This Idea was born about six years ago in Big Bend National park as two of my friends Aaron and Kyle, my Uncle Tom and myself floated the Rio Grande. It was a long trip, about 25 days but for Aaron and I it just wasn’t quite long enough. As we drifted between canyon walls we daydreamed out loud about spending weeks and then months on the river. We couldn’t get enough. Any river!!, every river!!!, the Amazon, the Yukon, the Yangtze and the Nile, the Ob and the mighty Mississippi; If they were long we longed to float their waters. “Well, if three and half weeks aren’t enough maybe three and half months would satisfy us,” Aaron suggested. “Or three and a half years,” I belted out.
Our daydreaming continued into the evenings and as we stoked the fire with gnarled mesquite branches we discussed the pros and cons about descending the longest rivers in the world. One river was too slow but accessible, others were fast but malaria ridden, some were romantic, or dammed, or too buggy, if militia weren’t the problem it would be the bears or hippos. We slung ideas back and forth and realized that some of the pros were cons and some of the cons were pros, but one thing remained true; we still wanted to float them all. But where should we begin? As our fantasy grew, days passed and more river miles were upstream of us, we noticed that the word “Mississippi” clung to our tongues.
So the question of ‘where?’ had been decided. Our thoughts however, were still being tantalized and our conversations controlled by ‘who?’, ‘when?’, ‘why?’, ‘how?’ and ‘what?’. The answers to those questions started out ruff around the edges then got smoothed out, torn up and stitched back together so many times in the last six years that a creationist might start listing left. Ill eventually fill you in on the evolutionary process, but for right now lets go back to the idea’s inception on the muddy little Rio Grande and the wayward river rats.