)
1 small onion
3-4 carrots, chopped
1 small can of pineapple chunks
salt and pepper to taste
green onions
Whatever else you want to throw in (nuts, spices, garlic, chicken, etc)

In a 2-liter or larger pot, boil the pasta until soft. Don’t overcook, and watch to make sure it doesn’t boil over. Drain the pasta and return to the pot. (Hint: cut the bottom four inches off a one-gallon milk jug and stab some holes into the bottom. Voila—Instant strainer!) Dice up the cheese, onion, carrots and dump in. Open the can of pineapple, drink the juice, and then stir in the chunks. Add whatever else you have on hand. Stir in the Italian dressing. Eat until you see the bottom of the pot. Burp. Go enjoy the sunset.

If we were to paddle the Mississippi again, there a few things that I’d consider doing differently.  Every long journey gives you more experience, and the Mississippi [...]]]> August 12, 2006

If we were to paddle the Mississippi again, there a few things that I’d consider doing differently.  Every long journey gives you more experience, and the Mississippi River trip was no different. There’s an old adage that “Good judgment comes from experience, and good experience comes from bad judgment.” That would be me.

First off would be to have more of a cash cushion to work with. Jess and I were both in the middle of our PhD programs at the time, and were your typical broke grad students. Having a little more cash to fall back on would have taken some pressure off many decisions, like whether or not to get a motel room when we probably could have used the rest.

I would have treated this more like a backpacking trip and carried less junk. We didn’t have a cooler or dutch oven, but there were certainly things that we could have cut out or combined. There’s a simplicity to cutting out almost everything and going lean that I’ve grown to appreciate.

The canoe worked out fine, but was larger than necessary from the headwaters down to Bemidji. Bemidji State University’s Outdoor Program Center rents smaller (pre-scratched) canoes that would have been more appropriate for that first stretch.

We’ll definitely have better rain gear along for the next trip. Paddling-specific clothing, with tighter cuffs and better design would have been great to have as it rained for the better part of the first month. My rain pants were marginal to begin with, and they failed completely about two weeks into the trip.

I was trying to get a newspaper article out once a week, sending out dispatches largely from libraries along the way. Next time I’d stretch that interval to every other week, and either carry a laptop or PDA / folding keyboard combination. Technology is changing rapidly, and there are already several products on the market that would make ideal small expedition computers for writing, sending photos, and getting info on the fly. Flash memory has gotten so inexpensive that we would probably just carry a few memory cards for the entire trip instead of juggling one card and burning cd’s along the way.

We needed to have a firm ending date in order to get back to school, and that was a stress inducer for the entire trip for me. Next time around, we’ll finish when we finish, ending dates be damned.

That’s about it. Most of these are fairly minor, but collectively had a large enough impact on the trip to affect decisions along the way. Long trips are often a crap shoot as to whether they’ll be successful or not, but it doesn’t hurt to stack the cards in your favor whenever possible

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I wrote a series of newspaper articles during both my Appalachian Trail thru-hike and Mississippi River trips for the Greensboro News and Record. I’m a big fan of using the right tool for the [...]]]>

I wrote a series of newspaper articles during both my Appalachian Trail thru-hike and Mississippi River trips for the Greensboro News and Record. I’m a big fan of using the right tool for the job when getting words down on (virtual) paper. I like to write but I hate dragging anything out in the field that I don’t have to. On the other hand, I’m not very good at transcribing my journals from a notebook into a document file. What’s a lazy writer to do?

During those trips I was largely dependent on public libraries for their computers and Internet access to post articles and photos. While libraries are wonderful about letting me use their systems, this isn’t the most optimal set-up for many reasons. Hours of operation, distance from where I was staying, and just the issue having to go to one more place just to upload 1,000 words and a few photos. There’s got to be a better way. Maybe there is.

For the next trip I’m planning on using something like a Palm Treo 750 or Iphone with a folding keyboard for writing and photo management. As is stands now, I do most of my writing at home on an old Handspring Visor and folding keyboard that I can’t manage to kill. I love the convenience of just whipping out the PDA and hammering out a few words at the drop of a hat. For just getting words on paper, it’s hard to beat.

The battery life on those old black and white units are incredible—I’ll go for about three weeks on a set of AA’s. The downside is that I don’t have WIFI or a card reader for the photos with that setup.We did use a Pocketmail email device for much of our short emails on the river. It was very easy to upload and download text emails, but no provision for photos. There’s an audio modem on the back, so you just dial a toll-free number from any phone, hold the unit to the receiver, then get you emails. Very handy.

I’ve also demo-ed a Alphasmart Dana. It’s a Palm-based unit that’s the size of a thin laptop, with a great keyboard and usable black and white screen. Batteries last about 40 hours, and it has built-in (but slow) WIFI. For just basic word processing, this is thing is great, and it’s built like a tank. But then there’s no real provision for photos…What I want is a flash-based PDA with lots of memory, built-in WIFI, folding keyboard, and a battery life of at least 20 hours. That, and a benevolent benefactor to foot the bill for another long trip.

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Mississippi River Journal

June 1, 2005

Been thinking about Dad today. He worked himself into the ground at the ripe old age of thirty-nine when I was three years old. I often wonder what he’d think about these kinds of trips I’ve been doing if he was still around. I wonder if I’d even be out [...]]]>

Mississippi River Journal

June 1, 2005

Been thinking about Dad today. He worked himself into the ground at the ripe old age of thirty-nine when I was three years old. I often wonder what he’d think about these kinds of trips I’ve been doing if he was still around. I wonder if I’d even be out doing these trips for that matter.

Sometimes I wonder just what the hell I’m doing out here. Shouldn’t I be doing the respectable thing and be working at some job right instead of wandering down a river all summer? Wouldn’t it be easier to just settle down and start going down the road that everyone else is traveling?

I feel as if I have a foot on two different trains going in opposite directions and I’m torn with which one to hop on to. If I continue with this PhD I’m probably going to end up with a decent job at a university with some time off to sneak outside every once in awhile. Then again, many professors seem to have abandoned that part of their life to chase tenure.

The other direction has me working some random jobs piecing together more of the things that really make me tick. An old friend of mine told me once that I’ll either be a graying professor somewhere or a chair maker. Right now I don’t know if I’d argue with that prediction.

I think that Dad’s early passing affects how I look at all this. I could get run over by a bus tomorrow for all I know, but I spent years doing all kinds of stupid crap and I feel lucky just to be around right now. I feel like I wasted ten years of my life to finally get to this point, so now what am I supposed to be doing with myself?

I spent the better part of my twenties floundering around from school to school, job to job, and relationship to relationship. A decade lost to decadence and depression. I’ve always a tinge of regret to all those years, but I can’t do anything about that now. Live and learn. Now I’m here at the ripe age of thirty-five, winding my way down the Mississippi River with someone I’m passionately in love with. Not exactly sure how I ended up here, but I couldn’t be happier. Jess has been a godsend, and I’m one lucky, lucky dude to be with her. Lucky indeed.

I don’t think that just going through life based just on what feels good is any way to live. I’m not much into goal setting either, but it feels great to watch something that I’ve planned and worked hard for come together. I planned on being a professor, and now that what I’ve worked toward for the last five years gets closer I just don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.

I can’t obsess about this much more, and I’m not sure this trip is helping anything. Everyday is one-hundred percent LIVING. Not a moment that goes by that we’re not experiencing the world around us. That’s a hard act to follow, and certainly harder to recreate back in the working world. I think about the Appalachian Trail every day even now, I’m sure this trip down the Mississippi is will be the same way. I swear this traveling stuff is like a drug.

Do you go on some life-changing trip only to pine away for another for the rest of your life, or do you just work your way through and never really get to those super-high points? Those super-highs also come with some awfully low points in the end as well. I honestly can’t get my head around the whole thing.