To look at 23-year-old Josh Evans, a Jackson native and Jackson Academy graduate, is to look at an artist, an intellectual, a man with scruffy stubble who fits in well with the aesthetics of the Fondren district. Evans’ counterpart is the aptly named Dallis Ketchum. Ketchum, 25, and a native of Memphis, is also a thinker. But unlike Evans, he is lively, considerably animated in conversation, tan and clean-shaven. On the surface, there are few similarities between the two; however, on Sept. 3, three days after Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic landfall and trek up from the Gulf of Mexico, this unlikely duo joined forces in a kayak to battle the most formidable of foes: the monstrous, 2,300-mile Mississippi River.
