Wild Memphis: how a new paddle-powered tour sees the musical city in a new light

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

“Paddle!” comes the rallying call from the back of our canoe, as a flash of lightning fills the sky with its electric tendrils. “We need to get out of the water, fast,” captain Matthew Burdine adds quickly, raising his voice over an almighty crash of thunder that rumbles like a hungry giant’s belly.  

The atmosphere has transformed at a dizzying speed. Just minutes before the storm clouds blew onto the horizon, we’d been floating along at the same pace as the driftwood, lulled by the rhythmic lapping of the water against our oars and basking in the hazy late summer sunshine. Now, racing to the sandy shore and scrambling for shelter, we’ve been dealt an important lesson by the mighty Mississippi, the 2,350-mile-long waterway that flows from Minnesota down to the Gulf of Mexico: Mother Nature is in charge here, and it’s a fool who forgets that.

Luck is on my side. Yes, I’m about to be stranded on a deserted island, but I’m with a team of survival experts. My two-day trip with the Mississippi River Expeditions team started earlier that morning at Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park, a patchwork of swamps, dense woodland and sandy shores in southwest Tennessee. We’d heaved our sailing canoe across the beach to launch it into the muddy waters of the Mississippi, aiming the bow towards the twinkly metropolis of Memphis 20 miles downstream.

I’d spent the previous few days soaking up the buzzy city’s colourful sights, paying my respects at Elvis’s former home, Graceland, and dining at the Beauty Shop. The latter is a new-wave Southern restaurant serving spiced chicken wings topped with crumbly blue cheese, set in a former beauty salon where Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s ex-wife, once had her beehive tweaked. Now, I’ve come to experience the wilderness on Memphis’s doorstep — that, up until now, few have been able to access.  

Born in the Mississippi Delta, Captain Matthew founded Mississippi River Expeditions after swapping his Wall Street career for a life on the water leading wilderness trips. “I decided to leave the corporate world and start to listen to my heart, instead of my head,” he’d told me. “I lived in the wilds for five years and realised I was made for this adventurous lifestyle.”

Joining me and Matthew is enthusiastic river guide Daniel Bonds, who learned his craft in the Boy Scouts, and John Ruskey, owner of sister outfit Quapaw Canoe Company. With shoulder-length white hair, he’s a modern-day Huck Finn who’s been navigating the Great River’s watery capillaries for decades. 

Daniel Bonds (right) is a guide with Mississippi River Expeditions and John Ruskey (left) is owner of a sister company Quapaw Canoe Company.

Photograph by John Davidson

Now that we’re all back on land, our toes squelching in the mud, we deviate from our original plan of sleeping nearer to Memphis, and set up camp here on Brandywine Island, a peninsula of sycamore forests, marshland and sandy beaches that’s home to deer, turkeys and cooing doves. We moor our two canoes — John’s small, dugout-style craft and my 29ft Langley Voyager canoe, with its sail folded neatly like origami — while Daniel battles through the horizontal rain to collect wood for a roaring fire. 

Looking like he’s stepped from the pages of a Mark Twain novel, wearing a crisp, white shirt and weathered Panama hat, Matthew pitches a cluster of dome tents and explains why he based his adventure company in Memphis. Built on the elevated bluffs beside the river in southwest Tennessee, the city is best known as the nostalgic home of rock and roll and birthplace of blues music. But Matthew decided to add some surprising new riffs to the landscape with his canoe outfit, offering trips that range from a gentle evening paddle under the city’s illuminated steel bridge to multi-night campouts.

Despite its urban image, Memphis has a location that makes perfect sense for this, he says in a Southern accent as thick as molasses, because “there’s actually more river wilderness access than in most other US cities”. Gradually, the rain eases up and the smell of steak sizzling on a skillet fills the air.

I feel far from the big city lights, marooned here in a wilderness of tangled forest and butter-soft sandbanks dotted with turtle eggs, but in reality we’re only 10 miles away. I can even see the neon lights, twinkling in the distance.

We’re all soon sitting around the warm glow of the campfire, John serenading us with guitar blues. Pausing between numbers, he explains that despite the Mississippi River being one of the country’s busiest waterways for cargo ships, with a hefty 175 million tons of freight flowing through the Upper Mississippi alone, this is also a place that teems with wildlife. 

“People call it the Old Man River, but really there’s nothing old or masculine about it. I think of this river as a queen. She’s one of the richest natural environments in North America, home to the smallest microbes up to gators and gar fish measuring 12ft long,” he says of the waterway that provides a home for a quarter of all fish species in North America. “It’s their home really, and we’re just visitors.” 

People have long travelled this aquatic artery by canoe. “It’s not surprising that the original Native American people who lived on this river got around in hand-carved canoes rather than on land,” says John. Cocooned in my tent that night, I drift off to sleep listening to coyotes howling in the inky darkness, 

Published in the Classic USA guide, distributed with the March 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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