I’ve got a new story in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer Magazine:

Let It Flow: A marathon canoe race on the Mississippi River challenges body and spirit.

I’d been paddling for almost seven hours when the explosions started.
BOOM!!!

I jumped. Then I remembered that Camp Ripley, the expansive military base that lines the Mississippi River, was on my right. A nighttime artillery exercise had evidently begun.

BOOM!!!

In the darkness I couldn’t see much except for the distant lights of my fellow competitors in the MR150, a marathon canoe race from Brainerd to Coon Rapids in its second year.

BOOM!!!

The explosions kept coming. Some felt far away. Others were unsettlingly close. The upside was that parachute flares occasionally lit up the sky and allowed me to see the river ahead. When these burned out, everything went dark. I turned on my headlamp to scan the water, but all I could see was a blizzard of flying insects.

Bombs weren’t what I expected when I signed up for the MR150. Then again, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, or how long it would take me to paddle 150 miles.

My boat was a small Wenonah canoe, made of Kevlar. It wasn’t built for racing, but it was decently fast and light enough to carry over the race’s six portages. I figured I could make it before the 50-hour cutoff, when the race ends whether you’ve finished or not.

I mean, how hard could it be?

Read the rest here.