The wind gently combing through the rust-colored weeds, calm waves lapping at the hull of my yellow kayak. Peaceful, right? Wrong. I didn’t want to spend one more minute on this stinkin’ river out in the middle of nowhere.
I swatted another mosquito. I was tired of muttering to the empty air, sick of complaining, sick of being alone. Sick of myself.
Ever since my wife, Mary, died, seven years earlier, I’d been searching for something I couldn’t quite describe. I’d quit my job as a restaurant manager to hike the Appalachian Trail, more than 2,000 miles. Then I’d biked 5,000 miles from Washington State to Florida. All by myself.
Alone was not the way we did things where I came from. I grew up in a traditional Mennonite family. My three sisters’ idea of getting away from it all was the cross-country bus trip with 30 of our cousins that they were on right now. I needed to be with family, they said.
No thank you. As much as I adored my family, they were smothering me. Stopping by with enough casseroles to feed an army, calling daily to check up on me. I hadn’t yet found what I was looking for, but I wasn’t going to find it with them, whatever it was. Closure? Peace? Understanding? God?
I’d wanted to paddle down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico ever since reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a kid. I bought all the guidebooks, did the research, mapped out my route. Most kayakers finished in three months. I would do it in two.
Sure, the first leg of the journey, in northern Minnesota, would be tricky. But I could manage it.
Wrong. I’d spent the first day stuck in weeds, forced to carry my kayak over my head in search of deeper water. Next came muddy swamps, channels clogged with fallen trees, wild-rice fields so tall and packed it was like trying to paddle through a hairbrush.
Then I flipped my kayak, landing headfirst in the roaring river and soaking my cell phone. It hadn’t worked since.
Now I was nearing a dot labeled Cohasset on the map, north of Grand Rapids. Not on my original route. In fact, I should’ve been in Iowa by now. But I was too exhausted to correct my course.
“Lord, I want to go home!” I cried out. Eight days—that’s how long it’d taken the mighty Mississippi to finally break a tough old guy like me.
What had I been trying to prove? I’d come out here to be alone, and I’d gotten my wish. I couldn’t even call anyone.
I spotted Cohasset in the distance. A desolate beach. I wondered what I’d find on shore. Bears? Coyotes? A plague of locusts?
My pocket vibrated. My phone? I grabbed it, hands trembling. The screen glowed. How was it working?
“Paul? Paul?” the voice on the other end crackled. My brother-in-law? Wasn’t he on the big bus trip?
“I had the strangest urge to call you,” he said. “You okay out there?”
“I dunno,” I admitted. “Honestly, it’s been a nightmare. What about you? How’s the West Coast?”
“We took a bit of a detour through Canada,” he said. “We’re headed back. You in Iowa yet?”
“Not yet,” I said, sitting up straighter in my kayak. “Where are you?”
“Let me check with the driver,” he said. “Looks like we’re about to pass through some tiny town…. Cohasset, Minnesota. Ever heard of it?”
A tiny dot on the map. A tiny dot where my kayak had been pulled. A place where I found myself asking, had I been carried here by the mighty Mississippi? Or something mightier? Had I really been alone?
I hung up and paddled to shore. Soon I was sitting on a warm, spacious bus with my brother-in-law, three sisters and 30 cousins. Exactly where I finally knew I needed to be.
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