The River Signal, a radio program improbably produced by three friends from a boat drifting down the Mississippi River, will be rolling into New Orleans for its final episode after a journey that started last June, in Minnesota.

Radio Producer Galen Huckins has been living on a boat for close to three years. Three months ago, he was joined by Oregon natives Brian Benson and Reid Lustig, to start a 1,800-mile journey upstream, collecting stories on their way to the Big Easy.

“The Mississippi river is so caught in various stories around either nostalgia or ruined industrial wasteland,” Huckins said. “It’s always been a big question for us, what we would encounter out here.”

The radio program is a weekly, hour-long audio production that is entirely scripted by three-man crew of the Channel Princess, a once-sunken thirty-three foot paddlewheel riverboat that carries this whole operation and serves as a means of travel, a workplace, recording studio and living place for the crew.

 

 

“We would’ve never imagined that we would connect with so many different people on the river. There’s a kind of network of people,” Huckins said. “We sort of talk about the river now as being almost a state in and of itself, where people up and down the river know one another and have their own connections.”

Inspired by musicians and performers whose stories they document along the way, the group writes fictional stories before recording and mixing  them on board, and issues a new release each week. After having recorded more than 25 musicians since last June, the travelers are getting ready to release episode 16 of The River Signal on Monday, September 14.

“I think our experience with New Orleans will have everything to do with the musicians we meet and our experience on the water, and it may have very little to do with what other people will experience who travel there, seeing downtown or coming from a different entry point,” Huckins said.

The use of fiction to tell those stories was a conscious decision according to the floating trio, based on the agreement that “every travel story is a subjective projection from the traveler, making the idea of a true travel story a bit of a myth.” Writer Brian Benson told the Minnesota Monthly that the group wants the people to “consider the way stories are told and constructed.”

The River Signal website features every episode of the series, as well as many videos that illustrate the many encounters made along the river, and other visuals such as maps and photographs.

Find the latest episode below, about the traveler’s arrival in the Mississippi Delta.