A boat trip in 1960s offered a glimpse of the true brilliance of beloved journalist

I recently looked back on a photo that reminded me of an adventure my wife, Lenore, and I took with a friend in 1962. We had parked and walked down to Missouri’s lovely Niangua River, celebrated for its spring-fed crystal flow, alive with trout and small-mouth bass.

Celebrated indeed — but not on this day. The muddy current churned far up over the banks on both sides, swirling amid the trunks of oak and river birch, rocking a jon boat the contractor had hauled in for us at a hefty rental. No matter what happened to us on that wild river, he could always recover his boat somewhere downstream.

“Yeah, this ole Niangua’s mean today, what with the rain,” he said, “but the boat’s yours for two days.”

We had driven 180 miles from Kansas City with C.W. Gusewelle that morning. This was years before Gus became one of the most loved and celebrated journalists in America. His column in The Kansas City Star endeared him to millions. Back then, he and I were pals from The Star’s city desk. On this trip, the three of us were joined by a half-basset named Sophie. Gus, as he was known at The Star, died in 2016; my wife died a year later.

Together on that long-ago float trip, we careered down the Niangua, soon discovering that floods open fresh channels. Choose the wrong one — a drainage unused for years — and you encounter tangles of spiderwebs, plantations of cattails, willow jungles wriggling with snakes. We plunged through, desperately flailing and scrubbing stuff from our faces.

Crouching low as river water gushed in around her, Sophie endured it better than the rest of us. Gus had more river experience than I. He took the rear seat and steered us around tree trunk snags, boulders and wreckage of past unlucky watercraft. Then from ahead we heard weird croaking: not one animal, surely many.

We saw them high at riverside in monstrous sycamore trees and so we steered to shore. Staring down at us from almost bathtub-sized nests were countless near-naked baby birds, offspring of gorgeous great blue herons. Nestlings prattled at us as we walked through, their parents shrieking and moaning. It was a heron rookery, and the adults uneasy at our presence flew from tree to tree.

Breathing the reek of their white droppings, I bent to pick up a dagger-like snow-white heron skull, 6 inches long with huge eye sockets: the new age pterodactyl. Later I gave it to an artist friend, who worked it into a sculpture.

Feeling chilled by the off-and-on drizzle, we left the rookery behind and built a fire using punky wood from a hollow tree. After a half hour of standing there soaking up heat, Lenore and I — for the first time in our lives — watched a man fall asleep standing up. It was Gus, disclosing a talent we witnessed a few other times in our long friendship. When there was nothing else useful to do, he could call time out.

Then he blinked awake, and it was onward, jon boat bouncing wildly down foaming slopes of rapids.

We were lucky. With the water so deep, we rode high over jagged rocks. In the evening, the river widened into a more sedate pool. We steered for land with most of a two-day float already behind us. The bow scratched into a flinty gravel bar. Boat tether in hand, I heroically stepped out to anchor us — and went over my head into impossibly deep water 2 feet from shore.

“Whew,” I said after I grabbed enough breath to speak.

We hauled the boat halfway up on the bar, warmed ourselves and cooked on a fresh fire. That night Gus slept in his dirt-cheap World War II Army surplus pup tent. My wife and I slept in one just like it. America had a brilliant U.S. Army in that war, providing their soldiers with the most stupid field shelter ever invented.

We lived through the night and awakened to find our boat pivoting back and forth on the current, the barest tip of its bow still clinging to the bar. In eight hours the river had come up 3 feet. Again, phew: Had the boat broken free, for us it would have been a cold swift swoop fully clothed in the current to the first possible downstream landing.

The rain continuing, Gus glanced up at the clouds and remarked: “This must be the clearing-up shower,” his favorite saying of the journey. Gus was ever the optimist.

By mid-morning we encountered our boat contractor waiting at riverside. He had guessed our toboggan ride downstream would get us there early. He ferried us back to our car, and our first river float together was finished.

But not the writing life of Charles Gusewelle.

At the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the ’60s, he drove through the most insane states of the South, writing of the Civil Rights struggle that left America better — if far from Christian even today. As Africa was transforming from colonies of European states into independent nations, he flew to Morocco on the north coast and drove south, writing of every country and people he encountered.

Arriving finally by plane in apartheid South Africa, Gus was briefly stymied. The white rulers refused to let him enter. But his page one story in the Kansas City Star of being locked out revealed the truth of that racist tyranny.

It’s preposterous, but I would like to think our float trip with Gus on the Niangua to some tiny degree equipped him to lead a 1991 expedition, floating Russia’s Lena river 2,734 miles from its source in Siberia near Lake Baikal — the deepest lake in the world at 5,387 feet —to its mouth in the Arctic Ocean. He took his wife, Katie, and daughters, Anne and Jennie, on that journey.

On their return journey from Siberia, they arrived in a Moscow that was under a coup d’état attempt. Communist hardliners sought to forcibly seize control from Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian president at the time with peaceful ties to the West.

Here was Gus, coincidentally but brilliantly on the job (with his wife and daughters) as a Kansas City Star correspondent in the embattled city. It was luck, I suppose, along with intelligence and courage by perhaps the greatest journalist Kansas City ever produced.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.