Captain Matthew left his career on Wall Street to get back to his roots and set up Mississippi River Expeditions.“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.
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.
Daniel Bonds is a guide with Mississippi River Expeditions and John Ruskey is owner of a sister company Quapaw Canoe Company.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.
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.