Morgan Simmons was a little startled by the crowd - nearly 30 people, only a handful related to him, gathered at the dock on Chautauqua Lake in western New York. Most of the well-wishers had read in the local paper, The Chautauquan Daily, about the 27-year-old mechanical engineer's maiden voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and what began as a bit of a lark was looking serious.
When Simmons planned his 2,180-mile, four-month trip, he was really just searching for an excuse to camp out on his 18-foot hand-built bicycle-powered pontoon, the Libelula. But now he had Cub Scouts, news reporters, and elementary-school kids between here and Louisiana waiting for him to expound on river conservation and watershed awareness. Simmons gamely tried to smile for the cameras while navigating the unexpectedly treacherous lake. Large motorboats were swinging by to check out his strange craft, their wakes thrashing the Libelula as though it were a toy boat. Then there were the plastic belts linking the bikes' drive train to the paddle wheels, now wet and slipping, preventing him from going any faster than 2 knots.
His plan: beta-test his vessel for a week on the 18-mile-long lake, then portage it to the Allegheny River, which connects to the Mississippi via the Ohio.
Thus, on this muggy afternoon, at this inaugural stop, Simmons had little choice but to pedal toward the dock. His slow approach afforded the applauding crowd a good view of the Libelula, which resembles a small white clapboard chapel set afloat. His epic trip may not be the first time a pontoon has sailed down America's great interior waterways, but it's definitely the first time a solar-powered, Web-tracked, bicycle-propelled pontoon has been pedaled down Old Man River by a bass-playing sea captain. He stripped a fishing boat down to its deck, then built the chapel-like structure to house a small galley, two bunks, a toilet, and a closet for his upright bass. He also designed and built the proépulsion system: two bikes mounted on a frame and hooked to paddle wheels made out of plastic trim and old bicycle wheels.
After a brief ceremony, during which-Morgan was presented with a banner from the Chautauqua Bird, Tree and Garden Club, he got back into Libelula and pedaled away. Bill Simmons, watching his son depart, remarked that they're used to him doing things "a little differently." As a kid, Morgan wrote to the National Geographic Association to volunteer for expeditions, and after college he worked on two-masted sailing ships for the Sea Education Association and biked across North America. He'd had the idea of floating down the Mississippi since reading Mark Twain in grade school. Yet the trip was tough to justify. So he turned the journey into a project, partially funded by the SEA, to educate kids. "The water in some lake in New York ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, and that began to grow on me," he says. "All the interconnected waterways end up at one place." He founded a nonéprofit, River WateréWorks, and bills the trip as "following the journey of a drop of water down the river."
Over the next two weeks, slipping belts proved to be the least of Simmons' problems. Around the time a team from his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, was racing a robotic car across the Mojave Desert in the Darpa Grand Challenge, he was stuck on a sandbar on the Allegheny. He'd taken the boat around a small, innocuous-looking island - to the wrong side, it turned out - and he and his crewmate, 25-year-old Aimee Rowe, had to winch the boat free using ratchet straps and the trunk of a dead tree. In one two-day period, the Libelula ran aground more than 20 times. They went on to battle rapids, boat locks, and winds. They ultimately had to use an outboard motor to keep on schedule. Boyishly optimistic, Simmons couldn't care less. "I'm not a lunatic," he says. "I'm a captain providing an interesting educational opportunity."
- Michael Erard
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Biking the Mississippi
