A flickering campfire, someone playing guitar and our tents set up nearby: all pretty standard, you’d think – except we were doing it on a sandbar in the middle of the Mississippi. With our guide, John Ruskey, we’d spent the afternoon paddling our sturdy large canoe downstream, though you could hardly call it hard work as the river flows at five miles an hour anyway. We’d been shadowed by silent flocks of pelicans heading south for winter, interspersed with skeins of honking geese, and overtaken by barges the size of toppled skyscrapers. Thanks to our radio, we eavesdropped on the captain’s conversations, all Southern drawls and dry humour – a lot of it about the crazy people in the canoe. And in the evening we sat back with drinks while John, who runs Quapaw Canoe Company, rustled up a simple meat-and-salad meal and told us tales of Old Man River.