Mississippi Transplant: John Ruskey

"When you look at Mississippi from the outside, you get fooled into thinking that it is a location stuck in time, and you forget that everything here is in the process of transformation..."

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Shortly after high school graduation, John Ruskey and his best friend took a trip down the Mississippi River and crash landed on Cat Island. That was the beginning of what would become John’s lifelong passion for exploring and sharing the magic of the Mississippi River with others. For the last thirty-four years, John has lived in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where “the big muddy Mississippi river” flows “alongside the thriving Mississippi Delta blues culture and tradition.” In 1998 he founded the Mighty Quapaws Apprenticeship Program for the youth of the Mississippi Delta, and in 2011 he founded the Lower Mississippi River Foundation for access, education, and the betterment of public outdoor recreation on the Middle & Lower Mississippi Rivers. Now in its twenty-eighth year, John’s Quapaw Canoe Company offers high quality guided canoe adventures on the Lower Mississippi River. Today John Ruskey shares what has drawn him to the Delta and what he’s come to learn about his community and the natural world over the last three decades.

John Ruskey in his happy place—the Mississippi River. Photo by Rory Doyle.

Where are you from?

I hail from a multi-generational Rocky Mountain family, (my mother Colorado, father British Columbia). Third youngest. My parents pulled themselves and our gang of ten upwards out of the Great Depression, and through the World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the hippy folk decades that followed, and forward into our modern era by the straps of their work boots, with a keen sense of morality and a do-good work ethic in the intimate, magical, and sometimes suffocating ways of a traditional Catholic family. My hometown was separated by social cliches, categorized by “freaks” and “cowboys.” I fit into neither. A misfit. I found my place in the cliffy mountains and clear-running streams.

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

After high school graduation in 1982, my best friend and I built a 12 x 24’ raft, and set off down the mighty Mississippi River out of the great North Woods of Minnesota, and five months later, in February 1983, we literally crash-landed on the first big island coming out of Tennessee into the state of Mississippi. Cat Island. Right above all the casinos in Tunica County, MS. My first night here in this state was as a muddy Mississippi River rat refugee on Cat Island. Huck and Jim were our role models. We were seeking our freedom in the same place. They found it on the face of the wild free, flowing big river. I’ll have to say, I found the same kind of freedom, and connection to the universe. I never got the mud out of my blood.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is a feeling. Home is where the heart is. When I settled down in Clarksdale, I was following my heart, and it seems like my heart found a place of vitality and wholeness in this strange thriving community in the wilderness of fields and floodplains, here in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. I was welcomed immediately by the people here, and felt a wholesomeness that I never encountered anywhere else. And I still feel to this very day (although since pandemic it seems to have been shaken by the chaos and erratic fluidity of everything).

What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?

I miss the smell of the High Plains desert after a summer rain. I miss the serenity of a three foot snowfall that completely transforms the world. I miss all the public lands and hiking trails. I miss the eruptions of the imagination that blossom in the high altitude environment and in cold weather.

But to be honest, that’s about all. Most of my family remains in the Rockies (or Coastal Ranges of the Pacific Northwest). When I’m in Colorado visiting family, I seem to spend about half my time wondering what’s happening on the banks of the Mississippi river.

Also, the same Colorado neighborhoods that I grew up in have become soul-squelching suburbia, where everyone tries to do exactly what everyone else is doing, and anyone not doing the same gets a lot of weird vibes and look down your nose kind of inspection.

I don’t miss the atmospheric high-society who is crowding native Coloradans like myself right out of their own neighborhoods, who moved into the spectacular Colorado Rockies to find their version of nirvana, something they probably saw in some Rocky Mountain High movie or commercial, or maybe experienced one time on a ski lift, or mid-mountain ski lodge hot tub, some false vision of the promised land, and decided to move because they wanted that for themselves, and then after moving in fell prey to the false promise of the Rocky Mountain High, and get tripped up by their imported selfishness and shallow spiritual goals. When I return to my old neighborhoods, I don’t know anybody. Which is strange. I haven’t been gone but a couple of decades, not even one generation. Even though I see the house I grew up in, it in no way feels homey.

John Ruskey as a child and young adult in Colorado's Rocky Mountains.

That entire region is suffering from runaway uncontrollable growth — everywhere from Pueblo through Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins — The Front Range it’s called. The quaint mountain towns like the one I grew up have become bedroom communities for flat-landers. The neighborhoods are permeated with a self-centered psychosis that breeds paranoia. Combine that with a bloody history of “Indian removal,” and the life where justice is served with a pulled pistol, and vicious shoot-outs. The Sand Creek Massacre is an example of where that leads.

It should come as no surprise when Colorado (and similar picture perfect places) pop up in the evening news with mass shootings. The 1999 Columbine Shooting, for instance, when you see crazed individuals who have no sense of direction or morality. And I think that comes from not living in healthy neighborhoods, like the kind you commonly find in Mississippi, in communities where you feel a responsibility to your fellow citizens and accountability to your community.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

Panny Mayfield and Wesley Jefferson, the “Mississippi Junebug,” were amongst the first people I met here in Clarksdale, and welcomed me immediately into town, and made me feel like I had found a place where I was a part of things, not separate from them. “Junebug” or “Bug” as we called him, became a father figure for me, his deep gritty wisdom was a salve that soothed my restless, itchy tendencies. Uncomfortable in my own skin, always looking for the next place. I became one of his band members. Later, he became my first shuttle driver for Quapaw Canoe Company, and his son Clifton my first Mighty Quapaw apprentice. Clifton coined the name we still use for the apprenticeship — the “Mighty Quapaws.” We sometimes sing a paddling song using lyrics invented by another another one of my young apprentices named “Popeye” (Jeremy Hayes).

I discovered in Clarksdale a lot of parallels, many powerful currents that ran parallel to each other, that don’t necessarily mix, but their proximity to each other seemed to magnify each other. Two of those parallels were the flow of the big muddy Mississippi river alongside the thriving Mississippi Delta blues culture and tradition. And two other parallels were the the new culture arising from the ashes of the Civil Rights era, and the influx of entrepreneurs and creative types, like myself attracted to this community, and finding a place within it.

I’ve experienced a creative freedom here in Clarksdale that I have found nowhere else in the world. I’ve been a gyspsy soul so far in this life. Looking for my home. For perspective, here are the places I had previously laid roots before I settled in Clarksdale: Batopilas Chihuahua, Mexico; Wallingford, CT; Silver City, NM; Sierra Madre, CA; Austin, TX; Santa Fe, NM; Adamant, VT, Valladolid Spain; and my childhood home, Evergreen, CO.

I come from a family of restless souls, modern wanderers, suburban gypsies. (Of course, all humans have some part of that gypsy nature in our blood, that nomadic quality that we all evolved from, the hunter-gatherer, following our prey and harvest of the natural world through regions and seasons). Strange to say I have lived in Clarksdale longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. I’ve been here continuously since 1991, so thirty-four years. I am now 62, so that’s now more than half of my life.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

When I first moved here, for good, I mean, in the early 1990s, I thought I found paradise in this strange town found in between the blues and the big river. I became part of the blues scene here, the thriving blues community, playing keyboards with the Wesley Jefferson Southern Soul Band. I lived in the historic Riverside Hotel, where Bessie Smith died in 1937 (when it was the regional African-American Hospital). I was in room #7, also known as the “Robert Nigthhawk” room. I became the first curator of the Delta Blues Museum, under founder Sid Graves. Sometime during that era I returned home to the Rocky Mountains for a family reunion, and I was showing my grandfather photos from my new life. He was shocked. “John!” he exclaimed, “John, those are all Black people!” And I was just as shocked as he was by his ignorance of the contemporary culture of the Mississippi Delta. (Although I shouldn’t have been, because previous to all this, I was equally ignorant).

John on the banks of the Mississippi River. Photos by Rory Doyle.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

Mississippi has allowed me to be who I am in the most essential aspects of my nature as an artist, and entrepreneur. I don’t think I would’ve been able to fulfill my dreams so fully anywhere else, only here, by the power of the blues and the big river.

They say Clarkdale is the crossroads; signs will lead you to a tourist destination near Abe’s Bar-B-Que US Hwy 61 and 49. Watch out for heavy traffic if you take your guitar there on a full moon night! Not there, but nearby, I discovered a personal crossroads at the intersection of the propulsive procreative power of the Mississippi Delta blues crossing paths with the biggest river in North America, the wild and wonderful Mississippi river, whose pathway carves 44 miles of Coahoma County, and 440 miles of the western border of the state of Mississippi. A fresh and sparkling new landscape laid down by the congealing mud after the melting of the last ice age. Geologically younger than the Rockies. A frontier into the early 1900s, when it was still a jungly forested floodplain 55 million acres big.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Until I crash wrecked here, in the early 80s, I always thought of Mississippi as a mysterious dark place, full of shadows and scary places. What I discovered is that it is a mysterious and muddy place, full of shadows — and light. Full of scary places — and welcoming. You can’t truly know one without the other.

(Just like the muddy Mississippi, which, of course created this muddy part of Mississippi that I live in, and that is the muddy Mississippi Delta. So my preconceptions were partly fulfilled, but in a changed way. In the decades since, I have discovered a land and culture full of mysterious muddy motions that cut through many layers at all sorts of levels. A never-ending source of creative inspiration!)

Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

I have great difficulty with the long-term effects of poverty, inequality, flood control, and deforestation. Hot summers getting hotter, and dustier, more chemicals, more exhaust, more smoke. There are some days it really hurts, a terrible aching pain. I’m prone to depression if I don’t get outside. Many times I’ve asked myself what the heck am I doing? Why am I still here? But then I read the news, and look around the rest of the country, and I’m reminded again and again that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and what a blessing it is to be living in this paradise of wild waters and a wild culture, in a community that breeds individuality and sincerely cares about each person.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

The Mississippi river, from which the state drives its name, exemplifies a flowing quality that is true everywhere, even in deserts and cliffy canyons. When you look at Mississippi from the outside, you get fooled into thinking that it is a location stuck in time, and you forget that everything here is in the process of transformation, and evolution — evolving upwards and forward through the parallel currents of family, community culture — fertilized by the state’s fields and forests, it’s lovely beaches, and lively rivers, and overflowing islands of life, everything in motion and flowing forward. Movies, books and popular culture has Mississippi locked down in Reconstruction, or maybe the Civil Rights era, and usually ignores the forward evolution happening at local level.

Of course, sometimes the flow doubles back on itself, like an oxbow of the Mighty Mississippi. But, like my mentor Johnnie, “Mr. Johnnie” Billington (1935-2013), used to say, “sometimes you gotta take a step backwards before you can go forward again.” (He also told me in the year before he passed that things are gonna get really bad but to keep the faith, and keep moving forward. Because they would get better again. And that we would be part of making that betterment happen.)

John with three Mighty Quapaw apprentices.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Yes. For sure. Many. Whew! Difficult choice! I have a whole pile of people I would like to include in this, but I’m gonna focus on a quatrain of living blues musicians here in Clarksdale, the up-and-coming juke joint blues workforce, who most people probably don’t know about, but who are keeping the traditional alive, and are probably the hardest-working quadratic in the thriving threshold of this vigorously bubbling Mississippi Delta blues scene. Namely Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Lee “Pocketknife” Williams, Walt Busby, and Heather Crosse. They all play together in various configurations of Big A and the All-Stars, and Heavy Suga & the Sweetones. They are amongst the upcoming stars in the next generation, who grew up here, and were all nurtured by local elders (including the aforementioned Mr. Johnnie, but also Josh “Razor Blade” Stewart, James “Super Chikan” Johnson, Big Jack Johnson, Wesley Jefferson, the “Mississippi Junebug,” and Johnny Holmes (Clarksdale musician, brother of Jimmy Duck Holmes, blue front Café, Bentonia).

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I’ve always been one to give flowers to the living. I would immediately split up all that money into ten thousand packages of $100,000 each, and send it out to people like the four blue stars highlighted above, and hundreds of others here in Clarksdale, and thousands of others across the state — those artistic and creative types were just barely getting by, like most of us here in Clarksdale, living on the poverty line. People who have never been without don’t understand poverty. Simple things like health insurance and a reliable vehicle are really difficult when you’re just barely getting by. Maybe it would be something like a mini McArthur Grant, no strings attached, to go out locally within Mississippi, including struggling but forward-thinking entrepreneurs and librarians, and teachers, and visionary organization leaders like Chandra Williams at Cultural Crossroads, and Ben Lewis, at Meraki, and Rebekah Pleasant-Patterson, Griot Arts leader, and Matt Sutton, with Spring Initiative, and all the other cohort leaders there. And you too, Lauren. And all the visionary writers who are sprouting like trees in the fertile soil, like Addie Citchens and Boyce Upholt.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

Rivergator, the Paddlers Guide to the Lower Mississippi River, is currently found online at Rivergator.org. One million words describing the Lower Mississippi river mile-by-mile from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico, including the Atchafalaya River, and other Gulf Passes and connections. Rivergator is the result of several decades of firsthand experience that started in the 1980s, with my five-month raft trip after high school graduation, but became an intentional project in 2011 thanks to support from the Lower Mississippi River Foundation.

Within the next year, I am hoping to condense everything into a single waterproof hardcopy edition that paddlers can strap down on the top of their kayak, or place in the canoe in front of them on top of a dry bag, and use in person without having to depend on technology. The goal is to create a guide to that mysterious landscape, that watery world created by the biggest body of flowing water in this quadrant of the world.

Rivergator is a guide to the wilderness within. The greatly misunderstood, turbulent waters and ever-changing islands of the big muddy river. Over 2,000,000 acres of bottom land hardwood forest alongside. That’s about the size of Yellowstone National Park. It’s a secret wild place in the heart of the Deep South. Double that adding on the Atchafalaya, River of Trees, and triple that adding on other adjoining protected wetlands like the lower end of the White and Arkansas Rivers.

In 1808 the Czechoslovakian immigrant Zadok Cramer wrote and published a guidebook called The Navigator, which was a guide written for the pioneer Americans who were streaming out of the crowded Atlantic coast, and following the rivers downstream into the frontier. It became a bestseller, and went through many printings. Not coincidentally alongside the era of steamboat navigation, which brought a new layer of accessibility to everyone who previously was using flat boats, keelboats, and of course rafts and canoes. Canoes are perhaps the oldest form of elegant water transportation in the history of humans. 8,000 years old at least. Archaeologists who study canoes think that it’s at least double that.

The tragic side of that story is the dislocation of indigenous cultures, like the Quapaw and Choctaw and Chickasaw, and dozens of other tribes and nations, who were forced out of their homelands, and made to march West into Oklahoma, mostly along the brutal routes of the infamous Trail of Tears.

But the Rivergator seeks to re-balance the divide between all of us Homo sapiens — and also all the rest of creation, for a sustainable and harmonious future for all, as we travel forward through time across this endlessly, evolving and wonderful, and often destructive, but always procreative, universe of ours. In the way that the first people here envisioned the earth, and that is a land shared by all beings, and shared in the way that our creator intended us to do. It’s all a matter of biology. Coyotes and Beavers do it. Ants and Monarch Butterflies. Geese and Swallows. Turtles and Frogs. Cooperation for the good of the colony, of the community. We do the same in our canoes, and during our summer camps, and on our remote wild islands. Because ultimately this is the only possible future for a healthy mother earth.

Also, shout out to the Quapaw Canoe Company. I need help keeping it alive. I’ve been running it for twenty-eight years now, and I am starting to stumble in my old age. I am the old turtle on the muddy river bank. Provenance. I need someone to come and take it over, and carry it onwards, in ways that I can only dream of.

Since the pandemic, we have entered a strange new world. Meanwhile over the levee, and over the bluff, life flows along pretty much the same as it always has. And that is, with the qualities that create the best of who we are as humans — in the sense of our spirits, our ethics and our morals. On the river we all share in the same meals, sleep in the same tents, and drink from the same jugs of water. We all paddle together across the big waters to reach the paradise-like islands of the big river. We are visitors to a land already inhabited by other layers of creation, and with whom we share our great mother earth.

We Mighty Quapaws are the Worker Bees of our Queen Mississippi. We seek diversity in our adventures and explorations using our big canoes, where a pure kind of democracy is exercised, and where all of creation has a chance not only to breathe, but to thrive. Not just us Homo Sapiens — we are but one species — but all of creation. All twenty-five million species of us and counting, from Least Tern to the Louisiana Black Bear, from Skinks and Salamanders to Squirrels and Skunks.

We all live on the same earth, we all drink the same water, we all breathe the same air. All 25 million of us. Of which us human kind are but one. We have one vote out of 25 million. (Note: official count is currently 8.7 million species. But species biologists believe it to be triple that).

There are 25 million of us paddling this most giant of canoes we call our dear planet mother earth, as we make the most epic of all journeys, and that is the journey of history and evolution across the endless depths and wonders of the universe. And so we must all learn to paddle together, one stroke at a time, and to please one other.

And this is the most humbling — and exciting challenge — of all.

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John Ruskey is a worker bee in the colony of his Queen, the Mississippi River. He is the author of the Wild Miles (www.wildmiles.org) and the Rivergator: Paddler's Guide to the Lower Mississippi River (www.rivergator.org). John was the first curator of the Delta Blues Museum (1992-98) and is co-founder of the Delta Blues Education Fund. In 1998 he founded the Mighty Quapaws Apprenticeship Program for the youth of the Mississippi Delta. In 2011 he founded the Lower Mississippi River Foundation for access, education, and the betterment of public outdoor recreation on the Middle & Lower Mississippi Rivers. He is owner and founder of the Quapaw Canoe Company, which will celebrate its 28th anniversary in 2026, and provides guiding & outfitting to the raw wild power & beauty of the Mississippi River, range extends from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. He is founding member of One Mississippi. In 2019 John was awarded the Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters: “Through his writing, his music, his watercolors, his environmental efforts, his work with young Mississippians, and his knowledge of Mississippi’s great river.” In 2022 John was awarded the St. John’s College Award of Merit for distinguished and meritorious service to the United States, to the Mississippi River, and for “outstanding achievement in the arts and exploration.” John was the SBA 2024 Small Business Person of the Year Award for the State of Mississippi.

One year ago:

Mississippi Native: Cameron T. Mayers

Two years ago:

Mississippi Transplant: Caitlin Brooking

Three years ago:

Mississippi Native: Exodus Oktavia Brownlow