Mississippi Wild Beauty

Whit Smith on the very basic need of humanity to have a real connection with wildness

Lower Mississippi River Dispatch No. 996
"Voice of the Lower Mississippi River"

Shreve’s Bar

In today's issue, Rivergator 2025 Expedition intern and partner, Whit Smith, muses on his generation's perspective of nature and society in our new world, and how the experience, and the feeling of the wilderness, varies with our definitions of it.

Walnut Hills

Whit is on summer internship from St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM, campus, where he will be returning this Fall as a Junior.  He is from a seven-generation Birdeye, Arkansas, farm family, and has a keen interest in sustainable agriculture, as well as literature, music, and many other things. Whit participated in 2022 LMRF Summer Canoe Camp, and became a Mighty Quapaw Canoe Company guide in 2023.  He loves the woods as much as he loves the waterways of the Mid- and Deep-South.  Whit kept the expedition well nourished and hydrated with locally grown watermelons, another passion of his.

Wolf Island

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"...melted away in the awesomeness and the intense vision and feeling of being in the lungs of some great organism, fully encapsulated by something immensely and unfathomably larger than myself."

-Whit Smith, Rivergator 2025

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Wickliffe Bluff

Whit Smith:

Starting from the barge-lined mouth of the Ohio River which joins the Middle Mississippi River to continue downstream past obvious signs of a heavily used and industrial river only to be greeted by a wild looking river by the time we camped on the bottom bar of Wolf Island– looking downstream and away from Columbus Kentucky where that long line of barges stops– brought to mind the thought of how we as humans living in this modern age interact with the wild when so many of our “wild” places seem to be in one way or another always interjected with signs of human "progress." 

Wickliffe Bluff

This is a thought my generation in particular must face as land gobbled up and altered by man has only increased exponentially through the years. Whatever one may make of “progress” and the inevitable fact that as humankind is present on the Earth, so are its alterations to the natural environment, the reckoning of what it is that is lost in the midst of "progress" necessarily must be had. As the saying goes, to understand our present, we must first understand our past, and in the case of paddling the Mississippi River, the “past” which I bring in as parallel to the wilderness experienced by the paddler of the Lower Mississippi shows itself in a strange way. The strangeness I see in it is that essentially the entirety of the Mississippi River– from the upper to the lower sections of it– are drastically altered by humankind’s centuries of engineering it to conform it to its needs. What this means to me is that what I am seeing is not purely wilderness by the strict definition of it since the natural functions of the River, which it had for time innumerable before humankind’s work to control it, were severed by the levees that surround it and the immense amount of rock and other construction materials like revetment which for the most part keeps the channel running the course determined by the Corps of Engineers. 

Greenville Bridge

This is interesting to me because in my experience of paddling close to seven hundred miles of the Lower Mississippi over two weeks, there are more points than less where I recognize- experientially not intellectually- that the river is a vast wilderness outside the grasp of humankind. Going back to what I claimed above about my generation in particular grappling with what “wilderness”-- which I see as being due to the immensity and the easily accessed knowledge of the destruction of  “wilderness”-- being on the river really emphasises what I believe is a real difference in the experience of wilderness and the definition of wilderness– which I think goes to show the very basic need of humanity having a real connection with the wildness in that the effects of the experience of being in the wild, even if it is not technically a “wild place,” is centered in the feeling of it. Feeling, in my experience, points to something oftentimes more true to myself than something I just think about rather than feel. For instance, when I read something or hear something that is particularly affecting, what seems to resonate can oftentimes be difficult to put into words, which is to say intellectualize what I am feeling. To feel something for me is a spontaneous and largely uncontrollable action whereas I can think something or hold a thought in my mind without much difficulty, which for myself points to the former of the two actions/reactions being on some level more true to myself. All of this is to say that in my own personal experience as well as what I’ve read or heard of from others, humans have a keen sense for wilderness, and particularly the experience of the wilderness. I believe this experience of wilderness is made more powerful due to the fact that I am self-obsessed for the majority of my waking time. 

Tunica Hills

What I mean by “self-obsessed” is that my outlook on life and just generally how I experience life for much of the day tends to be self-referential in that I am looking at and analyzing the external world based on my internal one, which revolves, more than I would like to admit, on my own ego– i.e. how the external affects my own benefit and self-perception. When I am in a wild place though, such as I was for majority of the last two-and-half weeks on the Mississippi River, this changes majorly and the external world is witnessed not based on the self-obsessed part of me, but rather something more akin to that childlike state of wonder and interest which I recognised in myself during much of my time on the river. Being entirely genuine and un-prejudiced and utterly absorbed by the wild beauty of the Mississippi and her now incredibly restricted– though not seeming so out on the river with the thick buffer of trees on both sides of the river for most of the time– floodplains for such an extended period of time is an experience which I can only be bewildered and thankful for from the Great Mother Mississippi. Circling back more fully on the experience of the wilderness which I brought up initially in this writing, the importance of the experience of a wild place, to put it shortly, is that experiencing such a place like the great river is not something we can curate or bring about by human-ingenuity or endeavor, but rather something out of our control, but spectacularly at the same time seemingly registered by something I recognize as being innate in myself, and I believe ourselves. 

Clark Creek

This leads me to an experience I had a few nights into the Rivergator Expedition when we camped right above the first Chickasaw Bluff. Our camp was at the old mouth of the Forked-Deer River in Tennessee amongst a sea of tall Black Willows which had grown out of a sandy forest floor. The sand had covered deep Mississippi River mud below creating a beautiful sandy base overgrown with vines and small flowering plants in some places and perfectly clean spots of fine river sand in others. The forest was oriented favorably and forested with large Willows so as to offer wonderful afternoon and morning shade– which are imperative during the hot summer months on the river– as well as cooled by a steady breeze, all of which led us, alongside the general exhaustion of the crew, to choose this beautiful camp site. Once the first mosquito bit a few minutes after the sun set around eight I crawled into my tent to read a little more and then head to bed. Once I had laid down with my book in hand though, the insects came to life with a fervor which left me awestruck in both the intensity of their calls as well as the rhythm of great vibrating breaths which they kept. I can still remember vividly how those great breaths came one after the other steadily on and on. I had no choice but to pay absolute attention to their song as the intensity and steadiness of it inundated every other thought that had been in my mind. The thoughts relating to the Cormac McCarthy novel I had been reading melted away in the awesomeness and the intense vision and feeling of being in the lungs of some great organism, fully encapsulated by something immensely and unfathomably larger than myself. By the time I awoke the next morning the insects had seemingly retreated to rest from their great endeavor and what remained in the morning dawn was the Great River and the sound of immense waters rushing against the rocks of the banks headed downstream for the Gulf of Mexico and the waking calls of the birds and insects bringing to life another day in the wild of the Mississippi River. 

-Whit Smith, St. John's College Intern, Rivergator 2025

Glasscock Point

St. Maurice Island

Rivergator 2025

For More: This is a continuation of previous newsletters, including: 
1) "We discover the “Rivergator"
2) "Surfing a 688-Mile Long Wave" 
3) "Cairo to Montezuma"
4) "Ladybug Canoe"
5) "The Keith Kirkland"
6) "Jean Canôt Joins Expedition"

Documentation & exploration on the biggest river in North America to update the Rivergator Paddler’s Guide (and simultaneously the Wild Miles).  

We last paddled in entirety in 2017.  What has changed?  What remains the same?  

Expedition run by Quapaw Canoe Company with support from Lower Mississippi River Foundation.

Clark Creek

Quapaw Canoe Company ~ Celebrating 27 Years of Service
Custom Guiding & Outfitting on the Lower Mississippi River
Winner of the SBA 2024 Small Business of the Year Award