McCOMB - I grew up in Southeast Mississippi, fishing, camping and hunting on the tributaries of the Pascagoula River - small creeks that fed into the Bowie and Leaf rivers and the rivers themselves.
As a young adult, I spent many pleasant weekends and vacations in a houseboat my dad owned on the Pascagoula.
Although I've boated for miles on both the Leaf and the Pascagoula, I've never seen the entire system - except through the eyes of Ernest Herndon and Scott B. Williams, who have a new book out entitled "Paddling the Pascagoula" (192 pages, softcover, illustrated, $20, University Press of Mississippi).
I highly recommend it.
Herndon, of course, is a longtime Enterprise-Journal staffer who, among other chores, covers general news, outdoors and religion for the newspaper. He has numerous books to his credit, some fiction, but most of them based on his own adventures exploring rivers and streams of several states as well as the jungles of Papua New Guinea and Honduras.
Williams is every bit as adventurous as Ernest, if not more so.
A Prentiss native, he has built his own canoes, kayaks, sailcraft and a cruising boat. He has canoed the Mississippi River 2,600 miles from Canada to Vicksburg, sailed to the Florida Keys and paddled a kayak for miles in the Caribbean.
Ernest came up with the idea of paddling the entire length of the Pascagoula and the two rivers that converge to form it.
One of his reasons was that the Pascagoula - which begins at the confluence of the 180-mile-long Leaf River and the 159-long Chickasawhay at Merrill - is, according to the book, "the last major river system in the continental United States whose natural flow is unaltered by dams, channelization, levees, or other human impact."
Thanks to the Nature Conservancy, some former officials of the state of Mississippi and others - details of which are outlined in the book - there's a good chance the Pascagoula will remain natural for future generations.
After some negotiating about their two-week trip, Herndon agreed to begin at the headwaters of the Leaf River, with Williams starting at the beginning of the Chickasawhay.
They met at the confluence of the two rivers and traveled together down the Pascagoula to Gautier, where the river runs into the Gulf.
Herndon recruited Travis Easley of Amite County to accompany him on the Leaf, while Williams, often a loner, opted to paddle solo until meeting his companions at Merrill.
Herndon and Easley each used canoes of different sizes. Williams paddled a kayak.
The book is divided into sections - Herndon writing about the Leaf and the upper Pascagoula while Williams covers the Chickasawhay and the lower Pascagoula.
They are both good writers, and the narratives include descriptions of the plants and wildlife along the river system, as well as history and people they encountered along the way.
There's also a lot of humor in the good-natured barbs the two writers direct at each other's habits and crafts, as well as the descriptions of and the reactions from some of the folks they encountered along the rivers.
Reading it made me want to get back on the Pascagoula - in a motorboat, perhaps, if not in a canoe.
