The best view John Ruskey ever had of Memphis from the Mississippi River came on May 15.

“That’s because we were 50 feet higher than usual, because the river was 50 feet higher,” he told about 160 people at the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District’s annual awards banquet Thursday night.

Ruskey described his 300-mile canoe journey on the swollen river with writer Hodding Carter IV and photographer Christopher LaMarca, providing descriptions and photos of river landmarks surrounded or submerged by water.

“This far outweighed anything I expected,” Myrtle Alvarado of Vicksburg said after the program.

“Being here in Vicksburg, it was fascinating to see what happened upriver, said her husband, Bobby Alvarado.

Ruskey said the Mississippi was falling as he, Carter and LaMarca put in near Memphis at the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers.

He arrived in Vicksburg by the Yazoo River four days later — the trip from Memphis to Vicksburg normally takes two weeks, he said — when the Mississippi crested here at a historic 57.1 feet, 14.1 feet above flood stage and 1.3 feet above the crest during the Great Flood of 1927.

“The Mississippi drains 44 percent of America,” Ruskey said. “The Mississippi and its tributaries make up the second largest river basin in the world.”

He said the current of the swollen river was swift.

They got their first taste of the strong current at the Memphis-Arkansas bridge on the Mississippi, “where we were quickly washed out of Memphis” by a 10-knot current, the equivalent of 11.5 mph.

That first day, Ruskey said, the group covered 99 miles.

“We looked for land, but we couldn’t find any, so we tied on to a driftwood raft where we spent the night,” he said. “I woke up the next morning, thinking the raft had turned over.”

He said the second day provided more evidence of the river’s strength at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers.

Where it meets the Arkansas River, he said, “the Mississippi runs so wild that map-makers can’t keep up with the changes (in the river).”

South of there, he said, the trio ran into swift water, adding, “in a canoe, the speed is exhilarating and slightly frightening, because you never know what might happen. We did 10 miles in 40 minutes and 20 miles in 90 minutes.”

Other than birds, Ruskey said the group saw very little wildlife during their trip — a deer and a wild pig on their second day on the trip.

He wondered about the wildlife that normally populated the flooded woods along the river as he slept in a hammock slung over the water on trees on their final night on the Mississippi.

“The flood caused a lot of businesses to close for two months, including mine, and a lot of people were put out of work,” he said. “But that paled in comparison to the number of wildlife that had been forced out of their habitats.”

He said the group caught crest of the river in Greenville and “rode it down.”

Ruskey said the trio tried to reach Vicksburg by using the Forest Home Chute near Eagle Lake to reach the Old Yazoo to enter the Mississippi near Vicksburg.

“But when we got into the Yazoo, we found that the current was flowing backward,” Ruskey said, adding the change in the current forced them to take a detour that went over Mississippi 465 and through Steel Bayou before reaching the Mississippi at Kings Point for the final leg to Vicksburg.