Saturday, November 23

Opposite Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

I got an email today from Venessia Young. She and her mother have been following us. Hello eKatherine and Venessia! Thanks for keeping up with us, keep us in your thoughts and prayers!

everywhere we have camped since bismark, north dakota, we have been near loud noises, bright lights, or noxious fumes. it is surprising how many power plants there are on the missouri. there's no way the few people who actually inhabit the shores use all of the electricity produced, so it must be generated for export, i imagine chicago, minneapolis, and other midwestern metropolises benefit from this power. while our surroundings might be quite different than what lewis & clark experienced, the act of camping is the same, we still cook over a fire, sleep in our bags thrown in tents (i sleep in the water ram when its not raining or snowing). a good campsite is a good campsite, it doesn't matter which era you are from. tops on my list is sand or grasses, proximity to the canoes (which means a good landing and a camp close to it) and driftwood or other firewood readily available.

the missouri seems to be widening a little bit here, and its curves have taken on bigger dimension, requiring more miles to get around the corner. at sioux city the bends seem to come every three or four miles, but here it seems more like seven or eight. there is a formula for river curves, which says that a river makes a bend every seven times its width, so maybe that is in effect.

i saw a huge flock of migratory birds this afternoon, far over the forest, it looked like a cloud from the distance. overhead were more snow geese going north, once again fighting the north wind. i thoought i heard a frog in the warmth of the afternoon, but that might have been wishful thinking. i did see several moths and butterflies crossing the river, and it was an afternoon for flying spiders, the air was laced with their long range webs, they kept landing in my canoe and climbing around my gear, i was glad for the company. thick swaths of willows are beginning to be seen on the sandbars, their leaves turning a fiery orange, the sight of them reflected in the river reminds me of the lower mississippi. a flock of wild turkeys flew across the river just before sundown, their bodies fat and black, flying in a beeline from one shore across to the other. i wonder what a wild turkey would taste like roasted up overe our fire. we saw some white tailed deer just before we made our landing for camp.

Friday, November 22

Mile 442, below St. Joseph, Missouri

i'm sitting by the fire watching the full moon rise through the thin cottonwoods on the opposite bank. we left st. joseph a few hours earlier today, i had the time to visit the albrecht kemper museum while mike charged batteries and did computer stuff. it suddenly makes sense why thomas hart benton wrapped his horizons towards the edges of his paintings, the landscape is just too big, the river views too wide, the sky too broad an expanse, the canvas is too small, no canvas would be big enough to be able to fit it in proper proportion. in omaha i saw some of karl bodmer's originals at the joslyn museum. his solution was too diminunitize the forest, the hills, the mountains, while leaving the sky and the river full scale. my favorite bodmer's are his forest scenes, those from the wabash and the lower mississippi. as a documentor of the american indian he is unsuropassed. but his painting really comes out as his brush follows the lines of the trees, the vines drooped over them, the chaotic piles of driftwood, and his grasses, sometimes emerging from somber dark places, other times blowing in a sunny wind.

as we paddled out of st. jo we had a farewell committee: a herd of wild turkeys ("flock" just doesn't seem to apply to turkeys somehow) directly below a grain elevator:

a herd of wild turkeys

scurrying by the grain elevator

gobble! gobble! gobble!

and then as darkness fell, five eagles were perched in a cottonwood, our welcoming committee to the night:

five silent wanbli waiting in a tree

when we pass under

scree! scree! scree!

now an owl is hooting in the forest, and some deer run behind our camp. how do i know they're deer? for the snorting sound. every day now we look for wanbli, the eagle, he seems to be our guardian angel. this morning the river bluffs were clipped by wide beams of sunlight, heavy with humidity, humid shafts of light descending between breaks in the bluffs, in one mike was momentarily exposed as he paddled toward a solid wall of bluff, rising immensly in front of his passage, dark and forbidding, like the oncoming wall of a tsunami, the sunlight striking him as if someone backstage had cast him in the spotlight.

another frosty morning, never before have i needed an ice scraper for my canoe. when i get home, and people ask me about the expedition, i'll tell them it was an ice-scraper expedition.

Thursday, November 21

Mile 478, somewhere below White Cloud, Kansas

we're camped on a muddy flat below a dike, just downstream from cannon creek, when we brought the canoes in for a landing it was just getting dark. will we ever see a camp in the daylight? it seems doubtful given the amount of daylight we are now experiencing. our consolation here is the view of bluffs opposite us, which even in the darkness loom gigantically over the river, the trees in our camp standing out silhouetted in the evening light, with which the river is shining. it has been a windy day, gusts of wind out of the north pounding the river and keeping us frantically paddling left and right. we were blessed that it was a northerly wind. the other consolation is the sound of the river rolling over the dike. we haven't had much river noise since our camp at prairie elk rapids. dozens of flocks of snow geese fighting the north wind. they should be going south. i wonder why they were so insistent? all day we saw them as we we borne southward in the same wind they chose to flap against, often times with little motion. perhaps they know something we don't.

three nights out of the last four we have paddled into the night, by moonlight (tomorrow morning we'll begin paddling again with the light of luna, as we make an early start). night paddling is a boon for us in this season of short light. the river here has been so channelized you could navigate it blindfolded. night paddling has another benefit. those bends that bore you during the day with their monotony suddenly junp to life at night. every motion of the canoe, every paddle stroke forward, every motion of the river, you register by the silhouettes of the trees passing each other, trees passing forests or bluffs behind, the bluffs sliding through the stars hung in the blue black sky. in no circumstance can you better feel the the curving motion of the river as it implacably slides through america's heartland.

todays' firsts: a possum is prowling around our camp, so i guess that means we're getting south. I saw my first honey locust tree on the missouri side of the channel. the maples, which seemed to enter the river scape even with the confluence of the platte (fifteen miles below omaha), are now flush with leaves still in the cycle of change. i saw green moss growing in the forest floor around rulo, missouri.

i have been studying the color and the shapes of the oak trees, which huddle like clotted blood on a barn floor in the riverside bluffs. the oaks, the beech, and the sycamore are all hanging stubbornly to their leaves. i have also been studying the effect of gusting wind on the face of the water, and the way in which small waves add up to bigger ones.