A Pilgrimage of Sorts

When I was in high school, my church youth group went on a service trip to Steubenville, OH, and the host family we stayed with had a bunch of drawings and quotes painted on the walls of their house. One of these was lyrics from the 1992 Indigo Girls song, Ghost: 

And the Mississippi's mighty 
But it starts in Minnesota 
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess that's how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart

I've never been much of a poet, but I've always found a haunting beauty in these lyrics. And I've always wandered if what they say about how the Mississippi starts is true.  

As I rode through the lake country of northern Minnesota getting further and further west, I started crossing a narrowing Mississippi River multiple times. And each time these lyrics kept working their way back into my head.  

I rolled into Grand Rapids (MN not MI - don't get me started on how every small town in Minnesota has a counterpart with the same name in WI or MI) to camp for the night with those lyrics still percolating in my mind, and as I set up my campsite at the Pokagama Dam on the mighty Mississippi, I searched google maps and realized that the headwaters of the Mississippi were more or less on my route to Fargo. Even though it’d add 30-40 minutes and rain was in the forecast, my course was set. 

The Pokagama Dam: Yes, these flood lights stayed on all night, but they were not nearly as disruptive to sleep as the trains and highway traffic were.

Sometimes a paid campsite pays dividends beyond a hot shower - the previous tenant of site 20 left me a few bottles of a local discount brew

The headwaters of the Mississippi are almost as middle of nowhere as you can get: Itasca Lake - a glacial melt lake in a state park surrounded by American Indian reservations in northwest Minnesota. 

The source of the Mississippi was "discovered" by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in 1832 (by "discovered" I mean he was guided to the source by the Ojibwe, who had known where the source was for who knows how long). The primary reason for the expedition was to broker a peace treaty between the Ojibwe and the Dakota natives, but it also had many secondary goals, including finding the source of the Mississippi, collecting scientific data, and vaccinating American Indians against small pox. The name Itasca is a combination of the Latin words veritas (truth) and caput (head) - thus the name roughly means true head. 

Turns out you can walk across stones at the headwaters of the Mississippi, but it takes about 15 steps, not 5. Though about 20 yards down the Mississippi from its source, they’ve made a log plank bridge you can cross in 5 steps. 

Proof I was there

Where I walked across the Mississippi, right at its source. Like I said, roughly 15-20 steps.

Not the aforementioned plank bridge, but you could also probably cross this one in 5 steps

"Here 1475 ft above the ocean the mighty Mississippi begins to flow on it's winding way 2552 miles to the Gulf of Mexico"

At the visitors center in Itasca, they had this huge relief map of the entire Mississippi watershed that would would allow any water you poured on it to flow like it would in nature to the delta in Louisiana. A rather neat perspective you couldn't even get from an airplane. 

I grabbed a pulled pork sandwich and a hot cup of tea at the gift shop to warm up before hitting the road for Fargo. As I rolled out, Ghost was playing through my helmet speakers.  

Keep Searching for the True Source,

Kev