"THE RIVER PROVIDETH all things," drawls John Ruskey in the mock-reverential tones of a redneck messiah. "And now, it will provideth ... fawwrwood!"

Ruskey is our ever-competent guide and spiritual leader. When he talks, which is seldom, and always in a very soft voice, we listen. He's brought us here to this fine-powdered beach in the middle of the Mississippi River, and now we're enjoying the musky coolness rising off the water while passing around a bottle of Jameson's whiskey.

It's an hour before sunset. Our group of ten friends is pitching camp here, 30 miles above Memphis, on a Crusoe-esque sandbar called Dean Island. We're not in Tennessee or Arkansas but a happy no-man's-land that's uninhabited and apparently unowned. As we fan out to collect driftwood, an air force of Canada geese honks along the flyway, arrowing north for the summer.

"In the ten years I've been canoeing the river, I've never seen a soul out here," Ruskey says. "Not even once."

From Dean Island, the Mississippi stretches for nearly a mile to the opposite bank. The channel here is deep, more than a hundred feet, and the water's colder than I expected—about 59 degrees. The smooth current seems almost languorous, until a massive creosoted telephone pole slingshots past.

Our mixed armada of canoes and kayaks lies just below us on the wet sand. We've been paddling the Mississippi all day, floating its confusion of currents, slipping into swampy back channels, and skirting the occasional tugboat as it nudges a zip code's worth of barges upriver. We've been provoking indignant horn honks from river pilots, who think they own the Mississippi, and drawing bewildered stares from Coast Guard and Army Corps officers, who think they rule it.

Maybe it's the Jameson's talking, but as I gaze at the river and warm myself by a crackling driftwood bonfire, I'm hoping the Mississippi will provideth something else, this river that is our river, the river, superlative among superlatives—biggest, widest, strongest.

It's something I've been thinking about for weeks now: What would t be like to jump into that roiling mess? To wallow and drift in it, to feel its fish-redolent muck against my skin? And, most important, to get out into the full swiftness of its main current and swim it, from shore to shore?