freshare.net
Two Australian institutions - the “walkabout” and “long-service leave” recently landed a pair of childhood chums in Missouri. They said Missourians and Americans in general have impressed them as being the most welcoming people on earth.
Struan Smith and David Seargeant, both of Sidney, Australia, passed through Missouri in August and early September. The pair of 62-year-olds are on the home stretch of a 2,300-mile odyssey that began June 28 at the three forks of the Missouri River in Montana. There the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers join to form the river that terminates at their final destination, the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.
Smith is a secondary school music teacher. Seargeant is an entrepreneur whose business ventures and sense of adventure have taken him all over the world. Their similar interests and 50 years of friendship make them congenial traveling companions.
“I’m always coming up with these madcap ideas, and Struan is always a willing partner,” said Seargeant with devil-may-care nonchalance and a Crocodile Dundee accent.
A penchant for adventure is a well-known facet of the Australian national character. This is epitomized by the “walkabout.” Aboriginal Australian males sometimes “go walkabout” at the age of 13, wandering in the wilderness for six months as a rite of passage. The descendents of Australian imigrants have put their own spin on the custom, taking off on spontaneous and sometimes arduous escapes from comfortable routine. They think nothing of closing up shop and home and striking out across their own arid continent or the globe.
This tendency is facilitated by the policy of granting public servants one week’s leave for each of their first 10 years of work. At the end of their first decade on the job they get 10 weeks to do what they like. They get another 10 weeks long-service leave for each subsequent five years of service. Many take the occasion to trot the globe.
“We’ve always liked the outdoors and vigorous physical activity,” said Seargeant of his and Smith’s many adventures. “This was a long trip so it was a challenge for us both physically and mentally and gave us a chance to find out if we ar e tough Aussie boys or just a couple of wimps.”
“We believe it’s good for the soul,” said Seargeant. “Like Helen Keller said, ‘Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.’”
Seargeant’s and Smith’s latest adventure started with plans to ride horses through the Rocky Mountains. When a wildfire scuttled that plan, Seargeant noticed the Missouri River and thought “We’ll come back here and paddle down that river.” The next year they took a road trip from St. Louis to the Big Muddy’s headwaters in Montana to determine if the trip was practical.
“The bits we saw looked great,” said Smith.
Both men now admit they may have underestimated the difficulty of some aspects of the trip, but they were still enthusiastic about the escapade when they passed through Jefferson City Sept. 4. They said paddling through seven of the nine reservoirs on the upper Missouri River taxed their endurance and patience. They found Fort Peck Lake, 134 miles long and 16 miles wide, “an inland ocean.”
They found not being able to see land from their 16-foot tandem kayak disconcerting, but it gave them an appreciation for the vastness of the American West. It also prompted them to skip paddling the two final and longest Missouri River reservoirs, 178-mile Lake Sakakawea and 231-mile Lake Oahe.
Both men were accustomed to physically demanding activities. Nevertheless, each lost about 15 pounds in the first two weeks of the trip. They found they could not eat enough to maintain their weight while paddling against headwinds in 110-degree heat and oppressive humidity on large reservoirs.
They averaged a little over 7 mph paddling on the river and took time out to rest and sightsee in scenic riverside villages like Rocheport. At night, they entertained themselves by reading books by authors like Larry McMurtry and Cormack McCarthy, who write about the West.
They ranked The Gates of the Mountains in western Montana the most scenic place of the trip. Explorer Meriwether Lewis bestowed the name on the stretch of river as the Corps of Discovery labored upriver between towering cliffs. As they rounded bends in the river, gleaming mountain vistas would appear as if gates were opening before them.
Their least-favorite stretch of river was its passage through the Great Plains, where scenery was nonexistent. Like Lewis and Clark before them, they were tortured by tornadic winds, stifling heat and humidity and swarms of mosquitoes. Those monotonous miles heightened their appreciation of the bluffy landscapes that began around Rocheport, Mo.
One constant throughout the trip was the genuine friendliness and amazing helpfulness of those they met along the river. Perfect strangers brought them food, drink and other supplies, offered to transport their kayak around lakes and dams and invited them into their homes for showers, home-cooked meals and beds in air-conditioned comfort.
In Montana and the Dakotas, the pair noticed the onset of a problem they know well from their native land. Reservoirs on the upper river are many feet below normal pool, but this is mild compared to conditions in Australia. They said many reservoirs of their dry continent are down to a fraction of their original size. Some are as low as three percent of capacity. The resulting disputes over rights to use water are similar to those beginning to occur along the Missouri River.
Asked what drew them to the Missouri River, Seargeant said, “Well, it’s one of the greatest rivers in the world, isn’t it?”
“And there’s the history side of it, too,” added Smith. “We are of that generation that grew up on westerns in the theater and Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza on television. And there’s Lewis and Clark. In some ways, I think I know more about American history than I do about my own country’s.”
As they neared the end of their journey, the two paddlers already were experiencing a melancholy sense of loss, knowing they would soon be back to their regular lives. So, n aturally, they were already planning their next walkabout. Those plans currently focus on packing kayaks up into the Andes Mountains from the Pacific Coast of Chile and then floating down Argentine rivers to the Atlantic Ocean.
To learn more about paddling the Missouri River, visit http://www.missouririverwatertrail.org/.