"Absolutely not!" she said, returning the $5 bill I'd just dropped in the donation jar. I smiled sheepishly as I took it back, because I should've known better.
What I mean is that I'd wandered into the Old Depot Museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi three hours before to ask if I could briefly store my canoe there while I returned my rental car. The rental car that had kept me safe from any residual effects from the hurricane that had hit the Gulf Coast two days before. The rental car that had gotten me (and my canoe) over to Jackson to stay with strangers for a night, strangers to me who were friends of the bicyclist I'd met in a coffee shop in Lansing, Iowa two months before.
Perhaps I should've known as I asked the two women working at the Old Depot Museum about storing my canoe that they'd want to hear about my trip and that they'd ask if I needed anything and that they'd offer me lunch and that they'd insist that I have dessert and that they'd give me a small trinket to take with me on my journey. Most importantly, I should've known that they'd refuse to accept my donation because we were in the South and that wouldn't be right. Not because my $5 bill had Lincoln's face on it but because I was a visitor there and I would not be made to pay for the kindness I'd been shown. This kindness was just part of the culture.
Besides, I could never hope to repay the kindness that's been offered to me. In the past two weeks alone, I've been given fresh watermelon, hard-boiled eggs, and a taste of the Blues by the owner of Quapaw Canoe Company. I've had individuals from about a dozen recreational boats and the US Coast Guard boat stop and offer me cold water. I've met a river angel in Greenville, Mississippi who picked me up with a trailer for my boat and proceeded to drive me all over town, taking up most of his day for me.
I cannot repay this kindness, but that is the point. I can thank many of these people by name - Tracy and Tabatha in the Depot Museum, John from Quapaw, Emily and Nate in Jackson and Meghann for coordinating, my friend Jess for sending me money for a hot meal, Joe for everything in Greenville - but that is still missing the point. I'm learning that these acts are not simply ways of meeting another person's needs but of allowing another person's needs, problems, and story to become entangled in one's own own. Of acknowledging that they already are.
In this way, the most valuable thing anyone gives me is their time. In this way, I feel incredibly lucky to have had people join me on this river. My friend, Paul, who'd driven over from Atlanta to meet me in Memphis, joined me for one day and night and I'll remember temporarily taking shelter from heavy rain and gusts of wind as well as crossing into Mississippi and the feast we prepared that night.
A week later, my brother's co-worker, Steve, arrived in Greenville to join me for the hundred-mile stretch down to Vicksburg. We'd never met, but he'd been drawn to this trip for years and had driven 11 hours from the Chicago area to make it happen. And over the course of two and a half full days of paddling, over the course of speculation about large animal tracks on the beach and using a paddle to launch a tennis ball across the beach, over the course of conversations about food and politics and life on the river, we became friends.
I was told it'd be lonely down here in the Lower Mississippi, and sometimes it is. Sometimes the vastness of this Delta, with the nearest town fifty miles downriver or ten miles off the bank, hits me. Every once in a while, I'll play music from my phone or switch on my marine radio, just to hear another human voice.
Because although there are many ways in which this journey from the Mississippi's headwaters to the ocean has gotten easier with Smartphones, it remains long and arduous. And although it's gotten more popular, it remains so uncommon that a towboat captain heard me on the radio last week and asked, "Is this a new boat named Canoe or is there an actual canoe out here?"
There's an actual canoe out here. One amongst the others, as has been the case for thousands of years and as I hope and expect will be the case for thousands more years. And on this canoe's journey south, I find myself buoyed by the people I meet and the people who join me on this river. And between these, I find plenty to hold my attention in the world free of humans.
"So, what's your story?" said a man yesterday. He was sitting on the front porch of a bar and restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi and had seen me pull my canoe in and walk up the long boat ramp into the 300-year-old town.
And where do I begin? Perhaps with the day before when a boat had approached me and its three occupants had given me a cold water and beer. Perhaps with the other boaters who'd asked if I needed anything an hour later. Perhaps with the group of boaters who'd invited me to share the beach they planned to camp on, who invited me to shoot skeet (or the air around it), eat freshly caught catfish, and sit around a fire with them.
How can I adequately remember - let alone relay - these days? I can list out the sequence of events. The breakfasts of granola, apple slices, and peanut butter. The gradual change in dialects as the echoes of the North fade into a Southern drawl. The clouds that so mesmerize me as they hold the day's first light.
The truth is that I can't adequately relay everything, because my memory is caught in an eddy somewhere upriver.
I bring only the refracted light of a Tennessee sunset. Only the reflections warped by the wake of barges carrying grain and gravel and gas past the confluence with the Ohio. Only the hum of unseen cicadas from the Arkansas banks.
But I do my best to try as this stranger, Travis, buys me a beer. He's done some long bikepacking trips, including the 400-plus-mile Natchez Trace which runs between there and Nashville, so he's very interested in my trip. He tells me the place next door, the Under-the-Hill Saloon, is the oldest saloon on the Mississippi River. So we head over there, and this time I buy him a beer. As we talk, other locals step in and tell me more about the place. Travis tells me he has to pop a smoke, which I learn means needing to leave, and I thank him and say bye.
When I leave Natchez, it'll be another 130 miles before Baton Rouge, the next accessible city. I'm looking forward to that stretch, but there's a band setting up and I decide to stay a little longer. I talk briefly with a group of people who came down from South Dakota and are revisiting their parents' hometown. When they leave, the man wearing a Chicago Bears cap presses a $20 bill into my hand and wishes me luck on my trip.
It's tempting to refuse this, but I've been getting better at accepting the kindness of strangers, at accepting these moments in which someone acknowledges me and wants to support or share in my journey. These moments shouldn't be repaid. These moments can't be repaid. So I say thank you and later give $5 as an extra tip to the bartender, pledging to give the rest to the next person who needs it.
Of course, I know a donation jar sitting in Vicksburg that would make a good home for this gift, but I push this idea aside.
It wouldn't be right.
Brendan - texted you & also copied message to your email
Such fluid, descriptive, engaging writing, Brendan, & such a great project, your Mississippi voyage--unforgettable! Keep up the great work!