Paddle a mile in their canoes

"We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this great country: those who come after us will fill up the canvas we begin."

- Thomas Jefferson, May 1804

Peter Geery isn't satisfied with just reading about the exploits of American explorers Lewis and Clark. He's been living them.

In his role as Sgt. John Ordway, Mr. Geery has reenacted small pieces of the team's epic journey.

"I've been on the river at 106 degrees, and I've been on the river at 36 degrees in wind and rain, standing in the bow of the boat and watching for semi- submerged debris," he says. "You can read the journals, but when you're wearing the clothing, and you're on the site, and you're living the talk, the journals take on a different presence."

Now Geery's reenactment group, The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles (Mo.), has a bigger prize in mind. Starting in 2004, exactly 200 years after the two Army officers set out across the western American wilderness to seek a water passage to the Pacific, the group will trace all the river-based portions of the trip, traveling in a painstakingly accurate replica keelboat and two authentic pirogues (large dugout canoes).

They won't often find the solitude encountered by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their party of about 40 - including American soldiers, a young Indian woman, and an African-American slave. According to early estimates, 25 million to 30 million Americans will explore some aspect of the 28-month, 8,000-mile trek that Lewis and Clark made by foot, boat, and horseback between St. Louis and the mouth of the Columbia River near Astoria, Ore.

The Lewis and Clark bicentennial officially begins on Jan. 18 at Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello near Charlottesville, Va. That's the day when President Jefferson sent a confidential letter to Congress urging it to provide $2,500 for an expedition to the Northwest in search of a river passage to the Pacific Ocean. He appointed his personal secretary, Lewis, an Army captain, to lead the expedition. Lewis, in turn, invited friend and fellow officer Clark to be co-leader.

Starting in 2003 and continuing into 2006, organizations and cities will engage in what planners say may be the biggest historical celebration in the United States since the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1976. The festivities will mark every step of the expedition's progress. Public-service ads will tell how it raised issues still important today, and students from elementary schools to colleges will study it from every angle.

Books are in the works, and hundreds of Lewis and Clark websites already have sprung up. A new large- format film takes visitors soaring over dramatic landscapes and plunks them into the frigid river rapids the explorers had to run. Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, has been commissioned to design four memorials to Lewis and Clark at sites in Washington State.

The bicentennial should be a way to "engage in a deeper conversation about what it means to be an American" and ask "what kind of course corrections should we be making in the 21st century," says Robert Archibald, who serves as president of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and is also president of the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

All the attention to what transpired 200 years ago will push people to ask themselves, "Can we stand in other people's shoes and see this land differently?" Dr. Archibald says. "That seems to be one of the powerful possible outcomes of this."

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