Ellington

Eve Beglarian is a modern-day, female version of Huckleberry Finn, but instead of exploring the mighty Mississippi River on a raft, she did it by kayak and bicycle.

Beglarian, a musical composer who divides her time between New York City and Vermont, dipped her paddle into the headwaters of the river in Lake Itasca, Minn., on Aug. 1, 2009, and steered her bright red, 17-foot kayak downstream for 2,300 miles or so, arriving in New Orleans a bit more than four months later.

A desire to discover the real America inspired her trip.

"Sometime in the fall of 2008, the combination of the economic meltdown and the presidential election made me want to go out and see what was happening in the country," Beglarian says. "The Mississippi River is the spine of the country. For the first half of the river, to Cairo (Ill.), I mostly kayaked, and the second half was mostly biking. It's like a super highway. Once the Ohio River joins it, the current gets much faster, and there's a lot of boat traffic. It's not really safe to be in a kayak."

Beglarian alternated days kayaking, biking and driving the support vehicle with several friends who accompanied her during much of the trip. Along the way, she collected memories, snippets of sounds, images and history from the river and her excursions into nearby towns, and she is now writing music that reflects her experiences on the Big Muddy.

She shares memories and reflections of her trip on her blog at evbvd.com/riverblog/.

Beglarian will speak about her adventures at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, at Millsaps College, and her band, Brim, will perform some of the music her watery journey inspired.

You spent a lot of time in Mississippi. What was your impression of the state?
I think it's more complicated than I thought it was. Coming there really made it clear to me. I think it's really hard for a northerner to really understand the complexity. In a way, it is like a foreign country. There's a kind of poverty in Mississippi that I'd never seen before. Especially if you're biking through these towns in the Delta, you really see it. In Natchez, you can't go grocery shopping without passing the slave-auction block. For me, that's a new experience. To make sense of that history day after day (for black and white residents) is hard.

There was a lot that was mythological to me. I got stuck in Mississippi. I met a boat pilot, David Greer, at a launch in Memphis and he gave me a lot of advice about what to experience in Mississippi. I had to go to Friar's Point. I had to go to Rodney. I had to go to Jackson. The river is this giant, and fierce. It'll kill you. But people love this river like a person. I felt very often that people were sharing their experiences of the river the way they would tell you about a person.

Did you have much experience as a kayaker when you started your journey?
Only recreationally. It starts out as this little nothing river, but as you go, you develop skills. The river grows to meet you, or you grow to meet it. I wasn't pushing to try to go quickly. My whole goal was to engage with people along the river. It didn't require me to start out really strong. We started out doing about 15 miles a day, and by the end we were doing about 40.

What will stick with you about your trip?
It was really a life-changing experience. It was really intimate. I really felt like I was making contact with the country in a way I didn't think was possible.

What type of music do you compose?
I write mostly concert music, classical. I also write for theater and dance, but mostly concert music.

How did your trip down the Mississippi inspire your newest compositions?
It's hard to answer that question because different things I heard and saw are becoming the inspiration for music I am writing. I ended up making a piece that's inspired by a Eudora Welty story about (the Mississippi ghost town) Rodney. Everything that I saw and heard has inspired me. I've started a band called Brim that was inspired by the journey, and it will be performing at Millsaps.