just trying to get them to think scientifically and do it in this remote way," Clark said. He "fell more in love" with the Mississippi, he said, and eventually decided that rather than just bring people to the rivers virtually, he wanted to do it literally, which led to the creation of BMA. I, meanwhile, had spent little time on waterways of any size. As a kid, I played around on smaller rivers while attending a camp at Lake of the Ozarks and argued with other campers over which one of us was paddling wrong. As an adult, I did a few float trips and debated with friends over how much beer we needed. But that was about it. So, when friends suggested the two trips on rivers much larger than I'd ever experienced, I was interested but unsure, perhaps a little uneasy, about whether it would be a good time. Last fall, after loading up our gear at the BMA headquarters in south St. Louis City, we drove about 90 minutes west to the Hermann Wurst Haus. Bratwursts, sauerkraut, side of potato salad, red cabbage. I wouldn't need to eat again until spring. We dropped my extra weight and the weight of our dry bags, tents, clothing, food, and beverages into Stan the Man , a 29-foot fiberglass Voyageur canoe sturdy enough to hold me, Clark, two of my high school buddies, and one of their dads. We entered the Missouri River alone, and that was largely the way it stayed for the next three days. It again felt to me a bit like we were trespassing. How could we have this portion of a 2,300-mile aquatic artery entirely to ourselves? It wasn't always this way. In 1804, Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark led a US military expedition to survey land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest. Along with four dozen men, the two explorers traveled in a 10-ton keelboat and two dugout boats from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. One night they camped just across from Hermann on La Loutre (which means "otter" in French) Island. That expedition ultimately led to the acquisition of territory in Oregon and California and increased commerce between Americans of European descent and Native American tribes along the river. (Sadly, it also led to the forced relocation of tribes from their land.) Since then, governments have constructed dams and levees along the waterway to provide room for farming and development; a quarter of the agricultural land in the US is found in the Missouri River watershed, according to American Rivers, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring damaged rivers. That construction and climate change have led to increased flooding in recent years, leading me to wonder what the natural world will look like one, two, or three

terrain July/August 2020

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paddling

WE ENTERED THE MISSOURI RIVER ALONE, AND THAT WAS LARGELY THE WAY IT STAYED FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS.