Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1117: Mississippi Source to Sea with Trapper Haskins

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Ep. 1117: Mississippi Source to Sea with Trapper Haskins · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk with adventures from around the globe to bring you the inspiration and motivation you need to get started in the outdoors or to keep you moving if you're already there.
0:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey Adventure Sports podcast family, I had to jump in here.
0:28
[SPEAKER_02]: This is episode 1117 and Trapper Haskins just knocked it out of the park, but not just this episode, I have since we had this conversation completed reading his book.
0:41
[SPEAKER_02]: and it is so well written.
0:43
[SPEAKER_02]: It is so much worth read.
0:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So make sure that you do get a copy of his book and read it and then I also have been listening to his music.
0:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It's on Spotify under Trapper Haskins and his lyrics are so thought-provoking and he has such an excellent voice.
0:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So with Trapper we get more than just an interview on the Adventure Sports Podcast.
1:04
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also a book and
1:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And I know you're gonna love this one.
1:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It ran a little bit longer than most because we just had so many good things to talk about.
1:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So plan for that and enjoy this episode.
1:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey friends.
1:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast.
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Today is going to be a fun one.
1:26
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to be talking about rowing the length of the Mississippi from the head waters all the way down to the Gulf and it was done in two stages and it was a very life impacting journey.
1:39
[SPEAKER_02]: The guest today is Trapper Haskins and Trapper.
1:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm excited to hear this one.
1:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I have interviewed one other person who actually did a similar trip.
1:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's just mind-blowing to me when people take on a trip like this length on a river of that size that's busy as well.
2:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, we'll get into all of that.
2:02
[SPEAKER_02]: But we have some other things.
2:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Trapper is written a book about this.
2:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And the book is called Cricket Old River, Rowing Toward Redemption on the Mississippi.
2:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you can learn more from the book, but I'm excited to hear more about what this redemption is on the Mississippi.
2:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Trapper also is a musician and he has a baseball league and we don't normally talk about baseball on the Adventure Sports podcast, but this is completely different.
2:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to visit about him briefly about that so you can see what's going on because it's super cool.
2:35
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, Trapper, welcome to the program.
2:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Kurt, thanks for having me.
2:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I guess the first question is where you want an inner tube or a canoe or a drift boat or out of two.
2:53
[SPEAKER_01]: We were in an 18 foot wooden rowboat, rowing and sailing boat, rowing and sailing boat.
2:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, right, right.
3:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So two rowing stations and a 72 square foot sail, boat was built out of wood and with again, it's got a
3:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The boat is actually called a Mississippi River y'all and it's a design that dates back to the 1800s.
3:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the kind of really used on the river.
3:21
[SPEAKER_01]: They would use it as a life boat on the on the on the steamboats, the hunters and trappers would use them and they were it was basically just like the John boat of the era a utility boat back in the 1800s.
3:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so, you know,
3:35
[SPEAKER_01]: just to get the context you did this in in two stages it separated by a lot of years a lot of years like 16 years but yeah the first stage was I guess the longest one and that was from the head waters down to New Orleans right right yeah so my wife and I so I'm from Memphis originally so I was born and oh okay and yeah yeah I fell in love with it sort of I mean it's a kid you know downtown Memphis there's a park called Mud Island and
4:04
[SPEAKER_01]: it's now a peninsula but it used to be in island a hundred years ago it's called city island and then in the 1970s I think the city built a model of the lower Mississippi river there and so it's basically like a bathometric chart it's a topographic map of the river filled with water and water flows through this thing every day and so when we were kids my mother would take
4:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And we would eat popsicles at the snack stand and whatever.
4:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when we were done, we would just throw the popsicle sticks in this little model of the river that's about maybe a quarter three, eights of a mile long, something like that.
4:43
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, so that's good size.
4:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's good size.
4:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the scale works out to
4:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one step is one mile.
4:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's like three feet to the mile or something like that.
4:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And it goes from Cairo and Illinois down to the Gulf of Mexico.
4:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So we would throw our popsicle sticks in there and just trace this thing down the river.
5:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And from this model of the river, you can look right off the edge of the park and you're looking down onto the Mississippi.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as a kid, I sort of had my, you know, that, you know, that's a thin mythology and stuff.
5:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of always loved the river.
5:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, fast forward a bunch of years, I worked on the, um, the sightseeing river boats that sort of tour up and down the water for on a worked on those.
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was my first chance to get out on to the river.
5:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I did that for a summer in college.
5:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And then my wife and I made the, um,
5:35
[SPEAKER_01]: made the youthful decision to both drop out of college about two years in and I wanted to learn how to build boats and so we got married and moved up to New England where I did a two year apprenticeship in a traditional wooden boat shop up in New England but while I was there I discovered the plans to this Mississippi River y'all really and yeah one one December
5:57
[SPEAKER_01]: day with three feet of snow on the ground.
5:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know just sort of overcome with a little bit of home sickness or whatever.
6:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I left Tennessee thinking, I don't want to live in the south anymore.
6:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been no interest in Memphis or the Mississippi or any of that but seeing this boat up in Maine sort of sparked that sort of love for the Mississippi.
6:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And so my wife and I spent about a year.
6:18
[SPEAKER_01]: building this boat in a friend of mine's garage up there and after I graduated my apprenticeship sort of my graduation present to myself and my wife before we started life in the real world was to spend three months going down the Mississippi and the intention was to go from the headwaters in northern Minnesota like atasca all the way down to the golf
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And growing up in Memphis, haven't only ever seen the Mississippi as this huge behemoth of a river, right?
6:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I soon learned how naïve I was and learn that where the river starts, it's just a tiny little, you know, free stream like everything else.
6:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So we actually did the first 500 miles in a canoe.
7:03
[SPEAKER_01]: then we swapped over to this to this riverboat.
7:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And we spent three months, you know, living on the river sleeping on the sand bars, rowing and sailing.
7:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we got to New Orleans, you know, of course the river gets increasingly busy.
7:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you get down to New Orleans, there are these ocean going ships and tankers and cargo ships.
7:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And we got to talk into a pilot of one of those.
7:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And he told us in no one certain terms that we were, you know, how to death wish, and this was crazy, and, you know, just really sort of read us the riot act, right?
7:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I decided, well, I sort of proven what I had to prove to myself, and so we ended up quitting the river in New Orleans, 100 river miles from the ocean.
7:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And, um,
7:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And then so that was stage one of the trip and I thought that was going to be the whole trip.
7:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And then 16 years later, I had a big boy job and I was working in an office where in a tie and you know had stable income, health insurance should have been perfectly happy.
8:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I had two beautiful healthy children and
8:10
[SPEAKER_01]: my wife and I, you know, still together.
8:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just, you know, the sort of the venture in me had sort of wethered by that point.
8:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, and I turned 40 years old and I thought, this is not, this is not where I thought I'd be.
8:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I said it in a wake-up call.
8:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
8:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Huge.
8:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, started suffering some some real debilitating panic attacks and stuff actually ended up in the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital here just trying to figure out what was going
8:42
[SPEAKER_01]: what was going on with me, I felt like I was kind of going crazy.
8:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Just stuck in this office.
8:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And we still had that boat that wouldn't boat had sad.
8:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was going to be my next question is what happened to the boat?
8:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
8:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The boat became a playground.
8:56
[SPEAKER_01]: The boat became a sort of shipwreck from my kids to play on.
8:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It became a castle.
9:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It was whatever the kids wanted it to be while they were going to play in.
9:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were 9 and 11 at the time when this sort of like this sort of,
9:10
[SPEAKER_01]: wake up call came and I told Mandy I said I want to finish the river we never finished it.
9:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we drugged the boat into the carport and the kids and I rebuilt you know we tore off all the rotten planks and rebuilt it and then the four of us um
9:26
[SPEAKER_01]: went down to New Orleans or any exact spot where Mandy and I pulled the boat out of the river, we put the boat back in the river with the four kids, with the two kids, the four of us, and finished the river.
9:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that part got a little exciting too.
9:42
[SPEAKER_01]: There's some encounters with ships and co-scard boats and the plight on the chair.
9:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Sheriff's office, and there was a tropical storm, and so it was, it wasn't the last hundred miles, it was not a cakewalk, that's for sure.
9:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know what, we're going to have to revisit all of this in detail because it just sounds so amazing, but yeah, I don't I've crossed them as a city several times just on a bridge of some sort mm-hmm
10:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember the first time it was just a source of wonder for me, because I didn't grow up on the big river, right, and to see a river that big, and to see the deep currents that come boiling up to the surface, the muddy water, you know, it's like, I don't know, it was like a living thing almost.
10:33
[SPEAKER_02]: It spook me a little bit and I'm a water person, you know, I've spent my life in water, but that river just looks so intimidating.
10:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, when I see water, I always ask the question, what would it be like to swim across or to dive under or to, you know, that kind of thing?
10:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
10:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was the first river I ever saw where I thought, oh.
10:55
[SPEAKER_02]: That could be a challenge, you know, and yes, anyway, it was kind of terrifying to me, but you grew up with a model of the river and being on the river and being able to be familiar with it.
11:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is kind of an off-the-wall question, but what did the river mean to you kind of on that gut level?
11:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, like you said, the intimidating, it doesn't seem to matter how familiar you are with the environment and the landscape and like what the water looks like, you know, the speed at which it's going like you said, there's boils coming up from the bottom, yeah, it doesn't it doesn't matter how.
11:35
[SPEAKER_01]: familiar you are with that stuff.
11:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still incredibly intimidating.
11:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember as a kid, being at that model, playing on the model of the Mississippi River and my mother or other adults saying, don't you dare ever go down to the real river?
11:50
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's just like this big serpent that just kind of rolls past the city.
11:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And every year there would be stories of people who had just gone for a quit swim in it.
12:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm forgetting his name right now, the blues musician went for a swim right there where my island is and got caught in the wake of a boat and never, never came back up.
12:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was super astonishing to me because the same year that we did the river at first in 2002, there was a Slovenian, or Slovakian, there was a European,
12:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Swimming the river.
12:32
[SPEAKER_01]: He was I think setting a record is something he wore a wet suit and swam the whole river.
12:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember thinking there's no way there's no way Those currents would grab you and pull you down the wakes would push you over.
12:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I just could not I couldn't imagine swimming across it let alone swimming the length of the river and Martin's Martin's trail I think the guy's name is but but he did it and some people have done it since then and
12:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I still sort of marvel at it because when you're on the river in a robot, you know, you mention those boils that kind of come up and I'm sure you get this on on some other rivers out west.
13:08
[SPEAKER_01]: If you glide across the top of one of those boils, it's almost like hitting black ice on a road.
13:14
[SPEAKER_01]: The boat just kind of pivots around and does what it wants to because the grants are fast.
13:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
13:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The currents come and straight up instead of going towards onelets, but yeah, it, it, um,
13:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I've obviously always been sort of infatuated or in love with the sort of mythology of the Mississippi and the whole, you know, the Huck Finn, Mark Twain, all the steamboats.
13:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I was a kid, that stuff just, I mean, that was the storybook stuff that I loved.
13:44
[SPEAKER_01]: At Mudd Island, there where there is or was a Mississippi River Museum, and inside that, they had the model of a
13:52
[SPEAKER_01]: or a mock-up of a steamboat pilot house.
13:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also remember standing in that pilot house like he was standing out as a drive in the boat.
13:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of always been a part of me.
14:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And like a lot of people say, you don't sort of appreciate your hometown until you leave it.
14:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't until I was a thousand miles away that I was like, man, there's something special about that.
14:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And that place.
14:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there are such a river.
14:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Matter of fact, you know, more about it than I do, I'm sure,
14:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, one of the the stats that I heard once that kind of blew my mind is where the Missouri and the Mississippi come together.
14:27
[SPEAKER_02]: If they had called the Missouri the Mississippi, then it would be the longest river in the world.
14:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's weird.
14:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I get into that in my book because the book is sort of a memoir and a travel log, but that, you know, being sort of a child of that area.
14:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, there's a lot of historicalicides and geographic
14:45
[SPEAKER_01]: your graphical tidbits and stuff in the book, and that's one of the things that I get into, actually where they come together, it kind of depends on the year, with some years the Mississippi is more volume and some years the Missouri is more volume, but the Missouri,
15:02
[SPEAKER_01]: the Missouri's longer.
15:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like you said, if they had called from St.
15:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Louis down, if they had called at the Missouri, I think it would be one of the longest, if not the longest, but for whatever reason, I guess cultural reasons, we call the Mississippi to one that runs up up into Minnesota.
15:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also get into, in my book, that the, you know, the Native Americans didn't consider
15:26
[SPEAKER_01]: you know that the river where it starts there's lake i taska and then the river flows a little bit into another lake and then it flows a little more to another lake and the native Americans considered each one of those separate streams a separate river and you know we the European sort of have this.
15:41
[SPEAKER_01]: obsessive need to find the the one you know that's where it starts.
15:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's sort of probably puzzled the Native Americans, but they showed us the way Yeah, the Missouri is I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it is it it I think the the Missouri
15:59
[SPEAKER_01]: as it is is longer than the Mississippi.
16:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe I could be wrong in that, but yeah, it's an astonishingly long river.
16:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it's long.
16:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, big rivers are fascinating to me.
16:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And we think about the famous rivers of the world, the Mississippi ranks right up there.
16:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Nick and hold it's own.
16:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a massive river.
16:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think about like the the Yukon, the Mississippi, of course, the Amazon and the Nile and some of the the big rivers in Asia, and they are all
16:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's no wonder that poets and musicians and people just kind of, they really get into rivers.
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the aspects of rivers and the Mississippi for some reason was the one that kind of impacted me the most this way.
16:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Water represents a transition between this world and the next.
16:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's something under the water that represents dying and death.
16:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think part of that is because there's a surface to the water that's moving and flowing, and we can't see beyond the surface very easily.
17:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
17:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So it stirs something inside of us about what's on the other side of that.
17:12
[SPEAKER_02]: You know?
17:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
17:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But the Mississippi for some reason, maybe because it's muddy, maybe because it's huge.
17:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I stand and look at the Mississippi, I'm like, wow.
17:24
[SPEAKER_01]: you know that one gets me yeah and i think that that that that's that's sort of uh... view of it is not not all that uncommon you know the native americans that live in the st.
17:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Louis area they have uh... on the on in altum illinois you know market uh... one of the early explorers had seen this giant bird looking
17:47
[SPEAKER_01]: monster painted on the rocks and the, you know, the Native Americans explained that that was a, a creature that lived underneath the river and up in a minute, up in Minnesota, where you've got the same Anthony falls, which the, the natives had a different name for in their view, there was, there was a monster that lived underneath those falls under the river.
18:08
[SPEAKER_01]: He's going to hear it roar 24 hours a day, you know, so they have their own own sort of traditions and mythologies about about monsters living under the river and it you really it's so muddy we talk to on the way down the river we.
18:25
[SPEAKER_01]: met these welders they were underwater welders oh well there is a there's a casino boat in market Iowa and I said how do you weld under underwater here like how far in front of your face can you see and he said about eight inches was about oh hey
18:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how you, I don't know how you weld if you can only see six or eight inches in front of your face, but yeah, there were a few times on the river where I intentionally sort of went under hold onto a rope just to just to feel how the how the current sort of pulled you and it's yeah, the world goes silent and you just just hear the rushing.
19:02
[SPEAKER_01]: of the water and you sort of become part of that tumbling and, you know, with the current and it's, it's, um, yeah, you're in another place, you know, you're here, but you're not here, kind of thing.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: It's special.
19:15
[SPEAKER_02]: That's, that's amazing.
19:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
19:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's, let's go over the first big leg in 2002.
19:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
19:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And let's, I mean, the whole idea that you built the boat and you and your wife
19:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that does appeal to me.
19:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't imagine, matter of fact, the Arkansas River starts just over the mountain ridge from where I live now.
19:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've thought about getting a kayak and going down until it's big enough or flows smoothly enough to switch to a canoe, going all the way back to where I grew up as a kid in Northeastern Oklahoma.
19:58
[SPEAKER_02]: the idea of being on the big river that takes you a long, long distance.
20:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about.
20:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was that like, yeah, it's funny.
20:07
[SPEAKER_01]: You described that sounds like a like a homecoming like you're but you're taking the scenic way home, which is in a lot of ways what what we did because we've been in Maine for two years and it was sort of like,
20:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to come back to Memphis, pass through Memphis, but I'm going to come back to Memphis via the river.
20:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to take the scenic route and what you talk about doing is essentially what we did, you know, if you talk about taking a kayak up there, is it leadville or what is the, what is the Arkansas start somewhere up there?
20:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep, it's above leadville.
20:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's at the climax mine really did right there is is where it starts and at that point I mean you would be waiting it because it's not even big enough for a kayak But yeah, as you get to once you get down to about lead bill then certainly Yeah, you could get on it so you can get yeah, so you talk about taking a kayak and then at the the more Floatable parts putting a putting a canoe and which is essentially what we did You know, we started in a borrowed canoe and left
21:04
[SPEAKER_01]: we left the robo because this robo their inch thick planks 18 feet long heavy it's oh yeah it weighs about dry the thing weighs about 600 pounds and so it was sitting on a trailer we left it at a marina on the Mississippi River in St.
21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Paul and then took a canoe from the headwaters which when you
21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure I'm sure varies year to year depending on the rain, but I mean, it was barely calf deep.
21:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we first got in, you know, you've got your your paddles, the blades are hitting the body.
21:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're the thing on the rocks.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
21:42
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely.
21:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And then every day it get just incrementally bigger and then it goes into Lake Bemidji and then comes out of Lake Bemidji on the other side and it's a little bit bigger yet and it just gets increasingly bigger but from the headwaters you know a lot of people think of the Twin Cities is being the top of the Mississippi but the reality is
22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: from the headwaters to the Twin Cities is 500 miles.
22:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're talking about, you know, you're talking about a quarter or fifth.
22:12
[SPEAKER_02]: If all we did is talk about the canoe part of the trip, 500 miles.
22:16
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be a great podcast.
22:18
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be a fantastic.
22:20
[SPEAKER_01]: 500 miles and I think it took us about three weeks to do that.
22:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we switched over into their robot and it sort of felt like, okay, this is what I came here to do.
22:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And some people have asked like, well, why didn't you just start their effects where, you know, that's where you could row the boat, but the sort of completest in me, you know, felt like there would be an asterisk.
22:42
[SPEAKER_01]: you know on the trip if I didn't start at the you know so we started that at Lake iTasca because i want to see the whole thing being a kid from Memphis and seeing this meager little stream you know just sort of making its way across these ancient lake beds and stuff and in northern Minnesota was just
22:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just otherworldly like how can this possibly be the Mississippi, but then when you see it's the same way if you see, you know, your child is a newborn and now my daughter was went off to her first day of her senior year of high school and I'm there.
23:12
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, this possibly be the baby that I held 17 years ago, but they, you know, so just the same the Mississippi just grows incrementally.
23:20
[SPEAKER_01]: until, you know, the ors are the the paddles aren't touching the bottom anymore.
23:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't reach from shore to shore anymore.
23:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's yeah, by the time it gets to the Twin Cities, it's a pretty formidable river by the time it gets there.
23:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But you still got another 2,000 miles to go to the Gulf from there.
23:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
23:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, okay, so you had built the boat.
23:43
[SPEAKER_02]: You thought you were going to take, but then you ended up in the canoe.
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: the last time that either my wife and I had been canoeing was probably in some middle school camp.
24:01
[SPEAKER_01]: We were not in any way experienced canoeers, but we just decided to go ahead and try it.
24:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, like anything, you sort of claim your paddles together and after a couple dozen miles or a couple of hundred miles, you sort of figured out.
24:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the end, we were pretty seasoned.
24:22
[SPEAKER_01]: five hundred miles is a good trip.
24:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:25
[SPEAKER_01]: No, we were not experienced that can do it.
24:27
[SPEAKER_02]: There's something beautiful about that.
24:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And I want to highlight what you just said like anything when you first start, but you learn it.
24:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of people see a dream of an adventure.
24:39
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and it seems it seems daunting or like there's too much of a headwind.
24:43
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, well, I don't even know how to do that.
24:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
24:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
24:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Well,
24:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I learned how to do it.
24:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I just was last week.
24:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I heard somebody say, I can't remember who it was, but they said, the price of mastery is embarrassment.
24:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
24:58
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to do willing to look stupid and just go out there and do something to get to the point where you've got to figure that out and get under control, so the price of mastery is embarrassment.
25:09
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I've heard it said another way.
25:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was something along the lines of experience as what keeps you from making so many mistakes, but the way that you get experiences by making so many mistakes.
25:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, something like that.
25:27
[SPEAKER_02]: That's very much especially in carpenterie too, right?
25:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, how do you learn to be an excellent carpenter?
25:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, I'm sure I've missed a couple of planks building that boat.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no question about that.
25:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's a good thing we have board stretchers.
25:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So how did you feel you and Mandy when you finally got back to the Twin Cities and you're able to get in?
25:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you call out a John boat?
25:47
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you call it?
25:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, we call it yall boat, which is where we are boat.
25:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, um, uh, why a WL is how it's spelled.
25:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Mississippi River yall.
26:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So we just called it the yall or the row boat.
26:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, but her name is uh, her name is Oxbow.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Oxbow.
26:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
26:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
26:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Which, if you're familiar with rivers is sort of those crescent shaped lakes that sort of flank these meandering rivers.
26:15
[SPEAKER_01]: They're old bins in the river that got cut off.
26:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we felt like our boat was sort of a ghost of the old river and so these oxbows are sort of ghosts of the old river, too.
26:25
[SPEAKER_01]: So it seemed like a fitting name, but yeah, when we got in, oxbow, it definitely felt like
26:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, closing one chapter and starting another one that I was super excited for because I knew once we got in that boat in Minneapolis I knew that that boat was going to take us on that river all the way back to back to home and hopefully the Gulf, you know, the plan was to the plan was to be in the Gulf in about three months.
26:50
[SPEAKER_01]: in the whole trip did take about three months even though we didn't didn't make it to the golf but once we got in that thing I knew this was this is my home for the next two and a half months yeah side of the robot yeah well so in the canoe did you try to stop at towns and get hotels or did you have a tent he did you can't buy the river or what did you do to get that far yeah we we um
27:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I bet we can't probably 98% of the night.
27:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, every now and then we would get, we got to hotel and Bemidji, I remember that.
27:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But so the nice thing is, in Minnesota, that head waters region, the Minnesota DNR has set up camp sites.
27:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there are camp sites with grills and portal ads.
27:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Just all the way down.
27:40
[SPEAKER_01]: yet well from from the headwaters to the twin cities or from the headwaters to
27:45
[SPEAKER_01]: close to the Twin Cities, not all the way down, but so there are designated campsites that you can camp on.
27:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So we stayed in the tent, remember hanging our hang our food from, you know, there's on the way to combat the bear hanging out.
28:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's couldn't get to them.
28:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But once you get down to the Twin Cities after that, there's no more DNR sites, but the entire Upper Mississippi is a National Wildlife
28:14
[SPEAKER_01]: with the locks and dams, you know, the river sort of pools and it's created hundreds, probably thousands of islands that do not have any sort of structures on them.
28:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we just, you know, so again, before the Twin Cities, we camped in DNR sites and after that, we would just, you know, round.
28:33
[SPEAKER_01]: four thirty five o'clock in the afternoon as we're rowing we would just start looking for a sandy bank to sort of set up on and there are some there's some beaches on the Mississippi that would rival anything that I've seen on the Atlantic or the part of the Gulf Coast.
28:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You have a beautiful sandy stretches there yeah.
28:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Very, very fun.
28:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you have sleeping quarters in the y'all boat?
28:54
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's an open boat, if you can imagine, just a John boat without the flat bow.
29:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It has a pointy bow, but it's 18 feet, three seats in it, completely open.
29:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's no cat in the open.
29:12
[SPEAKER_01]: right.
29:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So we slept every and we never slept in the boat.
29:16
[SPEAKER_01]: We always slept on the on the on the banks in a tent.
29:20
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, you know, every now and then we would meet somebody on the river that would invite us to their house with some really cool experiences met some amazing people.
29:30
[SPEAKER_01]: But most of the time we slept on on on the river banks.
29:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's funny when you start out and I'm sure this doesn't just go for river trips on any sort of
29:39
[SPEAKER_01]: extended endurance trip you always think it's going to be the nature and sort of the environment that makes the biggest impact.
29:48
[SPEAKER_01]: But man, the people you meet along the way, these just unexpected, unexpected conversations, you know, people because I mean, we met some conduits on the river that I'm still friends with today.
29:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And, um,
30:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We had complete strangers, give us the keys to their car, to run to a grocery store.
30:04
[SPEAKER_01]: In case there wasn't one near the river.
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And we would, yeah, we would stop in towns and we had big cooler.
30:14
[SPEAKER_01]: On the boat so we just load up probably three or four days worth of food, we had two Jerry cans that carried a total of 11 gallons of water even though we're floating on millions of gallons of water.
30:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We weren't drinking the other water.
30:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like any other camping excursion, I guess, just the difference being we were we were floating from campsite to campsite or rowing rather.
30:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't float quite so much.
30:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We did a whole lot of rowing.
30:42
[SPEAKER_02]: was the current enough to help out a bit?
30:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Or did you really feel like it was a lot of work?
30:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's what's interesting is that they say that if a range drop that falls and like I task a, will be in the Gulf of Mexico in 90 days.
30:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It takes about three months, okay, four, four, water to go from one into the other.
31:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that when we started this trip, I really did think we were gonna spend a lot of time,
31:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we would use the ors to sort of get out of the way of the toe boats or maybe hit some landing that we wanted to go to.
31:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But the reality is that summer, when we measured the current, it was only going about a mile and a half to two miles an hour.
31:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we really did row probably eight hours a day because we were averaging something like 30, 35 miles a day.
31:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
31:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it was quite a bit more rowing than we thought it would be.
31:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We also had, again, we also had a sale, and I thought we'd get to sail a whole bunch, but being in the summertime, the prevalent winds came out of the south and the south west.
31:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And so a lot of, you know, skrippers going south, we had a lot of headwinds.
31:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we sailed, I think, a total of about 15 miles of the whole,
31:59
[SPEAKER_01]: River way but 15 miles that's it we sailed our two there were two different days we had a north wind and we put the sail up and and got about 15 miles but yeah so we had kind of come up with this trick to figure out the the the current so every day at noon we would stop for lunch and we had charts we had like the navigational charts the same ones at the towboat towboat pilots you right and there's day markers you know there's um there's markers on the side of the river
32:28
[SPEAKER_01]: with a mileage counter and so when we passed one we would stop for lunch and we'd stop for exactly an hour and then an hour later I'd sort of figure out where we were on the chart and then just do the math and figure out how far did you float in an hour right and I gotta tell you most of the times it was only about a mile and a half some days it was two miles so it's you know the current's moving it's a powerful current but it was not
32:54
[SPEAKER_01]: bombin' along like it may be would be in the springtime when there's snow melts and spring rains and stuff.
33:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was August, September and October that we did the trip and so the river wasn't low but it certainly wasn't going and it's fastest.
33:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Interesting.
33:12
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think about all the questions that listeners must have and we could spend three hours on this trapper with no problem.
33:18
[SPEAKER_02]: People are going to ask, well, what about all the barges?
33:22
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, the big boats that are using this waterway.
33:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you don't want to tangle with those.
33:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
33:27
[SPEAKER_01]: No, you don't know.
33:28
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't know.
33:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, fortunately for us, those tow boats have to stay in the shipping channel and the shipping channel is marked by green and red.
33:38
[SPEAKER_01]: booze on either side of the channel.
33:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And this robot that we had is a flat bottom boat that only draws at three or four inches of water.
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And so anywhere with that.
33:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we really could go anywhere.
33:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So we would stay in the cart.
33:51
[SPEAKER_01]: We would stay in the channel because that's where the quickest current is.
33:55
[SPEAKER_01]: The current runs the quickest there.
33:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we saw a tow boat either bearing down on us or coming around the corner coming up towards us, we would just kind of mows you
34:07
[SPEAKER_01]: and just sort of skirt the shoreline.
34:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So the funny thing is when you're rowing a boat, you're looking backwards the whole time.
34:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're heading down river.
34:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And so every couple of strokes, maybe or I would look over our shoulder to make sure we weren't on a collision course with any big boats.
34:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, we would just skirt out of their way a little bit and stay on the side.
34:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I think initially we were worried about them throwing up big wake, but they really didn't.
34:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, being in Memphis, you'd see these tow boats come by.
34:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just sort of imagined this kind of parade of tobots, just sort of a non-stop, you know, procession of them.
34:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reality is there were some days where, I mean, half the day would go by.
34:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And we wouldn't see another boat, a pleasure boat, a tobot.
34:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you'd get from, it'd be noon before we saw anybody.
35:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Now there were other days when they were sort of crowded up around the locks and dams, but it was surprisingly,
35:09
[SPEAKER_01]: surprisingly uncrowded in the northern part of the river.
35:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, those are more like lakes because there's something like 29 locks and dams between Minneapolis and St.
35:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Louis.
35:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But once you get past St.
35:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Louis, it's a free-flowing river all the way to the golf.
35:27
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no dams.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just going at its own pace.
35:33
[SPEAKER_01]: What was it like going through the locks?
35:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And the first one was kind of a little
35:38
[SPEAKER_01]: you go in this big chamber, and you just hear these doors just clang, shut behind you, and then the water starts draining out.
35:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this cavernous concrete room here and just gets deeper and deeper.
35:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, wow.
35:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So anybody who's unfamiliar with that whole system is basically like a liquid staircase that goes from
36:01
[SPEAKER_01]: St.
36:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Louis up to Minneapolis and the reason that the Corps of Engineers did that was to give the towboats
36:11
[SPEAKER_01]: enough depth to be able to push a fully loaded, you know, barge because if there were no locks and dams, there's times of the year that the river would be unpassable, but those dams hold back enough water to allow the tow boats to move.
36:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And they also mean you have to row your boat a lot more.
36:32
[SPEAKER_02]: because you don't have much cars right?
36:34
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
36:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the northern part of the river definitely a lot less current.
36:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, because it's a series of like, said 20, it's a series of lakes, 28 lakes or something like that that, yeah, yeah.
36:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, a lot of rolling.
36:49
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, did you come to a time where you and Mandy were like, why did we do this?
36:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, what have we gotten ourselves into?
36:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Or was it more a matter of, you know, this is working?
36:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we're going to make it.
36:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, again, anybody that does these sort of endurance things.
37:02
[SPEAKER_01]: There were days of just excruciating boredom, you know, we're just rowing for hours on end and the scenery doesn't seem to change.
37:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that there was ever a time that we questioned why we were doing it.
37:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There was definitely an instance when I wish I wasn't there when we were in the state of Mississippi.
37:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a fisherman who, it became clear to me that he was a little
37:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was a little smitten with Mandy and a loaded pistol came out and that we had a we had a we had us an issue There that's a whole scene written about in the book obviously we both made it out Okay, but I mean that was the only time when I thought got I don't want to be here There were other times I remember when we were going through Natchez, Mississippi I still remember this Mandy said to me one day was it was a beautiful sunny fall day southern Mississippi
37:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, we realized we were coming up to the last state line would be going going across the Louisiana state line.
38:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember Mandy Santan, she's like, I wish this river could just go on forever.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we really had for the most part had it just unbelievably, you know, romantic time going down the river, just meeting amazing people and sort of sort of living, you know, living that dream I'd had ever since I was a kid at Mud Island.
38:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was on my own little popsicle stick going down the river.
38:27
[SPEAKER_02]: which I want to talk about the book a little bit here.
38:30
[SPEAKER_02]: But before we do, had Mandy written a book, would it be the same book?
38:34
[SPEAKER_02]: How different would it be?
38:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that and I'm very grateful for the fact that she did this trip because I wanted to do it.
38:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Now she's an incredibly adventurous person and as I write in the book,
38:50
[SPEAKER_01]: When I first approached a subject of doing the river with her, that I think if I had said, hey, do you want to hike the Appalachian Trail?
38:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have gotten the same answer, which was Hellia, let's do it because she's just a very outgoing, go-manity, adventurous.
39:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've said many times if you read the book that
39:07
[SPEAKER_01]: a couple of people that have read it and said, man, man, he's really tough.
39:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, yeah, Mandy, Mandy's tougher than I've ever pretended to be.
39:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's, yeah, she's a, she's a good partner.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, so she did it because I wanted to do it.
39:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And then 16 years later,
39:24
[SPEAKER_01]: When we went back, she said to be, and this is in the book.
39:27
[SPEAKER_01]: She says, I don't need to go back to the river.
39:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I did what I needed to do there.
39:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you need to go back, then I'm all for it.
39:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Now go with you.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So if she had written a book, we had a similar experience, but we had different motivations.
39:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I think her motivation was being an incredible partner that she is.
39:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, maybe proving something to myself that I needed to prove.
39:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think she had that same, I don't know, maybe it's a shortcoming.
40:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, she didn't have that same desire, I guess.
40:06
[SPEAKER_01]: The same drive.
40:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I'd like to ask people why.
40:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Why'd you do it, you know?
40:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's fascinating.
40:17
[SPEAKER_02]: People always have a different why.
40:19
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think it in the end, when it's done, often the why is even changed because of the experience.
40:26
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like I expected this, but I got that and did.
40:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, 100% I totally agree, because I think that my why, when we did the trip in 2002, we were in our 20s.
40:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We were newlyweds, been married for a year and a half.
40:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think my why at that time was just the pure adventure of it, just to take the scenic route back home to Memphis and be, you know, it'd just be this sort of triumphant return.
40:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe from Maine, I'm not sure.
40:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was just the pure adventure and just to experience, try to experience the history of the river.
40:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that was my why.
41:01
[SPEAKER_01]: But I know, for a fact, when we went back in 2018, you know, I was working that office job and my wife, for going back and fishing, the river was because truthfully a lot of things or some of the things that I had sort of begun in my life had not gone the way that I wanted them to go.
41:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'd had some had some failings, whatever in the music industry and I had a wood shop at one time,
41:29
[SPEAKER_01]: that I had to close when the economy sort of took a crash around 2010.
41:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I took that office job just for some secure, predictable income and to have health insurance and that kind of thing.
41:42
[SPEAKER_01]: All those sort of adult decisions you make sure you have a kid.
41:46
[SPEAKER_01]: When I, as I turned 40 and looking back on where I, looking back on what had brought me there, the more it bothered me that we hadn't finished the river
41:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It became just one more thing in my life that I had maybe begun, but not really seeing through to completion or hadn't really succeeded in the way that I initially sat out to succeed.
42:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that my why, and I don't know if I ever thought about this, but I think my why in going back in 2018 with the family was to just kind of set things right.
42:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess that's the
42:22
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the tagline, the book is rolling toward redemption on the Mississippi, you know, really trying to prove to myself that I did have what it took to finish the river and the first place, even though we didn't to prove that I still had that sort of like spark of an adventure inside of me, and yeah, to just sort of reclaim who I once was.
42:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that was probably
42:46
[SPEAKER_02]: definitely my why on the second trip so yet it meant a lot more on the on the second trip you know it was personal I guess yeah oh I get that you know you hear people talking about midlife crisis and I think that for a lot of people what that is is a realization that we don't live forever and a realization that the dream we had when we were 20 looks different when we're
43:12
[SPEAKER_02]: mm-hmm and it's not it's not a matter of succeeding or failing.
43:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It's it's a matter that life Life has a current and it's gonna steer us to and I hear people say real life is what happens when you made other plans mm-hmm You know, it's a painfully true.
43:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and So I get it.
43:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I'm not gonna go on about this, but I was asked the other day what would I tell me 18 year-old self and and
43:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought for just a second I thought I would tell me 18 year-old self never to take that first job.
43:48
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a great question.
43:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a really good question.
43:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know because what you did is you worked in the trades, you had your wood shop, you built a life around the things that you loved, the skill set that you had developed, even working on this boat, you know.
44:05
[SPEAKER_02]: but then you got to the point of, well, I've got to take an alternate route for a while.
44:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
44:10
[SPEAKER_02]: What was that like to go into the office setting?
44:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the office that I worked in, it was sort of, it was adjacent to the industry that I was in before was an architecture firm.
44:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But I went from building stuff to being the guy sitting at a computer drawing, the two-dimensional, the two-dimensional drawings.
44:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't, and I'm not an architect.
44:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I just have a I got a CAD certificate and so when things were look things were kind of kind of bleak for us financially And we you know we had dropped out of school years ago to go to Maine my wife went back to school to finish her graphic design degree she had started years ago
44:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we dropped out of school, I was an English major, you know, and I did not want to go back and be an English major because I knew I would just be stuck in a classroom or something like that.
44:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I went back and I got a CAD certificate.
45:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just got a nine months certificate to draw stuff on the computer.
45:06
[SPEAKER_01]: which is great by the way, which is great by the way.
45:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It was in its service purpose at the time and it was sort of the shortest path between, there was the shortest path between financial ruin and a steady paycheck basically.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
45:24
[SPEAKER_01]: but I recognized very quickly after being in there.
45:29
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first job where I'd ever had a computer, the first job where I'd ever had a chair that I sat in.
45:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I've always been on my feet building stuff.
45:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And it became clear after about four to six months once the predictability of the paycheck wore off once the sort of newness of the job wore off that this is maybe does not fit my identity very well and but I didn't really know where to go with that time I didn't want to leave and go back into the trades which were you know still kind of
46:02
[SPEAKER_01]: still trying to make their way back from the from the market crash.
46:06
[SPEAKER_01]: But, um, you know, so I stayed there for two and a half, all close to three years, um, just sort of toiling away at it.
46:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it wasn't until I turned 40 and had this sort of lightning bolt morning.
46:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a rainy, Monday morning in the winter, just weeks after I'd turned 40 years old and I was getting ready to go into the office and I thought, my God, this is what it's come to and this is what I'm gonna do for the next 15 years until I retire or 25 years or whatever.
46:44
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
46:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, 25 years goodness.
46:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And just,
46:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't face that prospect was just too depressing, too bleak, and I started to suffer these panic attacks really, you know, I drive downtown to the office where in my shirt and tie and I'd get the elevator and I'd be nauseous in the elevator going up there.
47:10
[SPEAKER_01]: put on my earbuds and turn on the computer and just start having these my heart would start beaten really fast and I was just it was not it wasn't healthy at all and I didn't really recognize why I was like what is going on and I ended up checking myself in because I was really worried about what was happening.
47:30
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, this psychiatrist and I get into this whole thing in the in the book about how he really made me aware of the fact that, you know, eons ago when we were on the on the Savannah's in Africa.
47:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we've got this fighter flight, you know, the amygdala when your brain sort of triggers this fighter flight for dangers.
47:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are external dangers, but with our modern brain, it doesn't always differentiate between external dangers and inner dangers.
48:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And those inner dangers can be like an identity crisis, you know, that sort of who am I. Right.
48:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And it can trigger the same sort of reactions that would be triggered if you were faced
48:13
[SPEAKER_01]: You know battle with some wildlife or something as crazy as that sounds and so can't remember him asking me Yeah, has anything changed in your life in the last few years that would sort of um that would sort of Shake up your sense of identity and I thought oh, yeah
48:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And very shortly after then is when I went home and I said I've got a, I've got to quit this job and I want to go back to the trades, but I want to do the river first.
48:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to, I want to finish that, you know, put, I want to put a, put a, put a pin on that at the, at the finish line.
48:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So a little trapper, I'm going to be really open here, you just told a parallel story to why the adventure sports podcast exists.
49:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
49:01
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... my first year in the office two years in the office i thought i was gonna die yeah completely numb i'd sit down in the chair and just be like what am i doing here you know not not not not an office work i mean it can be a wonderful thing right and and matter of fact i have a thirty plus year career of it that fed my family and and offered us beautiful opportunities
49:29
[SPEAKER_02]: But there was always this part of me that said, this is not who I am, right, and when Travis and I started the podcast 10 years ago, it was, it was a call to that, you know, it was like, oh, we know what we love to do on the weekends, we know what we wish we could do full time.
49:47
[SPEAKER_02]: We're at least we can start a podcast and encourage people to do more of it, get more involved in the, I mean, I spent all of my spare time adventuring, that's, that's really what it was all about, but that it was kind of that crisis in identity and it's a very parallel story to your own.
50:12
[SPEAKER_02]: and the subtitle is rowing toward redemption on the Mississippi and you just explained the motivation and what you went through, we totally get that, right?
50:23
[SPEAKER_02]: How did it feel with your kids now?
50:27
[SPEAKER_02]: To launch the boat, be back on the river again.
50:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you describe that moment?
50:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was everything I wanted it to be for a few minutes.
50:38
[SPEAKER_01]: When I asked the kids now, this is a couple of years ago, when I asked the kids now, yeah, how was that going back on the river?
50:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And my daughter was terrified, and my son was bored.
50:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And they have both said, I don't want to go back out on any any rivers.
50:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm hopeful that I'm hopeful that I planted a seed in them.
51:01
[SPEAKER_01]: to sort of follow through with things and to sort of chase their own adventure.
51:07
[SPEAKER_01]: But for me, excuse me, personally, when we launched back on the river, it was really surreal.
51:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It was very surreal because we were in the exact same place that we had been 16 years earlier when manning our 20s are mid 20s.
51:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And here I was now 40, 41 years old.
51:26
[SPEAKER_01]: What these two little kids and it was surreal, it was magical and it was within a few minutes of us being on the river, pretty horrifying, pretty terrible.
51:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, now you had the really big traffic to deal with all the way down, right, right?
51:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we had the same tankers and stuff
51:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't think about this when we went out there.
51:54
[SPEAKER_01]: First, but the difference was when Mandy and I had gotten a new oil on 16 years earlier, we were expert growers, we had spent every day on the river, we could judge the closing speed of ships and barges.
52:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were sort of that one with that environment.
52:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, 16 years later, we relaunched directly into that same environment.
52:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And the same way you might become rusty as a musician or any other thing.
52:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we didn't have a row.
52:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That was just like riding a bike.
52:26
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't the issue.
52:28
[SPEAKER_01]: The issue was judging the closing speed, like I said, of these ships around us.
52:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It was
52:34
[SPEAKER_01]: an unbelievably crowded day in the port of New Orleans and it was a foggy day our turn foggy no very soon after yes it wasn't foggy when we got on the river but by the time we got by the time we got out there within a mile or two this fog sort of drew a veil over the river and yeah it got real sketchy real quick
52:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what the book actually opens with us going back into the Gulf of New Orleans and the the Coast Guard ends up making an appearance very soon after we
53:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was, that's why I say that it was sort of surreal and beautiful when we first got on the river.
53:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But within a few minutes, it's sort of turned into a climactic, you know, dangerous situation.
53:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And a situation that I think my father-in-law has maybe not quite forgiven me for the other granted out into that environment.
53:31
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I interviewed a lady, boy, seven years ago or so, who had wrote across several of the oceans and she was going to do the Pacific and she left, I believe, from Japan, but she hit so much shipping traffic the first day and almost got taken out by one of the really.
53:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it was the same kind of thing that you're talking about.
53:53
[SPEAKER_02]: she she survived it when the ship was on top of her and she couldn't get out of the way she fired a flare and and they saw the flare and and mister you know and and so she turned around and went back and said nope not this trip and you know I can imagine just think about the size difference and the speed difference and the power difference right you have
54:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can stay out of their way, but if they can't even see you, you're just like a moth hit in the windshield of a of a car going down the highway.
54:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I mean, yeah, you're in you're invisible.
54:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the things 16 years earlier when we had talked to that pilot of the ship.
54:34
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, you realize
54:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You guys aren't even in a metal boat.
54:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You're in a wooden boat, like on the radar and vision.
54:41
[SPEAKER_01]: You're in visible.
54:42
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, you guys are invisible out there.
54:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
54:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
54:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, that's, uh, so did you, uh, did you finally, I mean, I don't want to spoil the story, but did you make it to the Gulf?
54:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We made it to the Gulf, but not with the kids.
54:59
[SPEAKER_01]: When we launched the boat a couple of days into it, there was a tropical storm, well offshore.
55:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, well.
55:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Tropical storm Dennis.
55:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we were about halfway done with that first 100 miles, they were projecting, this is no lie.
55:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They were projecting, trop storm Dennis, to hit the mouth of the Mississippi.
55:20
[SPEAKER_01]: The same day we had planned on getting down there, really.
55:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we actually had to,
55:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We actually had to abort that first trip.
55:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Labor Day weekend, 2018.
55:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And we got 50 of the hundred miles done.
55:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had to go ahead to call it off.
55:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember on the drive home,
55:44
[SPEAKER_01]: telling Mandy, like, well, we're going back.
55:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not, you know, I can't, I can't come back close.
55:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
55:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And then not finish it.
55:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I get into her reasons in the book and she said, we can go back, but we're not bringing the kids.
55:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they were there for half of that return trip.
56:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And then kind of poetically, it was just she and I on the last few miles, the same way that it was.
56:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what came here really happened.
56:12
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
56:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
56:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't want it to be that way, but once it happened like that, it sort of felt yeah, this works this works Kylie, rivers are a metaphor for life aren't they?
56:22
[SPEAKER_02]: 100% I mean my kids are all but one of graduated from college and that's my wife and I in the boat again Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean yes, it just uh
56:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the way it works.
56:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's beautiful and it's sad and it's amazing and yeah, it's everything all at once.
56:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll trapper a wish we had hours more.
56:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to go a little bit long if you have time.
56:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that all right to go another few minutes?
56:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And for the listeners out there, I'm just enjoying this so much.
56:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you are too.
56:54
[SPEAKER_02]: But I have a few more questions that we just have to have to ask.
56:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So would you a gut back on the water with your kids and the fog bank moves in and then you've got a tropical storm headed your way and it reminded me of the probably my favorite backpacking trip that I did with two of my sons but we were in a valley that there wasn't really even a trail because no one ever went there.
57:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It was so deep in the mountains and the storms.
57:21
[SPEAKER_02]: We're unbelievable, you know, you just rain and hail and lightning and and at one point we took shelter from a hillstorm for quite a while and then as we're hiking on up we saw smoke in the forest and we thought wow there's another person out here unbelievable there's a campfire and then the smoke went away and we realized no that was a lightning strike
57:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, so there was nobody, but the point of all of this story is when we when we finally climbed out of that valley, we had to go over a very precipitous pass with no trail and the top part of it was literally rock climbing with our our heavy packs with a way more exposure than we wanted, but I'd inquired how to get through that with Rangers and stuff and they said, well, no one's ever done that that we know of, there's not a way, you know what?
58:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But when we got out the other side, we got up on top of this pass at about 12,500 feet or maybe a little higher.
58:21
[SPEAKER_02]: The sun came out and it was wildflowers and mountain lakes and sunshine, emberds and butterflies and unicorns and my son said, it's almost like that valley just didn't
58:42
[SPEAKER_02]: to get out.
58:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And all we had to do is just get out of that one valley and everything was just glorious after that.
58:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
58:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm just wondering, did you have kind of that feeling when you got back in the river and the fog moves in and the tropical, you know, it's like, yeah, it doesn't want us here, you know.
59:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's I think I have a different viewpoint of that because I did have
59:11
[SPEAKER_01]: the river just doesn't want us here.
59:13
[SPEAKER_01]: My thought that I remember having is it wants us here, just wants to test us.
59:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not going to provide an easy path.
59:27
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not just going to skate down there, but I feel like
59:31
[SPEAKER_01]: after hitting all of that traffic years ago and the pilot warning us away from it, it was almost like to come back into that environment.
59:41
[SPEAKER_01]: It couldn't, it couldn't have been easy, you know, it was, I feel like it was the way it was supposed to be.
59:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if that's, I don't know, I think the river, if it wanted anything, it wanted to sort of, maybe make sure that I really wanted to finish it.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It fits the stage of life you're in too, you know, so much like I'm not going to give you this right you got to picture yourself up by the city of pants and get through you isn't that the way it is you're going to have to fight for it.
1:00:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:00:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
1:00:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So the word redemption, you know, rowing toward redemption on the Mississippi.
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Did it work.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, 100% I remember saying that it's in the in the book where my when we finish their river and you know my wife.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_01]: She's just such a stoic and she's she asked me we got to the very end and we're standing on the last bit of land there.
1:00:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So we rode out into the golf and turned around and sort of beached Oxbow on that last little spit of land and she said she said how does it feel and I was like I don't know whether
1:00:55
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I don't know whether I want to double over and cry or just laugh abhoriously, you know, I had such a mix, I had such a mix of emotions.
1:01:05
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's whole, I think maybe it was bitter.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It was bitter sweet.
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it was everything I wanted, but it was like when you finished some grand thing, whatever that thing is, man, it's really like you just really fit.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like the finish line is so
1:01:24
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, it's right there.
1:01:25
[SPEAKER_01]: You see that there rivers there.
1:01:26
[SPEAKER_01]: There's land on both sides and then all sudden it's just ocean.
1:01:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
1:01:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's it's a very.
1:01:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very discernible finish line.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to reach that finish line, 16 years after we had initially set out to do it was, yeah, it was beautiful and bitter sweet and you know, I know I wept a little bit.
1:01:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And Mandy, of course, did not because she's a stoic, but yeah, it was, I'm glad we did it.
1:01:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It was worth going back.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It did, it did for me what I think I wanted it to do.
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_01]: and that was the sort of proved to myself that I still had it in me and when we got back from the trip, I never went back to the office and I'm still doing carpentry, doing finished carpentry and furniture and the kind of stuff that I love doing.
1:02:18
[SPEAKER_01]: More constantly store homes sometimes, being a history geek, I love working on a historic home if I get the chance to do that.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So cool.
1:02:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, hey, do you mind reading just a short passage?
1:02:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Some sure that would give us a feel for the flavor of your book?
1:02:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
1:02:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to read the first couple of paragraphs in the book, so that the part that we just talked about in the port of New Orleans, 2018.
1:02:44
[SPEAKER_01]: OK.
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_01]: The day we relaunched the boat.
1:02:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So the book starts
1:02:50
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, way into the way into the story.
1:02:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a prologue port of New Orleans, 2018.
1:02:56
[SPEAKER_01]: When the ship emerges from the mist, it is clear we are in danger.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not there just moments ago when we read it our ears and decided to cross the river.
1:03:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Now like an apparition, it looms.
1:03:12
[SPEAKER_01]: The vague outline of its monstrous form comes into focus as though the thing is materializing out of the fog.
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_01]: constructing itself from the very air.
1:03:22
[SPEAKER_01]: My nine-year-old son is seated in the stern, his eyes wide with awe.
1:03:27
[SPEAKER_01]: He is too young to fully comprehend the crisis that is unfolding.
1:03:31
[SPEAKER_01]: My daughter, nearly 11, croutches in the narrow taper of the bow and fixes her gaze on the admitricity of the oncoming tanker.
1:03:39
[SPEAKER_01]: She understands the predicament.
1:03:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I know this because I can hear her crying discrete, muffled tears.
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Their mother, my wife of nearly 20 years, is focused solely on the task of growing.
1:03:52
[SPEAKER_01]: She and I are furiously pumping the ores, trying to pass through the channel ahead of the ship.
1:03:58
[SPEAKER_01]: The boat we are traveling in is not quite 18 feet long.
1:04:02
[SPEAKER_01]: The hull is painted dark green and sits only inches out of the water.
1:04:06
[SPEAKER_01]: To the industrial operations along the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, we are a nuisance.
1:04:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Looking down from the refinery docks, scowling men and hard hats, gesture for us to move on and throw their swatting away a pesky mosquito.
1:04:21
[SPEAKER_01]: To the tanker, this steel monolith churning up river, we are invisible.
1:04:28
[SPEAKER_01]: In consequential as a drifting twig, and we are directly in its path.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_01]: What the hell are we doing here, I think?
1:04:36
[SPEAKER_01]: My mind frightened and racing.
1:04:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the beginning of a holiday weekend.
1:04:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We could be anywhere else.
1:04:42
[SPEAKER_01]: The beach, the ballpark, the mountains.
1:04:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But we are here in the lowlight, courting death on this river.
1:04:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know why, because I've been here before, and I left something unfinished.
1:04:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, okay.
1:04:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Well,
1:05:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I am lucky because you sent me a book and now I can enjoy reading it.
1:05:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm super excited about that.
1:05:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's going to be fun.
1:05:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I have not read it yet, but I am going to your app right.
1:05:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I really think that's fun.
1:05:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I, we got to wrap up, but I want to hear about your music.
1:05:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:05:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:05:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So do you have a place where people can hear your music?
1:05:21
[SPEAKER_02]: What kind of music is it?
1:05:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh sure.
1:05:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
1:05:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a, you know, just think or songwriter kind of stuff.
1:05:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I live south of Nashville now in Thompson Station.
1:05:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but you know, growing up in Memphis, um, you got to play an instrument.
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_01]: If you live in there, you can ask for it.
1:05:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to be a songwriter.
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, uh, yeah, I'm on Spotify and YouTube, just as my name, Trapper Haskins.
1:05:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I've been playing guitar since I was about 12, been writing songs since shortly after I picked up a guitar.
1:05:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, early teenager, I've put out a few records, the last record that I put out, uh, it's called Blood in the Honey.
1:05:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And that came out in 2020.
1:05:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We released the record right at the beginning of COVID.
1:05:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of the, all the promotional shows got canceled.
1:06:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And, um, man, it was a brilliant time to put out a record.
1:06:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll tell you.
1:06:06
[SPEAKER_01]: But I've got a new batch of stuff that I'm working on trying to get recorded.
1:06:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But, um, yeah, I've been doing that for many years.
1:06:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it's just under my name, Trapper Haskins.
1:06:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also, I've got a website, TrapperHaskins.com.
1:06:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, yeah, my music on there.
1:06:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, it has the book is, is for sale on that.
1:06:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It the book is on Amazon, but the book is also for sale in my website on the store.
1:06:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:06:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:06:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's very, very cool.
1:06:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And then just as a parting shot, I promised the guests or the audience that we were going to talk about a unique kind of baseball.
1:06:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So tell us what you're doing and we'll wrap up with that.
1:06:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:06:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So I play what we call vintage baseball.
1:06:49
[SPEAKER_01]: uh here in Nashville and around the state of Tennessee and this is baseball as it was played in 1864 so the rules are a little bit different We wear the goofy old-time uniforms.
1:07:01
[SPEAKER_01]: We play a bare-handed version of baseball because gloves didn't come around until about the 1880s
1:07:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we play, again, vintage baseball.
1:07:10
[SPEAKER_01]: If anybody walked up to the field, they would immediately recognize it as baseball.
1:07:16
[SPEAKER_01]: But some of the rules are a little different.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the ball can bounce on the ground and be caught for an out-eat.
1:07:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The fielder doesn't have to catch it out of the air.
1:07:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So the rules are a little bit different.
1:07:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, we plan to league that is competitive, but it's not contentious.
1:07:32
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's more, if you have a love for the game,
1:07:35
[SPEAKER_01]: If you love history and the camaraderie and stuff, then you know, invite people to come out and play with us.
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Our youngest player, I believe is 18 and our oldest player last year was 80 years old.
1:07:46
[SPEAKER_01]: There's teams all around the country.
1:07:47
[SPEAKER_01]: We play up in Ohio.
1:07:49
[SPEAKER_01]: We've played at the field of dreams in Iowa.
1:07:51
[SPEAKER_01]: We've played down in Georgia, but yeah, we're all around Tennessee.
1:07:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball.
1:07:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're a history geek, a baseball lover, just all around good person, you'd probably enjoy it.
1:08:05
[SPEAKER_01]: If you just anybody Google's Vintage Baseball, that whole world will be opened up to them.
1:08:11
[SPEAKER_02]: That sounds like fun.
1:08:12
[SPEAKER_02]: What's the name of the league?
1:08:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Our league is the Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball.
1:08:17
[SPEAKER_02]: say that again, the Tennessee Association of Vintage baseball that get it right.
1:08:22
[SPEAKER_01]: That's correct.
1:08:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:08:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We're on Facebook and probably Instagram, I think, but definitely on Facebook.
1:08:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, anybody in the Tennessee area is our games are free.
1:08:31
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no tickets to just bring a blanket and a picnic.
1:08:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, come out and enjoy some some old time baseball.
1:08:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that's really fun.
1:08:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned before the show that it's soft pitch, right?
1:08:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It is.
1:08:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an underhand.
1:08:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an underhand.
1:08:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:08:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was one of the rules in 1864, was the ball had to be pitched underhanded.
1:08:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:08:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And I like the bounce idea.
1:08:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, bear-handed baseball sounds terrifying in a way.
1:09:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But being able to let it take a bounce, that helps.
1:09:05
[SPEAKER_02]: That's fun.
1:09:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
1:09:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
1:09:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It even's the playing field because some of the young bucks get out there and they just crush the ball.
1:09:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, if you crush, if you can get to the ball before it hits the ground a second time, it's the batter still out.
1:09:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So, oh, that's fun.
1:09:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:09:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, very, very unique.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Trapper, thank you so much.
1:09:24
[SPEAKER_02]: That the name of the book is Cricket Old River.
1:09:28
[SPEAKER_02]: The music is Trapper Haskins.
1:09:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, sir.
1:09:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And it is vintage baseball.
1:09:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Say the full name again.
1:09:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Our league is a Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball.
1:09:40
[SPEAKER_01]: very, very cool.
1:09:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, there's teams all over the country, so if somebody just Googles vintage baseball, they can probably find a team in their area if they're into that sort of if they're into that sort of historical nursery.
1:09:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and what I love about it is the comradery that you were talking about.
1:09:57
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, and I encourage people do something where you can interact with others and reconnect with this beautiful world in which we live, you know, it's worth it.
1:10:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's super cool that you're doing that.
1:10:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Trapper, thank you so much for your time.
1:10:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and it sounds like such an epic journey, but it's not just a single event, you shared with us the journey of life.
1:10:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And I thank you for that.
1:10:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate it so much, man, I really appreciate you happening today.
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah, you're quite welcome, and for all the listeners and viewers out there, figure out what it is, what is that thing that you've got to do and get out there, and ask them fun.
1:10:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.