Mississippi Adventure, Chapter X

Wherein we eat floating oatmeal, escape from a state prison, nap in the mud and feast on non-mushy marshmallows in a mysterious ghost town.

We were out in the current only a few minutes when we decided to have breakfast. Of course there was no shore so Eric decided to fire up the two-burner camping stove right there on our canoe, and serve up oatmeal from there. While he got the water boiling I laid back with the blanket over me and closed my eyes to enjoy the first break in the mosquito feast since we tied up the night before. We ate and rinsed our dishes in the river and then I fell asleep for two hours. Next time I looked at my watch (why were any of us wearing watches?) it was 7:30 a.m.

Bob didn't know I was asleep until he heard this weird sawing sound. He was looking around for the source with his field glasses and then he realized it was me.

[ERIC: The propane two burner stove is one of the greatest purchases I have ever made. It's about the size of a cooler lid and about 3 inches thick. I perched it on the cooler in front of me and thanks to calm water and no barges for a while, there were no hot water or fire mishaps. It was here that Leo made coffee with the Molita after I boiled 2 pans of water - 1 for the coffee and 1 for the oatmeal.]

ERIC: We noticed a big sign on the right side of the river. We paddled closer and read it with the field glasses. It was an old sign that said something like, "CAUTION: Dangerous Draws 1/2 mile ahead. Old River Lake Flood Control Project." We worked our way across to the other side of the river. Soon we passed the concrete barriers and piles of rock that seemed to make up the flood control project but it did not appear to be drawing. In the distance we could hear a navigation buoy tooting -- one long toot every several seconds. Maybe my weariness had something to do with it because I can still hear it quite clearly in my head as if it was etched there.

ERIC: We stuck to the left side. A little while later we passed a more modern and much larger concrete barrier along the right bank. The tooting buoy was there near the gateway to the Atchafalaya river. This meant that the wrong turn of the night before was probably not a wrong turn after all. We saw a road and some small buildings in the distance. A rare sight.]

[BOB: I remember seeing those buildings and having the biggest craving for a big greasy diner breakfast with eggs, sausage, grits, hashbrowns, biscuits and gravy (or any combination thereof). Then as we got closer it was clear that once again, disappointment - there was no town. There were a number of areas that looked really interesting to explore, but to get to the interesting area would have required wading through a half mile or so of muck, so we didn't do much exploring on shore at all, the whole trip.]

We finally saw a sliver of beach at the base of a hill and decided to pull over, just to be on land for a little bit. This was a relatively unusual spot for the Mississippi river where a hill came straight down into the river. But even where the river eroded the hill there were no rocks, only packed mud that crumbled in your hands. I was all for sleeping more there but the rest of the crew wasn't enthused. Bob got out and sat on the beach looking stunned. We have a picture of that.

[Katy: I remember thinking this steep embankment reminded me of the banks on other canoe trips with rocks and roots, unlike the half submerged trees or swishy swamps we'd been getting used to on this trip. I also remember being so happy to have my feet on solid ground after spending the night on the river]

We decided to move on because we didn't want to waste the still cool morning hours sleeping. We would sleep when it got hot.

[ERIC: That morning we stuck mostly near the east bank. By 11am or so were all spending a lot of time in the water floating like debris next to the boats. At one point I was the only one still in the boats. We had a couple swimming incidents.

ERIC: We saw an odd lookout on a pole among the trees next to "shore" (the trees were still wading in several feet of water as they had been the whole trip). We were not very far from the lookout but Bob (a swimmer in high school and college) had to swim hard to get to it. He climbed up the ladder to the lookout and instantly the current was pulling us past him at 5 miles per hour. He spent only 10 seconds or so up there before he had to jump in and chase us and still he had a very hard swim to get back.

ERIC: Shortly after that we were floating on the left side of an island where the river made a bend to the left. The channel between the island and the trees was relatively narrow. Suddenly a barge appeared coming around the bend and up the narrow channel towards us. Everyone got in the canoes and paddled quickly toward shore except Joan. She tried to get in our canoe several times but couldn't make it. (JOAN: after several tries I was laughing too hard to be able to do much of anything else). Meanwhile, the barge was getting closer. I was worried she would capsize us. Finally Mark and Leo came to the rescue. Leo grabbed our bow line in his teeth and then we all paddled hard towards the trees while Joan clung to the side of the canoe. We got the closest view of moving barge you would ever want to get from a canoe. There was a man standing on the tip of the front most barge holding a walkie-talkie. We waved and he waved back.]

We weren't on the river too much longer when we saw that we were just about to pass a big wide beach with a large sign with small white lettering. There was a dock for a ferry and we figured it might be a town. We couldn't figure out which one but we thought the sign would say Welcome To ... Bob and Katy and Mark and Leo were already pretty much past the beach so they waited at a nice beach a little downstream while Eric and I explored.

It was the only gravelly beach we saw. This is where I had my fantasies about 2-egg specials. I was so sure the place was a town I brought my wallet. After paddling across a nice swamp with several cranes walking around, we crunched our way up to that sign and we couldn't find the word welcome. But it did offer us free strip searches, courtesy Warden Burl Cain. It was a long sign, all written in legalese and it took a moment to realize we were at the Angola State Prison (Later we learned this is the home of the Angola Prison Rodeo, where prisoners supposedly volunteer to risk their lives against bulls, all to the cheers of a paying public), as marked on our lunch box maps. We decided to get the hell out of the there before someone thought we were part of a jailbreak. On the way back to our canoe I found a bullet-shell casing and put it in my lunch box. We walked back and found the rest of the crew wading neck deep in the water. It was almost 1pm and getting very hot. The sky was partly cloudy. More white than blue but still hot.

[Katy: I remember being very happy to actually know where we were (a place I could actually identify on the xeroxed road map on my lunch box), even if it was a state prison. We were all rather punchy from not enough sleep. I remember drinking a little too much beer because I was so hot and our soda supply had dwindled down to some terrible Dr. Pepper tasting drink called Southern Lightening. I also remember paddling in the water up to my neck, wearing my Chinatown straw hat, peering out at this strange, hot terrain and feeling like I was in Apocalypse Now.]

[BOB: It was incredibly hot, and we just drank the last of the beers and laid down up to our necks (that's right Randy, we were in it at that point - UP TO OUR NECKS) in the cool water. It was great. I think we were also squirting each other with the squirt guns.]

[Katy: we paddled all around this wide bend in the river, feeling like I was in a huge lake. Someone would spot a red cliff in the distance and hoping for solid ground we would all head for it, only to be disappointed. It seem like we went fifteen miles out of our way looking for a place to stop. I also remember I took a panorama picture of the river and sky because it was so gloriously expansive.]

It was probably just half an hour or an hour till we got to the place we decided to nap: a narrow beach next to a big muddy flat where an old road lead into the thick scrubby woods. At lower water levels, no doubt an excellent camp site. The rest of the crew lost no time settling down to a nap. Mark maneuvered his canoe under a tree, and set up some padding behind him so he could completely recline in the bow. Leo stumbled onto the shore and fell over in a heap. Katy outdid everyone: she laid on her back in the surf with her hat over the face. Bob took a picture. She looks like a corpse that washed up on shore. Later she said how it felt so great having the water wash over her and cool her off that she couldn't bring herself to move anywhere else.

[Katy: I also must admit the excess of morning beer didn't help the situation.]

Before Mark fell asleep, he laughed at Eric and me because we actually wanted to put up our tent in the mud, which was practically foamy, it was so soft. OK, it was only billowy. When we put down our tarp we had to crawl onto the tarp to get it to be flat enough so we could put our tent on top. The tarp sunk at least a foot into the mud. But once we were inside we were totally cozy. We hear we were the only ones who slept through the rainstorm

[BOB: I did set up my tent, just the screen part without the fly and got a terrific nap. When the rain started, I put the fly up, but then was awake and went out to hang out with the rest of the wet crew in the downpour. I remember sitting in a chair watching these big ants struggling to carry impossibly large cookie crumbs and such and being pelted and eventually carried away by these massive rain drops.]

The rain gang did not look happy. Bob's photos show them all kind of grimacing, sitting in the lawn chairs, wearing ponchos and dripping. Mark got the see-through poncho, which looks like a saran wrap dress.

MARK models a see-through dress

[Katy: I woke up in the mud still too warm to get into the hot tent with Bob, so I swam in the river for a while. Then I sat down to chat with Mark, who had just woken up. We were having a particularly pleasant time chatting and eating ant food while we watched the storm come on. But when it started raining I got very cold then realized I had left my only dry clothes out on top of the canoe. At this point I crawled my wet, dripping self into the tent with Bob and passed out.]

The storm passed and Katy crawled in Bob's tent and slept. We had to wake her when we finally were ready to go again. We started again around 4 or 5pm.

Somewhere in the late afternoon we saw a bunch of falling down buildings in a grassy field on the left shore. It was a ghost town, and one of the buildings was clearly labeled the Pt. Coupee Bank. It was a red brick building with entire walls kind of peeling off from each other, ready to fall down any moment. Nearby was a little white house, which I guess once had steps. It was sitting on a foundation probably three feet high. Inside some plywood was thrown down for the floors. Just unfinished sheets. There was some broken glass but it didn't look like any hobos had been living there. There was another building next to the bank that looked like it had been a smoke house. It was all brick, had a big brick fire pit in the middle, and a tin roof. All the walls were standing but there were no windows, and it looked like it had never had windows since there were no windowpanes.

[ERIC: the river bank here was reinforced with large rocks to prevent erosion. This made unloading the canoes difficult.]

There were a couple of other buildings that were also falling apart. The buildings looked so cheaply made at first we figured maybe it was a movie set. Especially since the sign on the bank seemed to be in pretty good condition. But in the white house, there actually was some kind of bathroom--and we figured if it was a movie set they probably wouldn't have bothered to build one.

Eric and I once saw another ghost town--deserted 80 years or so--in Rhyolite, Nev., and it looked similar, with no windows and lots of falling down brick. But in this ghost town on the Mississippi, most of the walls were still standing, albeit crookedly. We figured maybe the town had just been abandoned in the last few years.

The weirdest thing was the grass. There were no sidewalks, just tall grass that had once been cared for like a lawn but left unmowed for a year, with lots of bumblebees buzzing around. But the grass near the buildings was only a foot or so high, while the grass away from the buildings was super tall. God knows why anyone would mow there. Unless it was a tourist attraction, but we didn't see any litter or anything either.

[ERIC: another theory was that it was a summer camp town, built recently, for people to act like they're in the old west or something. That would explain the smoke house and the movie set-like bank. In the end we never did find a good answer except that there once was a town of Point Coupee that had been washed out by the river and subsequently relocated several times. The town shows up on very old maps but not new ones. It may indeed have been a ghost town.]

(ANYONE know about Pt. Coupee? pleases e-mail us! Here's one e-mail we got so far.) 

We took a few pictures in front the bank and set up our camp in the tall grass and Bob lit lots of mosquito coils to keep the bloodsuckers at bay. I had about four coils under my chair at one point. We ate weenies (what else?) and lamented the dwindling state of our beer supply.

At some point we noticed something we hadn't seen on the whole trip: another camper. There was a car parked probably a quarter of a mile away, in the grass. We guessed there was a road over there, the same one that once lead to the ghost town. For some reason, not one of us went over to talk to them. They probably could have told us all about the town, but I think in some way it would have taken some of the mystery out of the trip. Or maybe we were just lazy. We did wave.

Then came the culinary highlight of the whole trip, something even better than Big Buford Combos: s'mores. Somehow, through about 120 miles of mud, rainstorms, heat and bloodsuckers, and seven days of me using our food supplies as a cushion to sleep on, we had managed to preserve, intact, our graham crackers, Hershey chocolate bars and marshmallows, heretofore forgotten. They weren't even slightly smushed, stale or melted. We had s'mores and they were totally awesome. Mark was actually so tired that he went to sleep early and missed them. They tasted totally yummy.

[BOB: I stayed up late, Eric and I were the last ones up, and I was burning this massive pile of damp 12-pack boxes that we had been carrying. It created quite a bonfire that illuminated the whole camp. A beautiful sight. That was always my favorite time of the day. I kept moving the mosquito coils all evening, trying to keep them upwind. Keeping the mosquitoes at bay was a constant battle the entire trip. I typically was smoking a cigar the entire time we were ashore after dark, except for short periods while eating. I'd light one up before trying to start the fire once ashore, attempting to billow as much smoke as possible to keep them away, then once we got the fire started it would usually help a lot, keeping the mosquitoes off of half of your body anyway -depending on the wind.]

[ERIC: Since it was our last night camping I didn't want to go to bed. I was still waiting for poetry night or something and not willing to give up on it. But everyone except Bob and I had gone to sleep and we were exhausted. We sat mostly quietly, burning whatever we could find, until the mosquitos chased us away.]

Stay tuned for Chapter XI, Our glorious return.

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