Kayaking Down the Mighty Mississippi ST. PETERSBURG (WUSF) - By later today, Kevin Lilly will be lounging in a jet, traveling in style from his St. Petersburg home to northern Minnesota. That will likely be the last time he's sitting anywhere comfortably for the next three and a half months. He'll be traveling from at the headwaters of the Mississippi to the Big Easy - New Orleans - by kayak.

When he finally sets his 17-foot kayak in Minnesota's Lake Itsasca in a couple of weeks, it will be the first paddle in a journey that will take him more than 2,000 miles down the heartland of America.

But there's one big if: Lilly's never camped a day in life.

He'll have to get used to that, as well as being the smallest fish in what can sometimes be a very large - and fast-flowing - pond.

LILLY: It's a little bit mind-blowing because I just found out yesterday that somebody in Memphis just saw our news special and e-mailed me and said, "Do you realize the river is like two and a half miles wide in Memphis? And there's no recreational boating out there?" I do now. It's a little bit creepy, especially from Baton Rouge to New Orleans - there's cruise liners.

That's why he's planning to meet up with Coast Guard officials when he reaches Tennessee.

LILLY: They've told me to keep a health 200 yards from each tugboat. They kick out a six, seven-foot wake, which in a tippy kayak will topple me over. We're in a land of giants, basically. Just tread lightly, they tell me. You can never been too safe.

And just why would a 28-year-old who has just started his own marketing company want to risk life and limb? He's doing it for charity. He's already got several corporate donations. And Lilly and several others created a web site, WhatAboutBlue.com, to raise money for clean water projects in the Third World.

LILLY: The issues are water preservation - as in not trashing our rivers and our oceans, water purification, finding clean water sources for people and water provision. We're going to be building wells overseas for people, Asia, Africa, South America, people who don't have water.

Lilly's role models for this trip are - take a deep breath here - Forrest Gump - a fictional character who jogged across America - and a web site called "Fat Man Walking.com." That was a guy who walked from Los Angeles to New York to lose weight, and invited people to his web site to join along.

LILLY: I found out that he had about 70,000 hits a day in the nineties. So he was getting huge traffic. And now, we have social networking. It became viable idea at that point. That it would take off, that people would follow it and with social networking the way it is, one little message would go to a hundred people in a second, or a thousand, and they pass it to a thousand.

COGGAN: I hope this is going to be a life-changing trip for Kevin, opening his eyes to a whole new activity and a whole new way of traveling. But I think it's certainly something he can do.

Brian Coggan is one of two guides who will accompany Lilly. The California resident's never been on a journey this long, either - his biggest trip was three weeks down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. And on this expedition, his eyes will be wide open.

COGGAN: We sort of laugh about how, everyday, we hear a new thing that we have to watch out for on the river. One day I learned there are tons of alligators on some sections of the river, other day it's water snakes and bugs of course and the heat is always to be there.

And then, there's the huge number of barges that carry grain from the nation's breadbaskets to the huge ports at the end of the line in Louisiana.

COGGAN: A lot of people will talk about the alligators or the eddies or the whirlpools, but in most situations like this the most dangerous animal out there are other humans. Certainly barge traffic and other recreational boat traffic is probably the biggest danger to kayakers - just because kayaks sit pretty low in the water, you're kind of low-visibility, you don't move very fast, you can't get out of the way quickly. But to the advantage of kayaks, you can paddle in a lot of places that other boats can't go.

Lilly is also a bit of the romanticist when he envisions his trip. He talks about DeSoto's first trip up the Mighty Mississipi. About the setting for the steamy, moss-draped ramblings of William Faulkner. And of course, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

LILLY: I kind of want to write my own version of "Life on the Mississippi" from what I'm doing. So there could be a neat twist.

REPORTER: What do you hope to get out of this personally, by the time you get into New Orleans? LILLY: I know it's going to change me somewhat, personally. I honestly don't know what that's going to do. I hope the charity prospers, and I hope we can do this every year. But me personally, it's going to be a life-changing experience, and I don't know what to expect. I'm looking forward to discovering that, actually.

He's got the rest of the summer - and 2,300 miles - to write his next chapter. © Copyright 2012, WUSF