Upon close inspection, the Sunflower River writhes and tumbles and swirls in miniature eddies and shifting currents as it meanders through downtown Clarksdale.
Seeing such hydraulic phenomena in the Sunflower's overgrown offspring to the east, the Mississippi River, doesn't require such a watchful eye. But actually getting on that chaotic mainstream, and in a 12-foot aluminum canoe at that, entails a little more attention. Surviving it calls for expertise, and few people in the Delta have it like John Ruskey.
"It is this huge messy mass of water," Ruskey said on a recent January day paddling the Sunflower. "It's all these different currents and channels, all sinuously writhing and moving on top of each other and into each other and around each other. There are great swelling boils and swirling whirl-pools and eddies the size of city blocks, and everything's in motion. It's not a place for the timid."
Ruskey, a river guide, adventurist, sketch artist and former itinerant musician, owns and operates Quapaw Canoe Co. out of Clarksdale. Brave souls can pay Ruskey to take them out on the mighty Mississippi for a day or half-day - never less, Ruskey says. The river wouldn't allow it.
Water from 41 percent of the continental United States, 31 states, pours into it. By the time the river reaches Memphis, it has built up a tremendous amount of power. Contained, even by its own natural banks, it seethes and
roils to be free.
"It's a whole different scale of river experience," Ruskey explains. "It's more similar to being on a big mountain, like being on Mount Everest. You've got to plan on that kind of scale. You can't just go out for an hour swing on the river. I pack in emergency gear, VHF radio, extra food, a first-aid kit. You have to be prepared for whatever's coming."
Ruskey speaks with reverence of the river and its swirling eddies, shifty currents and sudden changes. He philosophizes about its waters, often relying on metaphors to describe it.
"It's like being on an interstate highway that's a mile wide, but instead of cars everything is water," he explains. "And it's like there are no rules of the road. Anything goes on the Mississippi.
"You wouldn't want get out on the interstate without knowing how to read the highway signs and drive safely. That's my job just to see safe passage from one place to another, and all that is a matter of learning to read the river. Like Mark Twain described in 1883, 'The Mississippi River is a book just waiting to be read.'"
With his custom-guided operation, Ruskey has interpreted the river for all kinds of people - tourists from New York, Europe and Japan and school groups from Colorado. His busiest times are between September and December and also April through June. One day, even John Barry, author of "Rising Tide," the definitive book on the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, came out for an excursion.
But Ruskey's most frequent paddling partners are more like Clifton Carr, 14, who has helped out with the business for as long as he can remember.
Clifton, an eighth-grader at Oakhurst Junior High School, is one of five Clarksdale schoolchildren Ruskey has hired as interns. Clifton, has helped the riverman build four canoes and can be found most afternoons at the Quapaw shop on the banks of the Sunflower in downtown Clarksdale, carving out a new dugout canoe, doing chainsaw maintenance or taking care of maps and other equipment.
"I help paddle, too," he said. "It's just fun to do."
The interns are involved in every aspect of the business, guiding trips, handling paperwork and building canoes, and they get paid for this work, a practice that Ruskey learned directing a children's blues program at the Delta Blues Museum. The canoe program is funded by a $3,300 grant from the Dreyfus Foundation.
"That's so I can provide some compensation for them, which is important for them," Ruskey said.
Some interns come from tough neighborhoods around town, where gangs and illegal street activity run rampant. For the neighborhood kids, much of the attraction to a life of crime there involves supporting their families and themselves, according to Ruskey.
"I'm trying to divert that a little bit by providing them some compensation for doing something positive or different," he said. "It's a little carrot at the end of the stick, but some of these kids give it to their parents, and their parents need it. It's trying stem overwhelming attraction to street activity. The kids love working with wood and being out on the water."
Learning the trade doesn't seem like work to Clifton.
"For some reason, they say canoe work is hard but to me it's simple," he said. "When you get into the sun it doesn't seem like hard work. The house work, that's kind of hard to me."
And the pay is merely an added bonus.
"He doesn't have to pay me," said Clifton. "I just do it because I like it, and it keeps me off streets and all that. It's pretty much an educational thing. That's why I like to do it."
The big river is to be respected and feared, but Ruskey doesn't take the comparatively placid Sunflower River lightly either. On this particular day, he strategically keeps his canoe among the trees, which cut the current, making the trip upstream a little less taxing.
Much of the experience is the abundance of wildlife, even inside the city limits. As the canoe passes under a bridge, an owl takes off from its perch among the girders. Upstream, mallard ducks flit and flirt in pairs.
Eventually, Ruskey points to what looks like the head of a beaver sharking through the water, its tail drifting behind it. But then the once-beaver bounds from the river and climbs up a tree.
"No, it's a squirrel," Ruskey exclaims. "That's the kind of things you learn on a day on the river. Who ever knew that squirrels swam? Every time I come out here, I learn something new. I've seen coyotes swimming, a black bear, white tail deer - I'm talking about in the main channel of the Mississippi, now."
The Mississippi is different. It requires faith, Ruskey says, especially on particularly turbulent days when the its waters are bulging out of their winding bed and over the levees and other protections man has built to contain it.
"It's like what Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas," Ruskey explains, "that at first you're astonished, then later you're confused, but then your confusion leads to your enlightenment. But sometimes on the Mississippi that takes days because everything is just moving so mysteriously."
Ruskey's own awakening to the Mississippi came abruptly in February of 1982, when he underwent a sort of baptism in its waters. He and a friend rafted down the river after graduating from high school. Their plan was to leave LaCrosse, Wis., and float all the way to New Orleans, but a chess game got in the way just south of Memphis.
As Ruskey tells it, "We were headed for the Gulf of Mexico, but we got waylaid by a TVA tower on the Mississippi state line. … We were playing a game of chess actually when we set out from Mud Island harbor, and we were kind of absorbed in our game. You would think in a mile-wide river that we wouldn't end up in a 50-foot place that would bring us into that tower, but we did. The river washed us up on an island, and we were near hypothermic. It's amazing that we survived."
After five months, the river odyssey was over, but the river's influence on Ruskey was far from it. "That was when I got my toe stuck in the Big Muddy," he says.
Later this month, Ruskey, his business partner Mike Clark and some of the interns will tackle tamer waters, paddling the entire length of the Sunflower River. The lesser scale of the trip won't diminish its significance. It will be the first time in recorded history that anyone has canoed all 250 miles of it.
The team won't be alone. They'll be joined by classrooms of children via the Internet. Each day, Clark will upload a Web site with images, video clips, journal entries, Ruskey's sketches and scientific data they collected, including the results of water-quality tests.
"The whole purpose of the thing is to connect children to the river, and those who can't paddle can get on and visit us on the Internet," said Ruskey.
Ruskey said he chose the trip because the Sunflower River flows right by his home. It just so happens the event coincides with the Sunflower's designation as America's most endangered river.
"The Sunflower, like all rivers in the Delta, is very ignored," he said during the shorter paddle up the river in January. "People plow their fields right to the very edge and log it and throw their trash in it and build their sewer lines along it, and very few people have the experience that we're having today, just paddling along these waterways."
But pollution and neglect aren't the causes of the river's endangerment. The reason lies about 200 miles downstream, just north of Vicksburg where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building the largest pumping station in the world to better drain the farmland that lies along the river. The expected results of such a project have ignited a battle, pitting farm and flood-control interests against environmentalists, who say the pumping station would destroy hundreds of miles of wetlands upstream that filter the river and provide a home for wildlife.
Ruskey says both sides should stop quarreling and take a float down the river in contention.
"Everybody's fighting about the Sunflower River right now," he lamented. "The Sierra Club is at arms with the Army Corps and Delta Council, but nobody has any idea what the river looks like from the river. They're all locked up in these legal battles and everyone's hiring their own scientists to give them their own conflicting data. But none of those guys will get out and know the river just for what it looks like itself, and that's too bad. It's a really beautiful piece of America."
