We shove off from the river island just after dark. I’m still relaxed at this point. The full moon is a lantern at our backs as we resume paddling down the Mississippi, aiming for the far-off lights of downtown. Our canoe holds four: my companion at the bow, then me, then two guides. The guides work for Big Muddy Adventures, an outdoor recreation company based in The Grove. Their goal: show St. Louisans, through outings like this, that exploring our big rivers is not nearly as scary as you think—that you can have fun out here and live to tell the tale. Such a mindset, if widely adopted, could fuel a new local economy. Big Muddy is just one of several companies, nonprofits, and individuals banding together to make this happen. They’re also proceeding with care. The big rivers deserve your love, but they demand your respect.
I, for one, am smitten—with the belches of spring peeper and leopard frogs on this wooded island; with the darkness, considering that we’re only a mile from a major U.S. metropolis (we can hear the whoosh of traffic on Riverview Boulevard); with the smooth water. We’re in a unique haven on the Mississippi: the only section that’s undisturbed by commercial traffic, 11 miles in all. What creates it is a canal to the east that allows towboats and their barges to bypass the treacherous “Chain of Rocks” rapids that are just upstream from us (and just south of I-270). As a result, the water alongside this island is gentle, like a lake. We speak in hushed tones. So do the eight other guests and third Big Muddy guide seated in the canoe behind us. If a river-recreation scene really blows up in St. Louis, this could be where it starts—here or up on the Missouri, which often has a similar feel.
Then we merge into the Mississippi’s main channel. Passing the mouth of the canal, we enter barge country: the Port of Metropolitan St. Louis. There are whiffs of compost and detergent. Industrial lights glower from both banks, though we’re still moving through shadow. The water is choppy.
This “Full Moon Float” by Big Muddy is so named more out of a desire to alliterate than to equate it with a beer-soaked laze down an Ozark waterway, explains the guide at the stern of my canoe, “Big Muddy” Mike Clark—a self-described “river rat” and founder of the company. “This river is a little more demanding than the Huzzah or Meramec,” he says—particularly in the busy port area. One must approach it with the proper equipment and skill. “If you’re a novice, you really do want to know how they operate down here.” Clark has a VHF marine radio on his life jacket. He uses it to announce our presence to nearby towboat captains. He hears them acknowledge us.
Jennifer Silverberg
Big Muddy Adventures’ Mike Clark
But as we approach the Eads Bridge, ready to fish out our phones and tap photos of the Arch, a huge shape emerges ahead: a full tow of barges, chugging right for us. I recognize that (1) commercial vessels pass through here all the time, and (2) this one, for me, has the emotional valence of the Death Star.
“Holy shit, look at this,” mutters Clark. He yells to the guide in the second canoe to move closer to shore: “Let’s get all the way inside here. He can’t see us.” Dissatisfied with the reaction, he bellows: “You got a tow right in front of ya. Haul balls!”
We escape its path with time to spare, but then three things occur at once: The tow plows past on the left; a Metrolink train roars over our heads across the Eads Bridge, because more intensity, why not; and a series of 5-foot waves start tossing our canoe up and down. I set down my oar and grip the gunwales. Earlier, Clark had warned that getting soaked in this cool March weather could lead to hypothermia within 15 minutes. I fix on the canoe’s nose as it pitches over one wave then dives into an ink-black trough, and I think: We’re going in.
In St. Louis, we fear the rivers that define us—and not just when they’re in flood stage. The current can suck you under, we’re told as youngsters. The water’s full of trash. Both assertions contain truth; neither monopolizes it.
Set aside for now the illustrious histories of the Mississippi and Missouri—how the confluence was the magnet that lured settlers here in the first place, 260 years ago. Or how the downtown riverfront once served as the city’s front doorstep, with one million passengers stepping on or off steamboats in 1855 alone. Or how, these days, the Mississippi remains an industrial highway, while the Missouri gives city and county residents nearly all their drinking water.
On the merits, the big rivers are neither categorically safe nor unsafe. They’re more akin to ski slopes, climbing walls, or even interstate highways: They entail risk, but you can dramatically reduce that risk with safety equipment—in the riverine case, personal flotation devices (or PFDs), typically life jackets.
Each year, the U.S. Coast Guard gathers data on recreational boating accidents all over the country. In 2019, they counted 144 deaths nationwide among those in or on canoes, kayaks, stand-up paddleboards, rowboats, and inflatables. Three-fourths of the victims weren’t wearing a PFD. The data doesn’t describe what befell the others, though in general, putting on a PFD is necessary but not sufficient: It must fit and be fastened. Only certain kinds—Type I and II—can automatically flip unconscious users so that they float face-up.
On St. Louis’ big rivers, Type I or II could make sense for someone launching out alone, says Amanda Kruse, a natural resource specialist in the St. Louis District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But Type III life jackets are a common choice, especially among groups. They afford your arms more room to paddle and, barring unusual circumstances, will keep you buoyant until someone can help. “Unless there’s some kind of vortex at one of our dams,” Kruse says, “you should be fine.”
Type III is the kind of jacket that Big Muddy Adventures passes out to our group on the day we hit the water. It’s a Sunday afternoon, clear and cool. We’re in North Riverfront Park at the city’s northern tip, huddled in a pavilion for a pre-float safety briefing by Clark. With his pointed black ski cap and black sunglasses secured by a retainer that’s flaring out weirdly from his temples, Clark looks almost insectile. But this man is a pro. He grew up in Chicago and taught grade school there before paddling down the entire Mississippi, in 2001. The next year, he founded Big Muddy in St. Louis. He now boasts more than 20,000 water miles of experience and has led all kinds of St. Louisans—including countless school children—out onto the river. Our group happens to be grown-ups in their 30s and 40s, but we’re relying on him just as much. In the highly unlikely event of a capsize, Clark repeats: “Stay. With. The boat.”
We muscle our canoes through a clearing in the brush and stop at a ledge over the water. Trash festers all around our feet—some deposited by high water that’s receded, some tossed by park patrons. Either way, it’s a bummer. I find out later that many public and private entities are laboring to address the big-river-trash problem. Missouri Stream Team organizes volunteer clean-ups. The U.N. supports a mobile app that lets people flag plastic debris on the Mississippi. The nonprofit Missouri Confluence Waterkeeper has linked up with the Environmental Protection Agency to set out trash traps in tributaries. But Waterkeeper’s director, Rachel Bartels, argues that even trips like ours can create a virtuous cycle: More people paddling leads to more people clamoring for clean rivers, which leads to cleaner rivers that lure more paddlers. Says Bartels: “You care for what you love.”
First, we must climb into the canoes. It’s not easy. This put-in spot—the only one on the Mississippi that’s open to the public between Alton and the Arch—is not a boat ramp with a gentle grade. It’s a steep 10-foot drop-off of mud and driftwood. We wobble and slide down, assisted by the outstretched hands of guides, who are standing calf-deep in the water.
But then—life jackets buckled, coolers and gear loaded—the long-awaited moment has arrived: the paddling out. Out into the vastness, the empty blue sky, the taunting wind, the sunlight splintering off purls of water that’s as dark as iced tea. This is the father of waters, Mark Twain’s “lawless stream,” T.S. Eliot’s “strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,” Eddy L. Harris’ river that carries “sins and salvation, dreams and adventure and destiny.” A woman in the back of the canoe asks for a can of Busch.
We curve around a headland, squint at a flock of blinding white pelicans, and finally park our canoes on a sandy beach. Now we’re on Mosenthein Island—1,077 acres of wooded public land accessible only by water. Before World War II, there was a proposal to build a municipal airport here. After the war, the Humboldt Boat Company ran a daily ferry service to the island. Some real-estate men even tried to transform it into a carnivalesque beach resort, but their effort fizzled.
As we fan out to collect logs for a fire, we can see who has commandeered this place. Beavers have chewed off tree trunks. Deer have left hoofprints in the muck. Overhead, a hawk alights on a bare treetop. At twilight, we’ll hear geese honk and coyotes whine.
But the occasional pop of guns to the west serves as a reminder: We’re not that far from the city. Clark himself lives just across the water, in Riverview. When the pandemic hit, he relocated to a tent here on Mosenthein for nearly a month, partly for quarantine purposes and partly as a money-raising stunt for the Gateway Resilience Fund. He’s clearly in his element today: tramping around, dropping knowledge. I ask about his footwear. They’re neoprene NRS Boundary Boots. He says he also has a dress pair for weddings and such. “These are reptilian,” he says. “I can’t moonwalk in these.” Then he plausibly moonwalks in them.
Later, as a cast-iron pot of cassoulet warms beside the fire, Clark shares a concern: that outfitters like him could become a victim of their own success.
“If this were Portland or Boulder or California or Washington, there’d be 100 canoes out here today. The pressure on the island would be immense. The pelicans wouldn’t be here. The hawk wouldn’t be here. It was a real moral dilemma for me—I was really starting to fear that I’d live long enough to see hundreds of people coming here and not respecting it.”
That hasn’t occurred. But he’s no longer by himself, either: “The evangelization effort is working.”
On the night of March 19, 2008, Roo Yawitz was standing in the bar of his brand-new music venue, The Gramophone, when a man sidled up to chat. He was caked with mud. Outside, his van had a canoe strapped to it. The man, “Big Muddy Mike” Clark, persuaded Yawitz to go paddling with him on the Mississippi. Yawitz was awestruck.
“It was like, ‘How did I grow up here and not know about this?’” Yawitz recalls. After years of more paddling, Yawitz began doing back-office support for the company and became its general manager in 2016. (Clark is still the senior guide and director of youth programming.)
Asked whether he fears that river rec will get too big, Yawitz says: “We have an abundance mindset here. If somebody wants to get into our business, that’s fantastic. As long as that company does it safely and everybody has a good time, game on.” Yawitz also accepts the risk that Big Muddy’s vivid Instagram feed will inspire independent paddling that shrinks his pool of potential customers. That would be no different from the Grand Canyon, he points out, where some visitors explore with a guide and others alone. An energized big-river-rec scene, he believes, is a good problem to have.
A more immediate challenge, to his mind, is for St. Louis itself to realize that it’s even possible. Other riverine towns have innovated. Both Oklahoma City and Dayton, Ohio, for example, leveraged their rivers to build whitewater kayaking parks. Yawitz wants St. Louis to be identified with big-river rec to the extent that Denver is with skiing or northwest Arkansas now is with mountain-biking (thanks to a multimillion dollar investment from the Walton Family Foundation).
Some European tourists who book trips with Big Muddy seem to feel, more than locals do, the cultural allure of the Mississippi, Yawitz observes. They’re thrilled to paddle in the same channel as the ancient Cahokian mound-builders, the first French explorers, the settlers headed west, the fictional Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. The majesty of the setting only heightens the experience. “The natural assets are there,” he says. “We just have to find a way to talk about them.”
One step in that direction was the Gateway Outdoor Summit, held at Union Station during a snowstorm in January 2019. The keynote speaker that night was Luis Benitez, a St. Louis native and accomplished mountaineer who, at that time, was leading the state of Colorado’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. (Benitez is now at VF Corp., the holding company behind North Face and other brands.)
Benitez’s message was essentially this: If you combine “quiet” outdoor activities (canoeing, cycling, etc.) with “loud” ones (boating, RVing, motorcycling, hunting, etc.), you have a mammoth sector of the U.S. economy. In Missouri, Benitez said, that sector had been responsible in a recent year for $15 billion in consumer spending, $890 million in state and local tax revenue, and 133,000 direct jobs “without even trying very hard.” Just imagine, he argued, if outdoor rec as a whole banded together to protect and grow public lands; ensure equitable access for all; recruit companies; and foster a workforce pipeline.
Inspired by the Summit, Yawitz joined forces with Greg Brummit of the consultancy Active Strategies and Brad Kovach of Terrain Magazine to form a new nonprofit: River City Outdoor Collaborative. Their mission, says Brummit, is to “connect the dots, be a catalyst, be an incubator.” That may sound abstract, but they've already notched a concrete win. One focus of River City is to boost outdoors access and interest among communities of color, so they’ve won a grant of $300,000 from the Outdoor Industry Association’s “Thrive Outside” program to do exactly that. (That $300,000 will be matched by a fund at the St. Louis Community Foundation, Yawitz says.)
None too soon. There’s a chasm between the urban Black community and the big rivers, observes Anthony Beasley, a local leader with Outdoor Afro, a national network that, per its website, “celebrates and inspires Black connections and leadership in nature.” Multiple generations of Black folks in the city were shut out of public pools, he points out, so they never learned to swim. “If I can’t swim, I’m not getting on a big-ass river,” he jokes. “So a part of what needs to happen is helping people be less fearful of not just the river, but of water, period.” This Labor Day, he plans to host about 20 Outdoor Afro leaders from other states in a paddle down the last 100 miles of the Missouri.
Beasley’s intro to the big rivers was Paddle MO, a five-day group excursion put on by Stream Teams United. In five years, that event has more than doubled in size and reached its self-imposed limit of 80 paddlers. There are other success stories like this. The Greenway Network’s Race for the Rivers, also on the Missouri, has gone from 27 paddlers in 2007 to about 140 in recent years. The biggest surge has been in the MR340—an epic race on the Missouri from Kansas City to the Confluence. In 2006, it had just over a dozen competitors; at press time, more than 750 had registered for 2021.
Steve Schnarr, executive director of Missouri River Relief—the nonprofit that organizes the MR340, in addition to cleanups—says that both kinds of activities crumble the psychic barrier between humans and the waterway. They render the Missouri “a place to go rather than a place to escape from.”
But the Missouri is unruly, Schnarr says. It’s different from the Mississippi, which allows for marinas (near Grafton, for example) and large boating events like the Blessing of the Fleet near Portage des Sioux. The Missouri “can go 12 feet up in one 24-hour period,” Schnarr says, “and when it goes down, it leaves everything covered in mud. So it has different personalities. You have to approach it according to how it’s feeling that day.”
That moodiness is an obstacle to building out the recreation scene there, Schnarr says. Even if all the towns along the Missouri wished to offer boat ramps and campsites—and not all do—the river’s whims make it hard to build paddler infrastructure that’s both convenient and reliable. Establishing a “water trail” can help with this by grouping all that infrastructure into one government-sanctioned association. For now, the Missouri River Water Trail consists mostly of an interactive online map, but Missouri Confluence Waterkeeper has applied through the state for a $78,000 federal grant to beef up infrastructure on the river’s last 100 miles. They want to set up informational kiosks, on-river signage, and even boat and bike lockers that would facilitate “pedal-paddle” adventures: You’d float down the Missouri, have lunch, then cycle back on the Katy Trail. That wouldn’t address the need for shuttles—another logistical challenge. But it would be a start.
“We have these two assets running next to each other: the country’s longest river and country’s longest bike path,” says Dan Burkhart of Magnificent Missouri, which promotes the river valley. “That ought to have more significance to people in St. Louis.”
It certainly matters to ambitious young people from elsewhere who are looking for a cool place to live and start a business, says Brummit. “Water is magnetic,” he says, but we’ve let industrial use dominate the riverbanks. Other cities, from Denver to New York to Toronto, have opened up theirs to residents and businesses. Observes Brummit: “More outdoor rec, more green space, more healthy food—it creates momentum. I’ve seen that in almost every place that’s tried it.”
Our Big Muddy canoes don’t capsize after all. They don’t even take on water. “This is called Mississippi surfing, right here,” jokes Clark as we roller-coaster over the towboat’s wake. Wait, I think, if he’s making jokes right now, then maybe we’re not really in danger. Sure enough, we level out.
“That might be an indicator of why a novice paddler might have a little trouble out here,” Clark calls out from the back. He adds: “It’s also a testament to how good the canoe is—just bobs right up and over ’em.”
After gliding past the Arch, we slosh onto the cobblestones, where two vans are parked and waiting for us. Not all excursions end that way, Clark tells us: “That was a high adventure one.”
We load our gear and climb into the van. Somebody looks out the windshield and points out a rat in the distance, scurrying over the cobblestones. “A river rat,” I say. Clark replies: “Some of us don’t mind being called that.”
