Story from clarksdale, Miss.
Cover Story
John Ruskey, navigating the Mississippi River on a replica of a 200-year-old English row boat named Annie.
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top:
River guide Braxton Barden
takes a break during rowing.
bottom:
Writer Chris Staudinger,
who authored this story and
worked for the Quapaw Canoe
Company for 16 months, rows
with apprentice Roy Williams.
opposite:
From the bow, Ruskey guides
a group of apprentices, river
guides and other adventurers,
down the Mississippi River
from Memphis to Helena, Ark.
Throughout the year, two, three – even as many as 10 people at a
time – climb into John Ruskey’s 30-foot, hand-built canoes and spend
hours or days jumping from island to island on the largest river in
North America.
It is an experience few undertake and none forget. It is an intimate
view of the the giant river, feared for her swift currents and heavy barge
traffic.
In the north Mississippi town of Clarksdale, John is the Coloradoborn owner of Quapaw Canoe Company, the small outfitter and guide
service offering tours of the nearby river.
When he was younger, he survived a near-death disaster on the river,
one he is reminded of each time his boat stops at the 5,000 acre Cat
Island. These days, John still dodges ominous barges and the damaging
effects of industry in what has become two centuries of popular disaffection with the Mississippi River. His customers are mostly outsiders,
those not influenced by the inaccurate information and rumor upon
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which the river’s reputation is built.
By 2010, John’s work with his then 12-year-old canoe company had
been featured in Outside Magazine, ESPNOutdoors and National Geographic. Three years later, John’s hometown recognized his business as
Coahoma County’s “Business of the Year.” In his acceptance speech, he
thanked the local business community, comprised mostly of large agricultural interests (some dating to the mid-19th century), for effectively
leaving him alone.
It seems unfathomable that the quiet streets of a post-industrial Main
Street community could nourish a company better than could a deeppocketed, metropolitan area like Memphis. But John often says that
Clarksdale is one of the only places that Quapaw could have thrived.
The Cave
My lodgings above John’s office (or “the Cave”) have afforded me a
birds eye view of the growth of Quapaw Canoe Company. I’ve spent
the last 16 months learning the river from John and his team in an experience that gave me a surprise at every turn.
At 6:53 a.m. a dense December fog was brightening above the
Sunflower River, and John was finishing the first phase of his day. He
looked a bit pummeled, with puffy eyes and knotted hair. He stretched
his elbows up above his head as I asked him what time he’d woken up.
“Oh...” he said, “The three o’clock hour.”
We faced his squat A-frame hut: all corrugated steel and chunky
wood with no straight lines. From its low-slung roof, a line of old
shoes, splotched with algae, hung by their strings. Behind it, the chalky
brown Sunflower River barely crawled.
He did not stare off towards the sky or the water and linger in the
silence, as he is sometimes prone to doing. Instead, with subdued excitement, he told me that he had been working on a breakthrough proposal for the KIPP charter school network, which he
hoped would take his Mighty Quapaw Apprenticeship Program from
a small, bold after-school safe haven to a firmly-founded, streamlined
outdoor education program. His hopes are for big, river-centric changes
in the Delta - especially for the chronically under-served.
The Cave’s heavy steel door, painted in trademark Ruskey swirls,
squeaks like a truck’s breaks when it swings open. A 3 a.m. squeak is
not unusual. Neither is a 4 a.m., 5 a.m., or even a midnight squeak. A
7 a.m. squeak is fairly late.
One magazine article described “The Lovely Life of John Ruskey.”
But “lovely” is not the descriptor that comes to mind when I hear the
Cave’s door squeak in the dead of night. I pull my sheets up to my chin
and wonder what he possibly does down there or whether (and why) he
works longer hours than, say, George Lucas or Jeff Bezos.
The Quapaw Canoe Company is headquartered behind this squeaking steel door in an underground, one-room basement whose contents
paint a clear, if scattered, picture of the 15-year-old, slow-grown company. There are floor-to-ceiling shelves of river books, Navajo rugs,
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“
The Mississippi River, he says, is ‘the greatest
expression of the beauty and the patterns and the
awful destructiveness of those wild powers that
govern the universe.’”
 A thick layer of frost covers Annie as she waits for her crew, who are enjoying a leisurely breakfast of oatmeal and berries before beginning the row from Cat Island to Helena, Ark.
 Left to right: The cracked earth on Cat Island, a 5,000 acre island in the middle of the Mississippi River teeming with wildlife; apprentice river guide Oscar Donaby unpacks the row boat; by
the campfire, the travelers get respite from the first bitter cold of the year.
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half-finished watercolors, driftwood effigies, old photos and bones. It
was once a home office, where John lived without most modern conveniences, including A/C and refrigeration (He preferred to chill his
perishable foods on a line in the Sunflower River.)
Ellis Coleman, a fellow Quapaw team member, told me that John
used to lay his head at night on a driftwood pillow. Now the Cave has
a new role as board room for John’s newly-founded non-profit, Lower
Mississippi River Foundation.
And now, four hours after his latest 3 a.m. squeak, John held up a
hand in an idle wave and smiled under his thick, gray beard. “Well,
okay, brother. See you in a few,” he said, walking across the Second
Street bridge toward his home, where his wife, his 6-year-old daughter,
oatmeal, school books and empty dog bowls awaited him.
He would return to the Cave to untangle the logistics of a 10-day
expedition, full of solar batteries, wetsuits, jugs of water, laptops, maps
and emails. He had been helping his friend and fellow river man, Kristian “Big K” Gustavson, to map a Florida river for what will one day
become Google Riverview.
The Rivergator
I came to Quapaw because of my mother. I had been planning a long
canoe trip down the Mississippi, and she passionately objected, painting gruesome pictures of collisions with barges and their giant propellers. As a general rule, the nearer one lives to the river, the farther one is
told to stay away. My mother was raised in New Orleans, where
“that river” is more of a floating factory than a body of water.
In a bit of a compromise, I joined Ruskey’s team in Clarksdale
instead. At an average flow rate of 450,000 cubic feet per second,
the Mississippi River is undeniably a force. It could fill the Louisiana
Superdome in four minutes. At flood stage, it wouldn’t take nearly as
long.
Though John is from the Front Range of Colorado, he knows the
life-taking potential of the river better than most. Fresh out of high
school, he and a friend began their Mississippi River journey in Wisconsin on a hand-built raft that splintered near Memphis, sparking a
near-death ordeal that could have scared him away for good. Instead
he picked up his paddle for another few thousand miles, and now he
makes his living encouraging others to do the same.
It began by chance in 1996. A German tourist by the sole name of
Hugh – a curious traveler unencumbered by deep-seated fears of the
Big River – had heard about a young blues musician in Clarksdale who
liked to duck out of town, sometimes for long stretches, to explore the
Mississippi alone.
By contrast, the locals – Memphians and Mississippians – are a
Foundation, which John directs. As of now, the trail stretches between
Caruthersville, Mo., and Vicksburg, Miss. In two years, when it is complete, it will guide experienced paddlers from St. Louis to the Gulf of
Mexico, and it will be the longest river-based water trail in the United
States.
In its introduction, John writes that he “hopes to share the secrets
for safe canoeing and kayaking on this often mysterious and confusing
waterway and at the same time dispel some of the myths about paddling the Big River.”
The Rivergator, much like the guided tours, begins when curious
adventurers (like myself ), come across John’s name and send him questions about paddling the Mississippi. Hundreds of brave souls descend
the Mississippi every year in self-propelled vessels, usually from upper
tributaries in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and sometimes even Montana.
Most go unnoticed because they’re only specks in the lake-like channel.
From a bridge above the water, you’d just as soon notice a stick or
one of the barges heaving the 400 million tons of cargo that passes
through the river every year.
much tougher clientele, still carrying the burden of three centuries of
horror stories, superstitions, floods and spectacular explosions.
Reversing such a tide is audacious work, but John usually goes about
it in his bright-eyed way. Last November, a barge passed across the
brown channel of the Mississippi, south of Greenville. It sent small
waves of water lurching towards the gravelly bank. Ten of us sat there
and spat pomegranate seeds between our feet. John tapped his toes on
the wet rocks to the railroad beat of his song. “I’m the river man,” he
sang, nasally like Bob Dylan.
He played it by request of his friend, Paul Hartfield, a Corps of
Engineers biologist, who was along for the 100-mile journey. The trip
was to celebrate and publicize The Rivergator: The Lower Mississippi
River Water Trail. The mile-by-mile paddler’s guide was sponsored by
the Walton Family Foundation through the Lower Mississippi River
At times in The Rivergator, John supplements the instructions with
stories. One particular account happened just down the river from
where John sang his song at the pomegranate seed-spitting lunch, at a
point called Fitler’s Bend.
During the record high water of 2011, he, a writer and a photographer “were documenting the flooding river for an Outside Magazine
story that would later be voted one of the best adventure stories of the
year.”
A small community had been carved into a wooded place that probably
shouldn’t be inhabited ...Obviously shouldn’t be inhabited as made evident
now: water was flowing over the streets twenty feet deep and telephone poles
were quivering like frightened bunnies. Some of the spec houses had been
overturned. We saw one house with muddy water flowing through its porch
and decided to investigate. Normally this house would stand tall above
the water ... It’s perched on stilts with a tall staircase reaching up to the
porch. The ground floor and the front porch stand at least twenty feet off the
ground. A jacuzzi had been installed on one side of the porch. But now the
river had risen over its sides, and the jacuzzi was full of muddy water. A
wide screen television was located on the porch wall behind. We couldn’t resist. We tied the canoe off and jumped into the muddy jacuzzi and enjoyed
a few minutes of relaxation!
He repeatedly offers that the Mississippi is reserved for advanced
paddlers. “Yes,” he concedes, “unfortunately a lot of people have gone
out and not come back. The river and its tributaries have probably
claimed more lives than all other rivers in North America put together.”
It’s a fine balance between play and reverence, fear and respect. It’s a
balance he deifies: The Mississippi River, he says, is “the greatest expression of the beauty and the patterns and the awful destructiveness of
those wild powers that govern the universe.”
The Rivergator, in that respect, is an almost evangelical mission to
venerate it, and ultimately, he says “to protect it.”
Distinctly Southern
The canoe shop’s front on Sunflower Avenue is streaked with psychedelic pastels. A red 1956 Chevy flatbed truck leans against the curb
outside of the building, which once housed an auto parts distributor. A
naked man holds a paddle and stands above a nighttime river scene in a
painting that is propped in the storefront window.
The shop was recently fitted with a huge portico, the sight of which
caused small traffic jams. The facade, which John designed and had
built with a downtown revitalization grant, combines the Southern
dogtrot and the Southwestern hacienda. The result is distinctly neither, much like its creator, especially within the confines of downtown
Clarksdale.
“I’m a creative spirit,” John says. And it’s this foreign push towards
the nonexistent (as well as his work on “that river”) in a place of deeply-
FROM LEFT:
John Ruskey shares a laugh
with fellow travelers at
daybreak over coffee on Cat
Island, the overnight stopping
point on the trip.
Annie at sunset at Cat Island.
Coffee is always on the fire.
A large piece of driftwood sits
covered in frost after the year’s
first bitter cold.
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“John looked to the sky, shook his head
and said, ‘You shouldn’t be motorboating anyway. You should be out there
in something slower and something that
exercises your body and doesn’t make
you more fat and lazy.’”
His stints with Jefferson, Tater ‘The Music Maker’ Wiley and James
‘Super Chikan’ Johnson were successful and brought him as far as Europe, but those years are often buried by the river. The late nights of
his bluesman days sometimes abut oddly with the early mornings of
his email-laden business days. I saw the odd confluence of those two
periods of John’s life one day in the summer of 2012. On the way to a
river presentation in Rolling Fork, we stopped in Greenville for what I
thought would be a simple, routine meeting. The next thing I knew, we
were listening to the mayor of Greenville try to lure a Quapaw apprenticeship program to his town.
John and I wore shorts and colorful plaids that I cannot guarantee
were clean. The mayor wore a suit. John listened intently in the varnished, wood-paneled room, legs crossed, head tilted, as if he, too, were
wearing a suit. Then we shook the mayor’s hand and went to Butch’s
house.
Euphus Butch Ruth is a Greenville photographer who drives a
hearse, which he parks in his front yard and uses as a mobile dark
room. Butch used to develop John’s film photos. He remembers watching a photo develop that was frightening even to look at. A livid towboat captain stood on the deck, shaking his fist and yelling. The man
- and the boat - were impossibly close. “There must be a whole lot goin’
on in that head,” Butch said. But, he also said, “John and I’s got one
thing in common. We both like to skinny dip in the Mississippi River.”
Unknown photographer, Girl in Fancy Dress in a Garden, 1887, Tintype, hand-colored by George McConnell
Collection of Dr. Stanley B. Burns, MD
held traditions that has led some to write him off as an eccentric. Delta
locals mostly call him “Ruskey,” and they sometimes accent the word
with a hint of mischief. It’s similar to the way they refer to Dollar Bill,
who has been known to walk down the middle of streets and shout vulgarities from the bridges of the Sunflower River.
A reporter once asked him about the issue of the invasive “Asian
Carp,” a fish that has seen exponential growth on the river, frightening
boaters as it heaves its slimy body several feet out of the water when
frightened. John looked to the sky, shook his head and said, “You
shouldn’t be motor-boating anyway. You should be out there in something slower and something that exercises your body and doesn’t make
you more fat and lazy. You know, Southerners are already overweight
and have health problems. They need more solutions that lead to better
color !
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Organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
and supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
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health.”
Others are enamored by him. “I believe in John Ruskey,” they say, or
“I’m a Ruskey fan.” He is “unreal,” “a visionary,” “enigmatic.”
The 1991 King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Ark., brought John
to the Delta. He lived in a tent at Friar’s Point landing (“You know,
where they fish,” he says) and worked on a cotton combine crew during
harvest hoping to get by until the winter. But more than 20 years later,
he hasn’t gone far.
Patty Johnson is a fellow Delta transplant and longtime friend of
John’s. Two of his watercolor riverscapes - one a predawn gray, the other a bluer flood scene - hang in her house. She is familiar with his preQuapaw, Clarksdale music life. She said she first saw John on the
porch of Hopson Plantation, a music spot on the outskirts of town.
“I think he was playing the accordion, of all things,” she says.
John plays the guitar, keyboard and drums, as well, and when
Patty remembers John’s weekly residency with bluesman Wesley
Jefferson at the Dew Drop Inn, she rolls her eyes back like she’s
searching for something that she can’t find. Because at some
point, John traded the musician’s life for the river.
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left to right:
Frost covers the dinnerware
on the first morning of the trip;
rubber river boots dry on sticks
by the driftwood fire;
Mark “River” Peoples beats a
native drum in a ceremony that
puts passengers, the river and
Annie, on the same wavelength;
Roy Williams tends to Annie
during a break on a sandbar.
The Mighty Quapaws
In late September of that same year, John was driving north on Interstate 55 towards Davenport, Iowa, when he got a call. He was to be
the keynote speaker at a river conference, and he had prepared notes
in which he would talk about the Mighty Quapaw Apprenticeship
Program. “They’re the same kinds of kids who often end up as gang
leaders,” he wrote. “They often end up not graduating and in jail. The
Mighty Quapaws gives these kids an alternate route across the river, to
the top of the mountain.”
The call was from a Darron, a quick-witted and good hearted
Mighty Quapaw apprentice, who carried his confidence the unwieldy
way that a 17-year-old boy often does. He asked John to bail him out
of the Coahoma County Jail. John told him he was 1,000 miles away;
he’d have to find someone else. Darron called back, again and again, all
weekend.
I paddled with Darron on my first Mississippi River trip. At the end
of the eight miles and soaking wet from a particularly nasty storm, he
sprung out of the boat. “Man, I feel great!” His words jumped out of
his smiling mouth too quickly for his teenage cool to hold back. (It
was, by all accounts, not an “awesome” trip. The boat was full of people
who had been misled by their tour company to expect a Mississippi
River “Safari” rife with bears and other exotics).
Other teenagers have similar responses to the river. Roderick, a
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17-year-old from Clarksdale, said, “I don’t know what it is, but being
here calms me down.” Jeremy ‘Popeye’ Hays is 20 and has amassed
hundreds of miles on the Mississippi over the last decade. He puts it
more simply, “I had to get out of town.”
At the conference, John diverged from his planned notes and
brought up Darron. He decided to highlight the arrest rather than ignore it. “That’s the modern day reality of the difficulties facing youth in
Mississippi.”
Those difficulties have not been easily overcome. “We gain Quapaws
and we lose them,” John said. But a new partnership with KIPP: Delta
Public Schools, a charter network in Eastern Ark., has John hopeful.
“We’ve started a new direction with some really smart people who understand child development,” he said of the the program. “I’m hoping
to codify that so that we can make an impenetrable program.”
Trailblazer
John finds all sorts of things on the river. He emerges from the
woods with fossils and shells and skulls and other animal remains. He
tries new recipes that sound absurd but usually turn out delicious. With
the Mississippi, he has managed to find a new space in a world that we
consider wrapped up and mapped. For the most part, he doesn’t find
the discovery groundbreaking. He chocks it up to the circumstances of
his rearing and the luck of his landing in Clarksdale.
“When it was time to go on vacation, my parents would pile us up
in the green van and we’d go camping and that’s just what we’d do,” he
says. But in the Delta, “that’s not the way families have traditionally
looked at the outdoors. You know, there’s hunting, and hunting is the
family thing in the South.”
It left a lot of room to grow a western-style approach to the outdoors. John’s mother, Lou, is the brave woman who piled all eight of
her children into that green van. She is white-haired and almost angelically mild-mannered, and she, too, is a painter. In a compelling selfportrait, she towers over her home, with hands held to the sky, larger
than life. In her right hand is an array of paintbrushes, in her left
is a set of arrows (“Don’t ask me about the arrows,” she says with a little
laugh.)
When John was three or four, the family lived near a park and a lake.
Between the house and the lake was a busy road. John used to climb up
to the bedroom window, Lou says, and stare out at the lake. One day,
he wandered out of the house and crossed the road towards the lake.
Lou told the story with fresh horror in her face.
“He was always looking for something more,” she said, “And he
was always trying to see more and go farther.” It is perhaps the same
instinct of wonder that drove him to build a raft and float the Mississippi in the first place. He writes that when the raft crashed, he and his
friend, Sean, clutched barrels “which kept flopping and twisting in the
boils and eddies of the main channel.”
But he says, “I gazed downstream upon the sands and forests of Cat
Island … I found myself wondering what it would be like to walk
across the island and imagining what secret places were there contained
within the sandy undulations and pristine pockets of willows, cottonwoods, sycamores and sweet gums and oaks.”
The wonder (and the thought of the unpleasant alternative) helped
them hang on. After he and Sean washed up onto the north end of Cat
Island, and with waterproof matches that they miraculously had gathered in the water, they started a fire that eventually attracted the attention of a tow boat.
That drive “to see more” was the beginning of the love affair that has
helped shaped Quapaw, which John calls “a creative business.” There’s
a lot more to see in that river, which is still shrouded in mystery, much
like our oceans. And there’s a lot more room to grow in Clarksdale and
Helena. Last April, the company built its fifth wood-strip canoe. And
a 20-foot cottonwood log, felled by a spring storm, waits to become
a dugout canoe under the manpower of the Griot Youth Program, an
arts-based outlet for Clarksdale teens that recently moved into downtown Clarksdale.
And the violence? It’s given him inspiration. “At the essence of my
soul,” John says, “I’m a creator, and I’m sure I’ll forever be fascinated by
those powers that are in the process of destruction and creation.” L
To book a Ruskey Mississippi River Tour, visit www.island63.com.
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