How one instructor’s 2,552-mile paddle reshaped the way he sees the world — and the way he shows up for his students.
When Shawn Hamerlinck decided to kayak the Mississippi River from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico this past summer, it wasn’t about reinvention. It wasn’t about proving anything. A long-held dream had finally ripened into a choice: you go, or you don’t.
Only about 30 people set off on this same source-to-sea trip each year. Typically, fewer than six finish. People wished him luck. Some urged caution. Many called it an ambitious “attempt.”
Hamerlinck, an EICC government instructor, spent 11 months training because he didn’t
plan to attempt the trip. He planned to finish.
When people asked, “Who’s going with you?” Hamerlinck never changed his answer. “God. If God’s with me, who else do I need?”
He launched his kayak from the Mississippi’s headwaters at Lake Itasca, where the river is narrow, cold, and easy to wade across. On that first morning, a father and two teens started the same trip but quit by day two. As Hamerlinck paddled away, they stood on a small bridge and called, “Godspeed!” That was the moment reality set in.
“It was just me,” he said. “And it’s 31 degrees outside.”
That northern stretch wasn’t emotional isolation so much as uninterrupted time; the kind modern life rarely allows. With no cell service, the electronic detox began immediately. A cultural detox followed. “You’ve got days at a time with nothing to do but think,” he said.
Hamerlinck prayed often, sometimes to sort through decisions, sometimes because the quiet created space for it. The stillness sharpened what surrounded him: geese arguing, shifting clouds, tree lines bending over the water.
“You start noticing things you’ve never noticed,” he said. “It’s like watching the greatest live, all-natural television right in front of you.”
The Mississippi offered every kind of test — weather, wind, hours of paddling, and moments that demanded faith or instinct over analysis.
North of St. Louis, drifting toward the Chain of Rocks, he heard barge captains shouting over the radio, “He’s going in sideways.” Hamerlinck had been admiring the historic limestone towers when a familiar nudge urged him to turn. He saw he was seconds from disaster. His kayak shot straight down the six-foot drop; somehow, he was all right.
There were storms, soaked gear, and the morning in Arkansas when he realized wild boars had moved in behind him. “There were times I felt lonely,” Hamerlinck said. “But I never felt alone.”
His sharpest moment of clarity came not in danger, but in frustration — lost in the rain, cold, and yelling that he didn’t know which way to go.
“Then I heard, clear as day, ‘The river only goes one direction.’ The answer was right in front of me. I just wasn’t listening,” Hamerlinck said.
Fifty-five days after launching, he reached the Gulf of Mexico. The final push — 46 miles in rising water and the tailspin of Tropical Storm Dexter — took everything he had. The last four miles alone took eight hours. He finished exhausted, dozens of pounds lighter, and marked by the experience in a way he didn’t expect.
A man at Burns Point looked him over and said, “You’re the first one to make it in five years.”
But for Hamerlinck, the real challenge started when he got home.
After weeks wrapped in quiet, reflection, and scale, daily life felt loud. The urgency he once felt — in news cycles, in politics, in small frustrations — loosened. “You experience something like that and realize how small most problems are,” Hamerlinck said.
Hamerlinck didn’t take the trip to become a better teacher. But he returned as one.
He teaches the same material with the same academic expectations, but he listens differently. He carries a broader sense of perspective. When students talk through worries that feel enormous — relationships, deadlines, setbacks — he understands how easy it is to mistake a moment for the whole story.
Hamerlinck doesn’t preach his river experience. He doesn’t use it as a lesson. But its presence is unmistakable.
He encourages students to trust their own capacity, to try the thing that scares them, and to understand that clarity often comes only after moving through something difficult or beautiful, or both.
Hamerlinck never tells them to paddle a river. He simply knows they’ll learn certain truths only after they’ve lived enough life to see them for themselves.
As he puts it, “They have to experience it.”