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Hi, I'm Anne Strain Champs, and today we're taking a fresh look at a big, muddy river, the Mississippi.

It's captured the American imagination ever since Mark Twain put Huck and Jim on a raft.

But what does the Mississippi mean to us today?

Environmentalist Bill McKibbon had this to say in his introduction to Mark Twain's memoir,

the Mississippi River hardly figures in the American imagination anymore.

It remains a sturdy transportation corridor, but as a thing, it inspires little reverence and even little thought.

Well, Bill McKiven lives in Vermont, after all, so he views the river

from a certain critical distance. But when you get closer, down to the banks of the Mississippi

itself, you find something different. People still living and working on the river. New species of birds being found along its shores.

And new stories about its path through our country's history.

In other words, this big, wide, muddy river is a place we're still discovering.

Vietnam, not necessarily assimilated into the culture completely and just got a canoe and kept going down river and started seeing stuff that I didn't know.

It's like, what's this?

This is John Stravers.

He goes by Hawk.

He's an ornithologist, a musician, and as he mentioned, a Vietnam vet,

and he spends his days on the river listening for a single bird, the Cerulean Warbler. Here's Craig

Ely with the story. I've been on a boat with John Stravers twice.

The first time was with a group of faculty and grad students, and he was talking about

bird research he'd done in the area.

...