In the spring of 1882, after a twenty-one-year absence, the writer known as Mark Twain embarked on a six-week return trip up and down the Mississippi River. “I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, …and such of the boys as might be left,” the one-time steamboat pilot wrote in Life on the Mississippi, the book that emerged from the journey. Yet the river itself kept flummoxing Twain, having “reshaped a landscape he had once strenuously committed to memory,” as Ron Chernow notes in his recent biography of Twain. “Hamlets that had fronted the river now stood landlocked, and when the boat stopped at a ‘God forsaken rocky point,’ disgorging passengers for an inland town, Twain stared mystified.” Whether Twain ever read Heracleitus is unclear, but the ancient Greek philosopher’s best-known lines might’ve offered him solace, or at least an epigraph: “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Twain happened, in Life on the Mississippi, to relay an anecdote about the very locale at which I am now peering. Island 63, roughly twelve highway miles west of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and 637 river miles north of where the current spills into the Gulf, is where the captain of a steamboat called the Skylark turned the wheel over to a visiting pilot, a “broken-down, superannuated fellow,” in Twain’s telling. “The ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside; and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again; and handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had originally taken the wheel!” (Twain quotes a man onshore, observing the steamboat chugging by thirteen times: “’Clar to gracious, I wouldn’t be s’prised if dey’s a whole line o’ dem Skylarks!”) Even for the pilot of the Skylark, it seems, one couldn’t ply the same river twice—or for that matter a dozen times.

Like Twain, I’ve returned to the Mississippi after a long absence—twenty-eight years, in my case. In 1997, an outdoors magazine commissioned the photographer Tom Rankin and me to voyage 250 miles of the river to surveil its fishing opportunities as well as its mysterious landscapes. Mysterious, because while twenty million people live and work in the hundred-plus counties bordering the river, most of us experience it only from a distance, or as an abstraction: something to cross via a bridge, or insure against, or fear, or maybe dimly romanticize in the Huck Finn way Twain bequeathed to us. In many minds the Mississippi exists solely as a giant interstate upon which travel hundreds of tons of freight every year, except on water, not asphalt. And as with an actual interstate, it’s not a place to play.

That’s not how John Ruskey sees it. The sixty-two-year-old Colorado native, who’s swimming in the chute with me as Tom is making last-minute checks of our boat, has been playing in the Mississippi ever since he and an equally Huck-besotted classmate built a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot raft to float its length after high school. That expedition fired a lifelong love affair with the river. A few years afterward, he planted himself in Clarksdale, and in 1998 he founded the Quapaw Canoe Company, where he hand builds voyageur-style canoes and guides visitors on daylong and multiday river trips. Ruskey is the single greatest resource for recreationally navigating the lower Mississippi—his mile-by-mile online guide, called Rivergator, runs to more than a thousand web pages—which is why we’ve timed our launch for when he’s at the landing across from Island 63, greeting a guide returning clients from a canoe trip. Ruskey and I emerge from the cool brown water refreshed and clearheaded, as though baptized.

“It’ll be surprising if you see more than a dozen recreational boats all next week,” Ruskey tells us while we’re securing our gear—tents, food, sleeping bags, cameras—to the bow. As on our first voyage, we’re piloting an eighteen-and-a-half-foot, flat-bottomed jon boat; unlike back then, when a fuel-line issue stranded us in the main channel with a giant barge bearing down on us, we have a newish ninety-horsepower outboard motor. Who navigates the river, I ask Ruskey, for anything beyond freight commerce nowadays? “Besides a few fishermen and a few long-distance paddlers and a few local paddlers,” he says, pausing, “no one.”

We spend some time chewing on the possible reasons for this. “The river is so unimaginably big, and hard to understand, and so many people have lost their lives in it,” Ruskey offers, citing the Arkansas grandfather of one of his apprentice guides who warned, “Six out of ten people who go out on the Mississippi don’t come back.” Despite the curious specificity, this claim is patently untrue. The river’s menacing repute, however, is not unearned. Midway through my and Tom’s previous voyage, the singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley vanished during an evening swim in the river in Memphis; his body wasn’t found until six days later. You cannot “trust yourself without danger to its stream,” an English captain warned in 1837. “It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again.”

“It’s the Mount Everest of rivers,” Ruskey says, sketching comparisons to the river’s and mountain’s size and force and stature, before noting one distinction that seems to confound if not offend him: “More people summit Everest than paddle the Mississippi River. More people, by a magnitude of ten, climb Everest than top-to-bottom paddle the Mississippi every year.” One of the world’s great natural wonders is right here, he’s saying, in the heart of the heart of the country—and hardly anyone seems inclined to meet it.

We wave farewell to Ruskey and motor to Island 63’s southern end where in a pewter fit of riffles and boils the chute reunites with the broad main channel, the two of us received, once again, into its waters.

For Heracleitus, nature centered around an omnipresent element: change. That’s why, for his central metaphor, he chose rivers. Take the Mississippi. In the 1940s, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers geologist and cartographer named Harold Fisk mapped its “meander belt”: the area across which the river has snaked and shifted over thousands of years. Fisk’s genius stroke was to use different colors to illustrate the wildly varied past courses: green for its 1880 route, light blue for 1765, shades of auburn for all its prehistoric curves and corkscrews, and so forth. The finished map resembled a tangle of rainbow spaghetti spilling down the middle of America, making visual an essential truth about the Mississippi: It’s never followed one sinuous course but rather hundreds, thousands. With every flood, with every soaking rain, the river wanders and rambles, seeks and slithers. It’s alive, and because of that, ever-changing. Panta rhei, wrote Heracleitus: Life is flux.

The same goes for Tom and me, our boat skimming the river’s corrugated surface as indigo thunderheads loom downstream. Tom was a young father when we made this voyage last; now he’s a young grandfather. I was living feral in a one-room cabin in Mississippi’s Hill Country, existing on a diet of nicotine, whiskey, and books; now I’m more than a quarter century into marriage, with three grown children, one of whom counts Tom as her godfather. In that long interim, we’ve found ourselves with less to prove and more to lose. Our faces have lines and our memories are occasionally moth-holed. Still, impressions from that first day on the river almost three decades ago have stuck fast: the exhilarating freedom of it, as though we’d slipped the border of what Huck called the “sivilized” world. “I stood like one bewitched” is how Twain described his own first passage. “I drank it in, in a speechless rapture.” Beyond the natural splendor, however, flowed another kind of grandeur for us. Here was not the fountain of youth but rather the fountain of American mythology, the praline-colored source waters of so much of our culture. Muddy Waters and Louis Armstrong and Jimmie Rodgers and Lead Belly and Johnny Cash all sang about it. Thelonious Monk channeled it onto his piano, and Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton into their poems. To travel the Mississippi, I wrote in my journals then, is to coast down the jugular vein of Americana.

Though life may be flux, constants remain. One of these (aside from my persistent affection for whiskey) is the ferocity of storms on the river. They battered us so thoroughly on our original voyage that, like the Ancient Mariner, we came back talking of almost nothing else. This time, eyeing the thunderheads, we land the boat at the bottom of Island 69, normally an archipelago beaded together over seven river miles but now, with the river high, just a single sandy bulge draped in young willows. We have just enough time to triple-tie the boat, pitch our tents, and scarf down dinner before the birds fall silent and the light dims to an eerie purple. Then the skies crack open. Inside my whipped, drenched tent, I scan the weather apps, watching as warnings stack upon warnings: sixty-mile-per-hour gusts, tornadoes, floods. From inside his own tent, Tom monitors the boat as it’s tossed by the gusts and waves, tendriled flashes of lightning strobe-lighting it as it bobs in a violent froth. Thunder booms. Willow branches split and tumble. There’s no sleep this night. When the storm finally passes, close to daybreak, we crawl dazed from our tents. The rest of the island, we see, has turned to muck, with only our tiny spearhead of sand remaining solid. Had we made camp any deeper inland, like in the low pocket of willow shade that’d briefly tempted us, we would’ve felt the earth turn to pudding under our backs in the middle of the night, would’ve found ourselves completely fluxxed.

Here’s one of the enigmas of the lower Mississippi: Ever since 1720, when the first waist-high levee was completed in New Orleans, the river has been relentlessly and elaborately engineered via rock dikes, wing dams, concrete embankments, drainage canals, floodgates, spillways, and more than a thousand miles of levees, in order to curtail flooding and, to a lesser degree, facilitate commercial transport. The result can seem, from a certain angle, like a synthetic environment, a byzantine plumbing project writ large: the river managed, bridled, tamed. The enigma, however, is that the land and water and waterland between the levees—in the area known as the “batture,” deriving from the French word for something beaten—can feel as untouched, as unspoiled, as untamed, as anywhere else in the continental United States. Hiding there is a lush, tangled corridor of bottomland hardwood forests, sloughs, swamps, and alluvial islands—a 2.2 million–acre ribbon, as wide as fifteen miles in some parts, of the Mississippi’s original floodplain, preserved not by statute but by the river’s inundations. A 2018 Army Corps of Engineers report deemed it “one of the most important remaining wilderness areas” in the country.

Readers of William Faulkner’s novella “The Bear” might recognize this terrain: It’s what remains of the Big Woods, having made “their last stand” here, just as Faulkner predicted: “too dense, too strong with life and memory…ever to die,” as he put it in a related story. Versions of the hunting camps Faulkner wrote about remain widespread in the batture. To access one, Tom and I push the boat through a logjam on the backside of Montgomery Towhead, a four-thousand-acre, question mark–shaped island on the Arkansas side, and then putter up a swampy chute to where an old friend named Wiley Prewitt—such of the boys, as Twain wrote, as might be left—awaits us.

The Montgomery Island Hunting Club was formally incorporated in 1981, but the island’s thick forests of ash, elm, and pecan have been prime hunting ground since Faulkner’s time. Prewitt’s father built the club’s first private cabin, prior to electricity making it to the island; now there are ten cabins, the newer ones perched atop stilts and crowned with DirecTV dishes. The Prewitt cabin, crammed with old sporting magazines and snake boots and bass lures and books (Teddy Roosevelt’s The Wilderness Hunter; The Young Sportsman’s Guide to Game Animals), radiates that old-timey, barrel-aged camp vibe. (The Smithsonian once painstakingly re-created its front porch for the American Folklife Festival.) “For a long time,” Prewitt says, “this was an old guy’s place.” It still had that crusty, spartan vibe when Tom and I visited on our first voyage; nowadays, big air conditioners hum beside some of the other cabins while moms chill wine inside and kids sprawl with iPads. A wide-screen TV dominates the main camp house.

We ride along with Prewitt in his boat as he checks his trotlines. Baited hooks hang from nylon lines arrayed near drowned willow trees, seven or eight of them heavy with catfish. Blues, flatheads, and channel cats: the entire mud cat menu, almost all of them males snagged in the frenzy of mating season. Prewitt lays one of the gunmetal-colored channel cats into a cooler. “That guy’s like a seventeen-year-old on spring break,” he explains. “They change the look of themselves completely during spawning. A few months ago, he would’ve looked just nice and silver, like a good eating fish. But now, as you can see, his head swells up and he turns green and black. The old guys call them willow cats, but they’re just channel cats in their mating form.” Prewitt sends us downriver with a ziplock full of fillets and a bucket of fresh ice. We part with a bottle of Scotch in return.

On our first voyage here, Prewitt happened to be hosting a filmmaker from New York who was shooting a documentary about the river’s fishing culture. The filmmaker thought himself very smart, admiring his every utterance as though it were a flawless smoke ring. At one point, over dinner in the camp house, he proclaimed the river a metaphor, letting the word go delicately wheeling across the table.

“A metaphor,” I asked him, slowly chewing a hush puppy, “for what?”

“What you and Tom are doing, traveling down this river, is escaping adulthood,” he said. “I think it’s quite obvious. This is every boy’s dream, you understand. It all comes from Huck Finn. You see, the river is—always has been—a metaphor. A metaphor for escape.”

It’s a dubious point. I recognized it dimly back then and more clearly now. For generations of enslaved people, after all, being sold downriver was hardly a metaphor for escape; rather one for horror and heartbreak and doom. No, if we’re going to make the Mississippi River represent anything, that something is change: panta rhei. The channel cat, re-coloring himself for mating time. Twain, blinking from a steamboat deck at an unidentifiable landscape. The thousand curlicued strands of the river’s meanders. And now this: an island from our first trip, name of Choctaw Bar, that no matter how hard I squint bears scant resemblance to the place I remember.

That’s the thing with the Mississippi’s islands: Rising and falling, the river is constantly scouring and reshaping and washing and remodeling them. Three years ago, back on Montgomery, Wiley Prewitt was strolling a gravel bar during low water when a peculiar shape caught his eye. What he picked up was the fossilized tooth of the American lion, Panthera atrox, last seen more than ten thousand years ago: a deeply rare find that excited paleontologists nationwide. By the time he’d donated it to a museum in Jackson, the river had reclaimed the gravel bar, submerging whatever other secrets it didn’t want divulged.

On the north end of Choctaw Bar lies a huge expanse of fine, pale khaki sand. Looking one direction, I feel sure I’m in the Caribbean; looking another, I’m almost definitely in the Sahara; in no direction does it compute that I’m in Arkansas, or for that matter that twenty-eight years ago we weathered a storm on this same island. As you wander south, the landscape shifts to pool-dotted grasslands and scrub where warblers and flycatchers and other marsh birds flit and flock and curious tracks—possum? armadillo?—crisscross the sand. A raft of cormorants rises at our approach, shuddering the late-afternoon sky. If another human being has been here, recently or otherwise, there’s no sign. Aside from our own footprints, a few tattered plastic bags, flood-snared in a thatch of wild roses, are the sole evidence we creatures exist.

As the sand turns pink then salmon in the setting sun, we mix gin and tonics and grill the catfish over a driftwood fire while engaging in that most sublime practice of old friendships: retelling stories we’ve told a hundred times before, the laughter no less genuine with the punch lines foretold. As darkness falls, one by one and then dozen by dozen the stars begin emerging until, absent any interference from urban light, they overrun the sky. Like Huck and Jim, we contemplate them. “We had the sky up there,” Twain wrote, “all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.” Jim’s theory was that the moon laid the stars like eggs, which Huck thought reasonable because he’d seen a frog lay most as many eggs as that, “so of course it could be done.” What a magical notion, it occurs to me, gawking upward: that freckling the night sky are thousands upon thousands of moon-eggs that upon hatching will flood the galaxy with a vast silvery glow. This is all that occupies my mind as I sink into my tent, drifting off to the whoosh of the waves lapping the shore as a midnight barge passes south.

One reason the lower Mississippi may not attract more recreational boaters is that, frankly, it can be dicey. John Ruskey figures that the river and its tributaries have claimed more lives than all other American waterways combined. Running your tank dry of fuel on a lake, for example, is a buzzkill, a crap day. But running it dry on the Mississippi can leave you in the path of a towboat pushing as much as a hundred million pounds of cargo toward you, in the worst-case scenario sucking you under twelve hundred feet of hull like an escalator hoovering a shoelace. Best to top off when you can.

One-pump riverside marinas still existed during our first voyage, though even then we once found our tanks so low we had to sweet-talk a fisherman into driving me to a gas station in Elaine, Arkansas. I’ve heard various reasons those marinas have gone extinct: the 2008 recession, the 2011 flood, COVID. But the net result, as the commodore of the yacht club in Greenville, Mississippi, tells Tom, is that his is the only fuel stop between Memphis and Baton Rouge. With so little activity on it nowadays, the river’s become a fuel desert. We top off.

With a population of twenty-nine thousand, Greenville is the single quote-unquote city on our trip, its downtown connected to the river by a five-mile slack-water harbor lined with towboat repair yards, loading terminals, cranes, and vast mounds of whatever’s shipping north or south. When beguiled by the birdlife and starlight on Choctaw Bar Island, it’s easy to forget or ignore the river’s day job as an industrial channel; that identity snaps back into place as we go put-putting into Greenville’s port.

Our guide for the day is Euphus Ruth, a photographer and longtime friend of Tom’s whose affection for the river approaches Ruskey’s. Ruth specializes in Victorian-era photographic techniques, using antique cameras and a portable darkroom to create haunting, even ghostly images. Theoretically he could do this anywhere. Yet despite the challenges endemic to living in the Delta—poverty, crime, racial and economic stratification, educational and health deficits; the list is long and often disheartening—Ruth has chosen, for forty-five years, to stay. And he makes no bones about why: the Mississippi River itself. With his home and studio within walking distance, Ruth spends long hours on its banks. “I go to it for sanctuary,” he says. “It’s almost like going to church. There’s something about that flowing water, and all the history of it running in the back of my mind as I’m watching it.” Sometimes he swims; at other times, he stands waist-deep in the shallows or sits on the bank assessing the barge traffic. “If I’m in a bad mood, I take my ass to the river,” he says, before busting out a laugh. “And if I’m in a good mood, I take my ass to the river.”

During our first trip, when we likewise stopped in Greenville, a man watched us trudge into a hotel lobby all decked in rain gear with mud-streaked faces, and eyeballing our stacks of vinyl dry bags asked us: “Y’all come from the ocean?” Twenty-eight years later, as we’re checking out of a different hotel, another man gawks at our gear and asks: “Y’all doing the Oregon Trail?” Again: Life may be flux, but symmetries abound. In both cases the men listened raptly to the details of our time on the Mississippi as though the idea of such a trip had never crossed their minds, as though encountering a new strain of lunacy.

A river only has one desire: to become the sea. Just how it goes about fulfilling that desire, however, doesn’t really matter—not to the river, anyway. It’s constantly changing course, constantly recalibrating, constantly seeking the most efficient route to its wide blue destiny. As we cruise downstream toward an island called Wilson Point Bar, our penultimate campsite before Ruth will meet us with a trailer at the Vicksburg harbor, I find myself studying the water, which has attracted more adjectives than probably any other single natural feature in North America: dusky, muddy, rusty, molasses-colored, opal-tinted, thick, blue, chocolate, yellow, chalky, metallic, cypress-gray. Every one of these, I realize, is dead-on. That’s because the Mississippi’s surface is an infinitely shifting mosaic of riffles and boils and dimples and whitecaps and eddies and smooth glassy patches that moment by moment swing from blue to brown to green to brass to every other color chronicled. The Mississippi exhausts description because it exhausts our senses. The river may be a book, as Twain proposed, that one needed to learn to read. But it’s a book being ceaselessly rewritten, one sentence to the next, words vanishing here and new ones appearing there, four million gallons of revision per second surging past New Orleans.

After making camp on Wilson Point, Tom and I roam the pathless interior, astonished anew at the solitude afforded by these islands, at the no-man’s-land tranquility hiding in America’s belly like a pearl in an oyster. Much has changed since 1997, but not that. If anything, the river is even more of a refuge from the ruck of society, the ordinary, modernity, take your pick, than it was back then. In the interior, cottonwood fluff glides gently through the gold sunlight, drifting like snowflakes. Buckvine sprawls. Green hillocks of lush Bermuda grass undulate toward the shorelines, like dislodged pastures deposited here by a flood. Gin and tonics get mixed as the sunset turns the sky’s few fleecy clouds to orange. We set them on the boat’s stern as we take our nightly plunge, tickled by the notion of having our own personal swim-up bar. Dinner sizzles over driftwood flames. Stories get told and retold in the campfire glow. “Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time,” I recall Huck Finn saying. “Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts.

“It’s lovely,” Huck concludes, “to live on a raft.” And that, above all, remains the same.

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