I dare say that May is going to be very fine. More important than being my birthday month, which has actually been traditionally full of bad luck for me—camera wrecked in a tipped canoe, face split open after a nasty bike crash—is that it’ll be spent of paddling and roaming. Tomorrow afternoon, after class, I’m heading south of the not-so-notorious Minnesota/Iowa border to the fledgling Upper Iowa River for a 140 mile float to the Mississippi. Then, after a night at home, it’s off to the Great Smoky Mountains. After that, a trail clearing trip to the Boundary Waters.
Back to broken cameras—I was recently enjoying the website of a photographer whom paddled much of the Mississippi River (http://www.theriverinside.com/). While he readied to enter one of the river’s many locks, he capsized. His gear sunk to the bottom. More interestingly horrible, at another point in his journey, his photographic equipment was destroyed when a barge mistakenly unloaded its sewage into the photographer’s canoe! The details were scarce on how such could happen; though I can only hope that the man was not in his canoe at the time of the deluge.
