The River and the Devil at Your Heels

I have a deep compassion for people with an idea. I mean that sincerely.  It’s because I’ve spent my life building technology startups. And I understand fixation. The sleepless nights where the idea is oxygen, where you see something so clearly, while others think you’re crazy.

 Jumping the St. Lawrence River in a car has just never been one of my ideas. It has never even crossed my mind. But when I first heard about it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had to learn more. Because in my own way, I’m a risk-taker, too. Not with rockets and cars made of steel, but with companies, ideas, and the strange courage it takes to attempt something that might collapse under its own ambition.

 Startups are a kind of jump. You take something heavy and improbable, point it toward a distant shore, and pray momentum carries you far enough that gravity doesn’t catch you before it doesn’t.

 So, I get the instinct. I do.

 Just not a Lincoln Continental with a jet engine strapped to its back. Where the idea came from, how it took hold, how it grew into an obsession — that’s the part that fascinates me, because the psychology of it feels familiar.

 Risk-takers recognize one another – even when the risk is entirely different.

 I’ve parachuted out of airplanes. Dove from high River cliffs. Climbed lighthouses at three in the morning – when I was younger and thought gravity was only optional.

 But nothing like this.

 This man believed he could jump a jet-powered car nearly a mile across the St. Lawrence River.  And strangely, the story itself feels like the River. As ever it was. Because the River is not just majestic.

 It’s quirky.

 It’s wild.

 It’s strange in the way only places with the longest memories can live.

 The River is full of characters — pirates and smugglers, industrial barons with summer castles, fishermen who know every current like a heartbeat. It has hosted robberies, strange inventions, improbable fortunes, and quiet tragedies. There’s a rhythm to it.

 People build things here that make no sense anywhere else. They attempt things that seem ridiculous until suddenly they become legend. The River has always had a tolerance for these characters.

 It takes all kinds.

 That’s the truth of it.

 The River is not just beauty. It is this accumulation of stories — some noble, some foolish, some somewhere in between.  The magic of it comes from all of them existing all at once. 

 Which brings us to the stunt.

 In 1979, a man named Ken Carter arrived near Morrisburg with a plan that sounded like it had been conceived somewhere between brilliance and madness. He wanted to jump the St. Lawrence River.

 Not a narrow section.

 Not a clever engineering bridge.

 The River itself. 

 And, nearly a mile.

His machine was a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. A vehicle near-and-dear to my heart, Motor City and man-made, designed for quiet American highways.

 Its long steel body now turned into a projectile.

 Rocket engines strapped into the trunk.

 Parachutes packed into the back.

 It was equal parts engineering and equal parts theater.

 For five years, Carter chased the jump. Money evaporated. Fuel tanks exploded. The ramp they built even shook itself apart. Weather delayed attempts. Crew strikes halted others. Investors lost patience. The dream, though, never lost momentum. And in a twist that feels almost poetic, the man who would attempt the jump was not Carter himself, but an American stunt driver named Kenny Powers.

 A Canadian dream.

 An American behind the wheel. 

 I have always loved that combination as I probably always should. It has always felt symbolic of our countries. One imagines it, designs it, builds it. The other straps in and says, let’s see what happens. Camaraderie built on courage and the right amount of recklessness.  The ramp was built and stood in a farmer’s field west of Hanes Road. An asphalt runway stretching toward the water like a promise. At the end of it, it tilted upward toward open sky.

The River waited.

 Boats floated offshore. People gathered along the banks. Lawn chairs appeared. Cameras rolled. The moment had the strange stillness that comes before something impossible is attempted. Then the rockets fired. The Lincoln roared down the runway faster than reason suggested it ever should. The ramp bumped — never fully fixed — and began shaking the car apart before it even reached the launch point. Still, it lifted.

 Only for a moment — one of those suspended moments history loves — the car hung in the air between shores.

 Between ambition and gravity and air and water.

 Then physics remembered its earthly job.

 The Lincoln practically disintegrated in midair.  Parachutes deployed. The wreckage splashed into shallow water. Kenny Powers survived. Eight broken vertebrae. But alive.

 The jump was over.

 Carter vowed to try again, yet it was never attained. That’s what men like him do. A few years later, in 1983, he died attempting another stunt in Peterborough, ON. The ramp at Morrisburg was eventually demolished. The runway still partially exists — faint, forgotten, a scar in a field where ambition once tried to outrun all odds.

 So, what do we call it?

 Heroism?

 Foolishness?

 Or simply the human impulse to ask the question that built bridges, companies, airplanes, and rockets:  Is it possible?

 We don’t live as heroes. People decide that for us later. Men like Carter and Powers lived in that in-between space — the place where people watch and wonder if something impossible might be possible. The River has always had room for people like us. Because the River itself isn’t about beginnings or endings. It’s not about borders or destinations.

 It’s about presence. 

 Without the eccentrics and the dreamers, the smugglers and the tycoons, the fishermen and the stuntmen, the River would always still flow.

 But it wouldn’t be the River. 

 Would it?

And somewhere between the roar of those rockets and the quiet splash that ended it all, the River reminded everyone watching of something so seemingly simple: the devil isn’t always in the details. Sometimes the devil is at at your heels — whispering you might just clear the water, you might just make it.

 Just maybe . . .

By Mark E. Russell, Idle Isle, NY.

Mark Russell is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the Western New England School of Law, and has applied legal precision and narrative clarity to every venture he’s led, from early startups to global agencies and now to CatalystXL, the software-as-a-service company he founded to simplify how organizations communicate and operate. Russell has written for multiple publications — among them Detroit’s TBD Magazine — and contributed to Mastering Communication at Work along with two chapters in the New York Times bestseller, Spend Shift. He lives in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, with his wife, Amy Saunders Russell, their three River Rat children — Emma, Sam, and Trey — and their miniature schnauzer, Stella. The Russells divide their time between their home overlooking Lake St. Clair and their summer island retreat, Idle Isle, on the St. Lawrence River.