Making a river adventure out of the day by day

When Dave Pokorney, Chaska City Manager, and his 17-year-old son Mike stepped aboard their homemade houseboat this July 5, their troubles were behind them. No matter that the naysayers, like Noah’s neighbors, had told him that boating the Mississippi River was fraught with perils.

What would an adventure be, after all, if you knew at the start just how and where you would end up? To both of the Pokorney men, adventure meant not knowing — despite the poohpoohing of the feint of heart and the doubts of Dave’s wife and three daughters.

Yes, Pokorney père et fils had their problems before debarking. First, the boat they built in the garage was just a wee bit big and, like a difficult birth, did not want to come out. Second, the boat — wryly dubbed It Floats — had trouble at first living up to its name, as a test run or two revealed; atop its pontoon platform, it drew too much water and had to be lightened considerably. Third, it showed a severe steering problem on one of these test runs.

No matter. Dave Pokorney had gotten the idea of building a houseboat and floating down the river, and he wouldn’t be budged from it. He and Mike would build the boat and float it from Chaska, on the Minnesota River, more than 400 miles and through 21 locks to Hannibal, Missouri on the Mississippi.

Dave didn’t get the idea, he insists, from reading Mark Twain, though Hannibal was Twain’s home town and the port from which he put out to see the world and tell us all about it in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

No, father and son were sitting with family around the Thanksgiving dinner table, November 2004, chewing the turkey and the fat, when Dave simply suggested he thought it would be “lots of fun to have a houseboat.”

They laugh now, recalling how one of the last and best preparations they made for the trip, after their early misadventures, was deciding to do without the spare motor. Yes, they saved weight and space, gained apprehension, and, with luck and pluck, made it down the river to Hannibal with no more trouble than you might have tubing down the Apple River.

What did they see, floating down the river? Lots of birds, for one thing, Dave recollects. Ducks, of course, and eagles — “lots of eagles,” he says, “from Savage, when we first set out, all the way down the Mississippi.”

What else? Lots of wilderness. “Ninety-five percent of the land we passed through was wooded, undeveloped wilderness, which really surprised me. Not developed lots, not farmland, just wooded wilderness. And the farther south we got, the prettier the river got also.”

Other impressions? Most towns along the Mississippi, like those along the Minnesota, including Chaska, ignore the river. They turn their backs on it, turn away from it, and look inward toward the land. Only in rare exceptions do the cities front the river, honor it, look towards it. In Minnesota, of course, Hastings and Red Wing are fluviotropic towns, with well developed historical downtowns that look to the river. And in Iowa, Pokorney says, Muscatine has a splendid new riverfront development. Elsewhere, could be, it’s as if the inhabitants don’t want to go with the natural flow — afraid perhaps, as people who live on unpredictable waters tend to be, that the jig might be up at any time. (Consider Grand Forks in 1997 and New Orleans this year.)

While Dave and Mike were floating down the river, they saw lots of commercial barges, as you might expect; lots of recreational boats, especially on the weekend; tons of fishermen, private and pensive folks, could be; and lazy times when they just waited, with a barge, for an hour or two to get through a lock or, at night, anchored at shore, played cribbage and gin rummy.

On July 18, thirteen days after departing, the Pokorneys arrived in Hannival, Mo, and were picked up by Pam, Dave’s wife and Mike’s mother. Mercifully, she had brought a trailer, and the crew hauled It Floats back to Chaska overland.

As a landlocked city manager for 20 years, Pokorney confesses, the river might be just the form an adventure should take. Uncertain, true, but beautiful, and relieving you of the stress of sitting, sitting, and rarely being able just to go with the natural flow.

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