The Mississippi River in Dubuque.
A north-central Iowa woman is sharing the tales of her 13-year adventure of paddling a canoe the entire length of the Mississippi River.
Anne Sherve-Ose, from the Hamilton County town of Williams, is the author of “Mississippi Misadventures,” about a long and involved trip which started innocently enough.
“Some college friends and I decided to paddle canoes from Itasca in northern Minnesota to the Twin Cities,” Sherve-Ose says. “When we got to the Twin Cities, we decided to just keep on going. We just kind of segmented our way down the whole length.”
Each year, they’d meet and paddle from the point where their journey ended the previous year. It took 13 segments over 13 years to complete the route. Sherve-Ose says the book covers a range of subjects, like history, geology, and river navigation. She notes it’s not chronological.
“It doesn’t say we had tuna sandwiches for lunch and mac-and-cheese for supper,” she says. “It’s organized more on topics such as the storms that we endured or scary things that happened or animals and other wildlife that we experienced.” As for wildlife, the group saw plenty of deer, bald eagles, heron, fish, beavers and ducks, but one thing they were looking forward to was seeing an alligator.
“We were disappointed in that until the very last week of the trip when were having a picnic lunch by the side of the river,” Sherve-Ose says. “One of my friends said, ‘That looks like an alligator,’ and it was an alligator, in fact, there were four of them right by where we were eating and where we had just been swimming.”
Sherve-Ose is scheduled to talk about her book tonight at 6:30 at Kendall Young Library in Webster City. For information about buying her book, contact her at: [email protected].
(Thanks to Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)