The Headwaters
By Richard A. Suleski, Jr.

The Headwaters

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book -
a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger,
but which told its mind to me without reserve,
delivering its most cherished secrets
as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside,
for it had a new story to tell every day.

~Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi

It was two years and two months ago that I completed my 10,982-mile bicycle journey through the contiguous 48-states of the Union. I was now a deckhand and night watchman aboard the Steamer Julia Belle Swain. One of the last left in America.

The Steamer "Julia Belle Swain" at the levee. La Crosse, Wisconsin

A piece of history that wasn't resigned to a museum or the scrap heap. Instead, it breathed steam. I was working on one of the last paddlewheel steamboats left in America.

I lit up a cigarette and watched the smoke climb up over the handrail and down the deck. It was heading towards the paddlewheel. Down river. Down towards New Orleans. And time passes slowly on the river. The mother of all American rivers.

I was sitting on Route 66 of a previous century. Mark Twain tied up at this very same levee. We looked at the same bluffs, and even the same towns like La Crosse, Prairie du Chien, Dubuque, Winona, and Trempeleau. Of course some of the buildings have withered away, and others have grown. Twain once said his most favorite section of river was Trempeleau Mountain. I passed it about once a week on the steamer. I was starting to get an idea of what he was talking about. And so here I sit, aboard the deck of a steamer like Twain, wondering about my life. Wondering what things I could find while I journeyed along the Mississippi. What lay in the towns and farm fields that flickered in the Midwestern evening sky? It all started here. And eventually, I was going to flow south too. Just like the Mississippi River.

For the past couple years I had dreamed of canoeing as much of the Mississippi River as I could. Last fall, in my first attempt, I started out from East Dubuque, Illinois and planned to go all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. On day four, I gave up. I had a hernia that needed mending. I had gotten it earlier in the year working on the Julia Belle, but decided to get it fixed after my canoe journey. My hernia decided that paddling a canoe day in and day out for a couple months was not a very good idea. I went home and got my guts sewn back together. I would plan a second try next fall, the fall of '99.

And so, in the middle of September, I began a trek to the headwaters of the Mississippi, Lake Itasca. I headed there in spite of a very bad cold. My spleen was removed a few years ago, and therefore my cold lingered for quite awhile, my body didn't have the antibodies it needed to fight off the bug. My doc in Waukesha gave me an antibiotic, and rather than wait for myself to get better, I elected to start the journey anyway.

The headwaters of the Mississippi River, Lake Itasca.

It had been burning in my brain for two years now. Like last year, I didn't care if something was wrong with me. I had a "gig" with PBS, who happened to be at Lake Itasca the same time as me. I was hoping I could plug my book stuff, since my agent in New York was pushing Ten Thousand Miles of America. A very good friend of mine, Donald MacKay, and his father, volunteered to haul my canoe and I from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Lake Itasca. Eleven hours if you drive fast, pulling an ancient single-axle camper. My girlfriend Heather and I drove behind in her Toyota pickup. We made our way to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Heather and I spent the night in Park three to four weeks while I paddled from Itasca to LaCrosse. I was planning to canoe the entire length of the Mississippi.

The next morning, Heather and I made our good-byes, very sadly, and I was off to concentrating on my chosen endeavor. My temperature had come back down a little, but it seemed the antibiotic wasn't doing anything. Donald, his dad Scotty, who speaks with a thick Scottish accent, and myself ate breakfast solemnly as it rained incessantly. This reminded me of Ten Thousand Miles of America, it rained non-stop for the first four days.

We made our way to the boat landing, where I would be dropped off, and paddle the mile or so across Lake Itasca, and enter the tiny, five-foot-wide stream that emptied Lake Itasca, the tiny stream was called the Mississippi River. I paddled across, with a cold mist and a cold wind blowing on me. The weight of all my gear in the canoe kept me pointed towards the swampy area with tall reeds, which was where the "big" river began.

Lake Itasca at the Headwaters.

I arrived there, planning on seeing nine people from PBS filming my arrival. Nobody was there except for Donald and Scotty. We took pictures of each other, the sign that said the Mississippi River started here, and that I had 2,557 miles to go. I had moved some of my gear around the rock ledge that creates a miniature dam where people can walk across to claim they walked across the entire Mississippi River.

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