The Magnificent, Magical Missouri River Float
Greg Wood
Three days. Twelve people. Forty miles on the magnificent Missouri River. These were the ingredients for a magical September weekend on the most under-used recreational resource in the state.
It will take a whole story to describe the amazing experience (we plan to run it in February, when you may be feeling housebound and be ready to get back outside, at least vicariously, through words and pictures). But I will try to sum it up.
The weather was glorious, in the seventies. The river was beautiful. There were stretches when it seemed we were the only people in the world, so we got a small taste of what Lewis and Clark and their voyagers must have experienced.
But it was quite different, too. We had a butler boat (a john boat) accompanying us to attend to anything we discovered we needed. We had a massage tent, which I enjoyed one evening. The roof was open to the sky, and the clouds floating by while getting a massage was an event itself, almost equal to the gorgeous bluffs we floated by on the water near Rocheport.
The people were wonderfully interesting. From Gabe and Tom, our gourmet chefs, who prepared everything from lamb and asparagus to scrambled eggs with duck sausage, to Billyo O’Donnell, our artist-in-boat, who painted a huge wooden boat wreck on California Island, to our Wapiti friends Kevin and Bill, who made our adventure possible, to Justin Leesmann, who documented our trip, and absolutely every individual on the trip, all were fascinating. We melded into an easy-going and fascinating flotilla. I’m going to do it again.
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Danita Allen Wood is editor-in-chief and co-owner of the magazine, along with her husband, Greg Wood. They bought and revived the magazine in 1999. Since then, it has won multiple awards from the International Regional Magazine Association, including Magazine of the Year in 2008. Danita will share her journeys around the state, some of the behind-the-scenes stories about making the magazine, and reflections on life in Missouri.
