Altamaha Altimeter

Posted on January, 2024 by Burt Kornegay
Early morning view from our campsite on one of the Altamaha River’s big sandbars.

Plan E

In Slickrock Expedition days I always had more than one river in mind when I scheduled a canoe trip. Plan A was the advertised trip—say a week on Oregon’s Grande Ronde River, with the group meeting in Boise, Idaho, on July 10. And one year at that date the Grande Ronde was flowing at what I considered its perfect level for canoe tripping: 2000 cubic feet per second (cfs) on the USGS Minam gauge. But the next year, same date, the river, now discharging at 15000 cfs because of a big snow-melt in its headwaters combined with rain, threatened to wash both the gauge and Minam itself away—plus any canoe-trippers foolish enough to venture on it. Another eastern Oregon river, however, the John Day, was flowing at 3000 on the Service Creek gauge, just right for exploring its 70-mile-long Great Basalt Canyon. So when the group assembled in Boise, I switched the trip to it, Plan B.  The third year, again in July, I advertised the Grande Ronde—my favorite western river to canoe. But as it turned out, the only way to descend either it or the John Day would have been to drag the boats. Both rivers were shrunk because of puny snow packs. Heraclitus put it right 3000 years ago: “No canoeist runs the same river twice.” So, digging deeper in my memory, I pulled out Plan C, a trip on the Challis reach of Idaho’s Salmon River. It had a bold flow.

For everyone involved, too much was riding on the canoe trips for me not to know my ABCs.

This past November, 2023, I had to know to E.  I’d been trying to set up a fall trip that I make annually with canoe buddies Henry, Bobby, and Pat, but, after ordering the topo maps and securing a shuttle driver, along with finding nearby accommodations for our pre-trip rendezvous, I’d had to cross out first Plan A then B then C—on the Rio Grande in Texas, the Sepulga-Conecuh in Alabama, and Georgia’s upper Ocmulgee, respectively. A persistent and widening drought was sucking the watery life out of them. I turned to Plan D, the lower Savannah. It was running at 5000 cfs, excellent for canoe-camping. Plus, I already had the maps. But even with numerous phone and email inquiries in the Savannah River basin below Augusta, I was stymied by a drought of reliable shuttle drivers.

Then I remembered Georgia’s mighty Altamaha: it would float our boats. It also had trusty Scott Taylor of Three Rivers Outdoors to shuttle us. 

The Altamaha (pronounced AltamaHA) is a southeastern Georgia river that forms from the confluence of two rivers big in their own right—the Ocmulgee and the Oconee—and it flows for roughly 140 miles to the Atlantic, carrying the water of one-quarter of the state. Hence its nickname, “Georgia’s Amazon.” I had paddled the two big tributaries, each around 200 miles long. What would the main stem be like?

From the confluence of the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers, which start in central Georgia’s piedmont, the Altamaha flows southeast through the coastal plain for 140 miles to the Atlantic. Drawing from Wikipedia

With just a week to go before our starting date, I proposed to the others that we paddle the Altamaha’s upper half. We would launch at the US 221 bridge, near the confluence, and canoe down to the US 301 take-out, 70 miles in 5 days. They said Let’s do it. 

Where a Bend Is a Bight

Because of the ongoing drought, even the Altamaha was low. But low for it meant 2600 cfs at the US 221 bridge. That equals almost 200,000 gallons of water passing a given point every second—the equivalent of four Nantahala Rivers. And yet, as we discovered, because the Altamaha is also a wide river, 300 feet across at the confluence and widening as it goes, it was running little more than paddle-blade deep. The Altamaha ran so wide and slow, in fact, that often the experience was that of paddling a long lake, not a river. The chief exception to this was where the current flowed to the “cutbank” side of the river’s bends or meanders, which in that part of Georgia are called “bights.” 

When a meandering river forms a bend or bight, most of the current swings to the outside of the turn and erodes a sheer bank, hence the name “cutbank.” But the opposite happens on the inside of the bight. There the river slows down, grows shallow and deposits its sediment, which accumulates in sand or gravel “point bars.” 

Meander, bend, and bight are all names for sharp turns in a river channel, with the current eroding “cutbanks” on the outside of the turn and depositing the eroded sediment on the inside “point bars.“

Naturally, we’d take the cutbank side of the bights. That’s where the river deepened and picked up speed. Even better, sometimes we’d find a natural slalom course to weave through, its gates formed by the skeletal trunks of river-toppled trees. Taking the cutbank passage did not rise to the excitement of running rapids or of navigating tight, twisting channels, but if was refreshing to hear the whitewater-like sounds of the river rushing through strainers and around deadheads.

But although the cutbank was the fun side, whenever we came to a bight I usually held to the inside of the turn first, before angling across the channel to enjoy the cutbank’s faster ride. The inside had its own kind of attraction. There the Altamaha grew so shallow and clear that it seemed to become a thin current of air sliding over the land. We were in cypress-swampy Deep South Georgia, but when I looked down over the side of the canoe, right below me appeared a Utah desert landscape of sand dunes and valleys and treeless mountain ranges all formed by the river; and although the current was moving at no more than 1 mph, I seemed to be skimming the desert’s surface in the cockpit of a small plane. Sometimes, the land would rise so close that I thought I was about to crash into it. But at the last instant—if I’d aimed my glide path right—the riverbed would abruptly drop off at the apex of the bend and I’d glide out over blackness.

Thoreau, who boated the slow-moving rivers near his home almost as much as he hiked in the surrounding woods, wrote in his journal: “The shallowest water is unfathomed—wherever a boat can float, there is more than Atlantic depth.” 

While taking the Altamaha’s inside passages on water barely deep enough to float my boat, here’s the depth I fathomed. When I looked up, I was on a wide flat glistening world moving almost imperceptibly onward between a thick forest. The next bend downstream was a long way off. It would take many pulls on the paddle to reach it and see what was on the other side. Georgia’s Amazon seemed to be taking all the time in the world to merge with the Atlantic, though merge it would. But when I peered down, paddle now shipped, I found that the same river was whisking me over a close-up world of sand and pebbles and debris being built into beautiful features, features that hardly had time to form before they were being dismantled again by the current and made into new ones. No one part of the riverbed had time to emerge into steady sight: both it and I were in motion. Depending on whether I looked far or near, out or down, steady or dizzied, the world revealed itself in different ways according to my perspective. To take the inside passage was to travel on two rivers at once, an encapsulated experience of lived time.

To quote Heraclitus in full: “No canoeist runs the same river twice because it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

Watch This!

The third day came with actual flight.  We were stretching our legs on a sandbar when we heard then spotted a single-engine plane, blue and white, cruising downstream over the woods on the far shore. Even at a distance I could see that it had big rubber tires—called “tundra tires” and “bush tires,” made for landing on rough terrain. The plane appeared to be skimming the treetops, giving a twist to the name “bush plane.” Wondering if the pilot could see us, Pat waved—and the plane waved “yes” with its wings, and flew on out of sight.

We were about to launch when we heard the plane again, but this time it sounded louder and louder. Suddenly, around the downstream bend here it came in a tightly banked turn—but now it was mid-channel and flying so low that one of its tires was spinning on the river’s surface. The pilot was performing a kind of water wheelie, at the same time keeping the tip of his wing from digging in. The plane flew straight towards us, holding its risky tilt, then flattened out and zoomed past not 100′ away, both tires now furrowing the river, shooting up spray. When it pulled up steeply to climb over a wall of trees, we saw written across the top of the wings in red letters, SWAMP RANGER.

Stock photo showing the kind of plane we saw on the Altamaha.

The wings should have said SWAMP RANGERS because about every half hour after that another bush plane would hove into sight, then another—all different colored, and all flying low, following the river’s meandering channel. They looked to me like Piper Cubs and single-engine Cessnas. I fancied there must be an Altamaha Aerial Association—AAA for short—and that word had spread among the members: Hey, canoes are on the river, a captive audience! We’d wave as they zoomed by, and, as if machine and man were one, the planes and pilots in them would wave back.

Usually, what I like best about seeing an airplane is the thought that at least it’s farther off than a powerboat and will be gone quicker out of sight and sound. My opinion on the matter of aircraft is simple: if God had wanted us to fly, he’d have given us wings, not paddles. I see an airplane off with good riddance. If it’s an ear-piercing, canoe-rocking speedboat or, worst of all, a devilish Jet Ski, I add this prayer: May it crash and burn. If the Almighty had wanted us to slice rivers open with screaming machines, he’d have given us something other than canoes. But that afternoon on the wide, low, slow Altamaha, I have to confess, the Swamp Rangers were exciting to see.

A screaming machine split North Carolina’s tranquil Lumber River wide open as it ripped past my campsite one evening in June of last year. It was the first boat of any type I had seen in three days of travel, and it made a wake that almost washed over my camp.

The pilots weren’t out to dominate the river, show it how fast they could go, or to drown the Altamaha’s delicate water sounds and bird songs with the noise of their engines. They weren’t trying to make money out of it. There was no “Air-tamaha Tours” written on the fuselages. We saw just one person in each plane. Rather, I liked to think the men in their flying machines were closer in spirit to the ospreys that glide up and down the river as much for the pleasure of it, I’m convinced, as to find a meal. Or, to take an example from my home here in the western North Carolina mountains, they were akin to the pair of ravens I watch soar from ridge to ridge over the gulf of air that is Moses Creek valley while swooping and looping and tooting away to each other with aerobatic skill.

The fifth and last plane was my favorite. It was also the smallest. We were setting up camp when it flew around the bend. Its doors were wide open—I’m not even sure it had doors—and the pilot was clearly visible inside. Approaching us, the plane slowed until I wondered how it was able to stay aloft. We’d seen bass boats rip past faster than thatg, powered by roaring engines. This flying machine sounded like it had a push mower for propulsion. Or maybe it was a one-seat pedal boat rigged with wings, and the sound we heard was that of the pilot pumping his feet to make the blade go round. It was a slow and low aircraft for a low and slow Altamaha.

I’ve read that Piper Cubs have a stall speed of 38 mph. If so, this plane verged on stall. The pilot was giving new meaning to “terminal velocity.” And the risk is real. In June of 1987 divers pulled the bodies of three men out of the section of river we were paddling after their small plane nosed in and sank.

As the old joke goes:
What are the last words of a redneck? “Watch This!“
What’s he say before that? “Here, hold my beer.”

Even if it is fueled by alcohol, to me there’s something compelling in a vow that demands follow-through. There’s the hint of the heroic spirit in it, of derring-do. People turn to watch. Swamp Ranger #5 puttered past so slow I could have run out and held his beer.

One of us laughed that if we’d had women in the group, the pilots would have hot-dogged it with barrel rolls, wingovers, and dives. With their big tires, they would have turned our sandbar into a landing strip and offered free rides.

A well chosen word is worth a thousand pictures. But rather than search longer for the right word to describe the Aerotamaha planes, I’ll give you a video to watch. Title it, “Look how close his wing is!”:

https://www.facebook.com/ShopARTC/videos/altamaha-river-bush-plane-skimming-the-water-check-it-out/3611308075549028/

Pretty Good Plus

After dining on ReadyWise freeze-dried suppers last May during our canoe trip down Maine’s Machias River, Bobby and I rated them to be “Pretty Good.” On the Altamaha, Bobby brought other brands for a freeze-dried taste test, though I went back to my standbys, Progresso Soup and Ramen Noodles. As we gathered round the festive board our first night in camp, we watched Bobby pull out a pouch of “MOUNTAIN HOUSE Adventure Meal Beef Stew.” Following directions, he poured boiling water into the pouch, zipped it shut to let the food reconstitute, then cleansed his palate with an anticipatory beer. Ten minutes later he dipped his spoon in the bag, dug deep, and lifted out an adventurous mouthful. It was dusk by then, and he chewed thoughtfully, staring out over the river and comparing that night’s fare to what he’d had on the Machias. Then he dug his spoon in again.

The back of the pouch had a “Best by” date of July 2053 stamped on it. I playfully took that to mean that if its desiccated contents were left to properly age they’d be “best by” 2053. There was also a self-congratulatory blurb: “How do we do it? We use only the highest-quality ingredients and cook our meals the old-fashioned way. The result is a home-cooked flavor, no matter where you are.” We were on the Altamaha River. How’d the food taste? Bobby held up the pouch and gave it a “Pretty Good Plus.”

It occurred to me that if Bobby had saved the meal until 2053, more than likely both of us, and Pat too, would be on a river bigger than the Altamaha, in spirit canoes.

It was “PEAK REFUEL 2 Premium Breakfast Skillet,” however, that received peak honors. Bobby pulled it out of his food box on the 5th morning. The picture on the pouch showed a savory and salivary heaping of hot eggs, sausage, potatoes, and peppers. You’d think we were at Waffle House. He added hot water, set the pouch aside for the required time, then, with the first taste pronounced the meal “Pretty Good Plus a Smidgen.” After eating two-third’s of the contents for “2,” Bobby asked if anyone wanted the leftovers. Henry, who’d been eating the instant cream of wheat I’d brought for our breakfasts, wasted no time in taking it. He rated the contents, “Pretty Good Plus a Smidgen Plus.”

Yankee Reach

Big sandbars wrapped around most bights on the Altamaha, so sandbars are where we camped. We would pitch our shelters at the back of the bar, where there would invariably be an inviting grove of black willows—some of them with limb spreads that rivaled live oaks. The willows, their long lanceolate leaves showing a blend of summer green and autumn yellow, were pleasing to look at bordering the expanse of sand. They were also a ready source of firewood (black willow breaks so easily it’s also called “crack willow”). They would serve as breaks if the wind came up. They provided pegs for our increasingly smelly clothing to hang on. And they sheltered us from heavy dew. 

But getting our gear to the willows at the end of a long day was a haul. The soft sand increased the effort required. “The biggest sandbars I’ve ever camped on!” Pat said as he lugged a gear bag past me towards the trees.

I named our campsites Swift Cut, Big Willow, Swamp Ranger, and Yankee Reach. That last name isn’t mine. I got it from the USGS topo map of our final stretch. I wondered if Yankee Reach dated back to Sherman’s March to the Sea, the memory of which still smolders in Georgia. It might designate the place where his army crossed the Altamaha.

Entering the Yankee Reach of the Altamaha River.

Two Selected Shorts

1.) When we approached a string of houses along the bluff at Deens Landing, mid-trip, we heard two people yelling at each other. Our view of them was blocked by trees. I turned my hearing aids up to high, but, in the time it took us to pass—the two going at it the whole while—I couldn’t make out the words, just recognized the shrill voice to be female; the other voice, deeper, but no less angry, was definitely male. Both were out of tune with the tranquil river. Later, Henry told me the gist of the row:
“Do not go into the house!”
“I’ll go where I want to, WOMAN!”

2.) Bobby said that often when he tells people about our river trips, the first question they ask is “How do you charge your phone?”

Canoe mates at lunchtime under Altamaha sandbar willows.

River Trip Facts and Figures

Shuttle driver: Scott Taylor, Three Rivers Outdoors, off Old River Rd. south of Uvalde. Besides shuttling, Scott has a canoe livery serving the lower Oconee, Ocmulgee, Ohoopee, and Altamaha.  His email bespeaks the love of his life: Ontheriverman@gmail.com

Put-in: We loaded the canoes with our gear at the US 221 bridge, on river left, and in the stench of two rotting deer carcasses dumped by a hunter. Scott told me with disgust that the year before he had counted 150 carcasses that hunters had left on the shoulders up and down the highway.

Take-out: We unloaded our canoes at the paved “Jaycee Landing” on river right, just upstream of the US 301 bridge. It had picnic tables, a shelter, bathrooms, and a small store.

River level: 2600 cfs at the US 221 USGS bridge gauge.  A flow of around 4000 would give the river some oomph. The higher flow would also open up for exploration the river’s dead river channels, oxbows, sloughs, swamps, and cut-throughs, whereas our 2600 level confined us to the main channel.  Above 4000 cfs, however, the river’s sandbars, so pleasant for camping, will start to be submerged.

Guidebooks: Suzanne Welander and Bob Sehlinger: Canoeing & Kayaking Georgia. In April of 2024 Joe Cook’s Altamaha River User’s Guide is to be published by the Georgia River Network. Based on the other River User’s Guides I own that have been written by Cook, and also published by the Network, I expect this one will provide detailed maps and useful information for river paddlers, as well as give a running account as you go downstream of the Altamaha’s natural and human history.

River reading: Janisse Ray’s Drifting into Darien, the first part of which recounts a trip the author made with a large group in 2011 down the Altamaha to its mouth.

“Altamaha”:  According to John Worth, an anthropologist who studies the southeastern Indians, “The river took its name from an immigrant Yamassee group descended from an interior chiefdom originally known as ALTAMAHA, or TAMA  . . . and visited by Hernando de Soto in 1540.”

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Maine’s Machias, a Good “Bad Run of River”

Posted on July, 2023 by Burt Kornegay
The Machias begins as a stream flowing from lake to lake.

Maine’s Machias River has its start about 30 miles northeast of Bangor as the crow flies, and it runs for 75 miles to the Atlantic though a part of Maine known as “Downeast” by those who live there—a region characterized by a jagged coastline and inland high points called “mountains” that rise a couple of hundred feet above a glaciated, rock and rolling land. If you could look down from satellite height, you’d see that the river’s overall course forms a shimmering silvery question mark in the deep-green of the region’s forests suggesting the unknown and seeming to say, “Why gaze up at the stars when here at your feet lies undiscovered Earth?”

The Machias, pronounced “ma-CHEYE-us,” makes up in a series of lakes, starting with Fifth Lake and counting down to First. Each lake is connected to the next by a stream deep enough to paddle after spring snow melt. Once it emerges from First Lake, the Machias flows uninterrupted for about 45 miles to the coast. That’s the stem of the “?”

The Machias is a blackwater river, meaning the water, though clear of sediment, is the color of weak tea, a color caused by the tannic acids leached from decaying plants in the river’s numerous bogs. In a sense, the Machias is a kind of tea made by nature. But when stirred up in rapids, the tannic acid turns into a white froth. The resulting foam, though harmless, is often mistaken as a sign of pollution both on northern rivers like the Machias and on blackwater rivers in the Deep South.

The foam seen in an eddy below Great Falls on the Machias is stirred-up tannic acid in the water, a common sight wherever blackwater rivers “boil white.”

In paddler’s lingo, the Machias is a “pool and drop” river, with the drops forming rapids ranging from Class I to III. Just before it meets the Atlantic at the coastal town of Machias, the river ramps up to one final drop, Class V+ Machias Falls, which plunges 30 feet into Machias Bay. The word “Machias” is said to be a Passamaquoddy Indian word for that final plunge, meaning “bad run of river.” The town has built a boardwalk to the falls, and from the safety of that vantage point you can look down at the raging maelstrom and imagine yourself styling it in your canoe, coming out the bottom not only upright but with a dry boat and a “good run!” smile. I’d say that in Passamaquoddy if I knew how. 

Today the Machias flows freely all the way to that final waterfall, but for more than a century the river was dammed in places by lumbermen cutting the virgin forest—dams that were chiefly built of logs, rocks, and dirt. The loggers used these “splash dams,” as they were called, to regulate the river’s flow for the logs they floated down to the sawmills near the coast.

Photo of a 19th-century logging “splash dam” similar to what would have been built on the Machias.

In the 1970s the last of the dams was taken down, letting the Machias flow freely again. Equally liberating, in the years since then the Machias has become one of the few rivers in the nation protected in its entirety from industrial extraction, development, and abuse. This was the happy achievement of a years-long drive by preservation-minded citizens of the state. Today the land bordering the river is either in public hands, owned by land trusts, or protected in conservation easements. This includes tracts owned by timber companies, which keep their activities back from the river and its tributaries.

To the River

On May 4, feeling the tug of the Machias question mark, I left Cullowhee heading north, Maine bound. I was pulling a trailer loaded with three canoes and one kayak, plus camping gear for four, and enough food to last a week. Mark Jaben, the kayaker on the trip, rode up with me; fellow canoeists Bobby Simpson and Pat Stone would fly to Bangor on May 6, our meeting spot. There we’d do final packing and spend the night, putting on the Machias the next day. Our goal was to paddle the river starting at the top, Fifth Machias Lake.

We explored the Machias in a fleet of three canoes and a kayak.

Our motel that night had seen better days. We’d been told when making reservations that it was undergoing renovations to see better days again; but as it turned out, we arrived early in the transition—meaning the new furniture, fixtures, carpet, paint, and cleaning supplies had arrived but were still in storage. Our accommodations were midway between modern rooms with all the comforts and tents in the woods. Make that threadbare tents with musty smells.

Making up for what the facility lacked in furnishings was the candid, humorous woman who greeted us at the desk—I’ll call her Lynn. Lynn said she had been brought in by the new owners to get the motel up and running again. Noticing the canoes on the trailer, she told us she had done some canoeing herself but not for days at a time, and she wanted to know about the adventure we’d planned. Lynn also told us she’d had a wild adventure of sorts right there in the motel, one she hoped not to have again. It came in the form of a plump woman who had checked in the night before, and who then called the front desk 27 times throughout the night to complain about one thing or another—including her inability to sleep. When the first call came, Lynn said she went to the room to see what the problem was and when she knocked on the door and it opened, she was greeted by the sight of the woman standing there bare from the waist up. Lynn rolled her eyes wide when she told us this, and, holding her hands down lower than her navel, exclaimed, “I didn’t know gravity could do THAT!

We left Lynn and the motel wildlife the next morning and in two hours reached Machias town. Although we hoped to launch at Fifth Machias Lake, our shuttle driver, Rob Scribner, had told us earlier that there was a chance the road to it, closed during the winter, might still be closed, and that turned out to be the case. But the road to Fourth Machias Lake was open, so he’d take us there.

Before leaving ,Rob made a short detour through town for us to see what would be our take-out spot at trip’s end. This was a good idea. What we saw was a nondescript grassy bank with a parking area above it that would be barely recognizable from the river as the place to stop—and it was only half-a-dozen paddle strokes above Machias Falls. We saw no warning sign about the 30-foot drop just ahead; the fall’s horizon line was hidden in the shadow cast by State Highway 1 that bridges the river there; and bridge traffic muffled the water’s roar. It’s good to have a clear picture in your mind of the take-out, or the waterfall might take you out. Luckily, the current leading to the lip of the falls is slow.

The put-in to Fourth Machias Lake turned out to be near the lake’s outlet, where the river, still in embryo form, flows down to Third Lake on what’s called Fourth Lake Stream. The moment we got out of the van and saw the shining expanse of water backed by green coniferous forest under a blue sky, it was clear that Fourth Machias Lake was too inviting for us to simply paddle the one mile down to the outlet and leave it behind. Here was no manmade reservoir of the likes we are used to in western North Carolina, where almost every living river has been dammed up into a kind of water battery to help power all our stuff. Fourth Machias Lake, spreading out fresh and natural before us, “was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world,” to quote Thoreau when he looked out over the Maine wilderness during his first boating trip there. And we saw fit to enjoy it. So, packing up our boats, and saying goodbye to Rob, we paddled back up the lake in the opposite direction from the outlet to see the lake and find a spot to camp.

What we found to camp on was a clean, sandy spit on a small island with room enough for four. Settling in, we ate supper, let the days of traveling to get there fade from memory, then bedded down under a starry sky. We woke from time to time to loon howls, fish splashes, and beaver slaps, while ripples lapped at our feet. Accustomed to looking at a southern sky at night, I was surprised to see the Big Dipper not where I expected it—close to the northern horizon—but almost directly overhead. The clean water, the trees on the island pointing up into the night like black arrowheads, the Big Dipper spilling its contents into the lake—all said, this is Maine.

Looking at Fourth Machias Lake from our campsite.

Rips, Pitches, Rapids, and Falls

A boating trip down the Machias puts you on every kind of freshwater. You cross glacier-scooped lakes, glide down fast, rocky streams, pass quiet bogs and meadows, stretch your muscles on long flatwater stretches, and run or portage a dozen or more boulder-strewn rapids. Much of the way is bounded by a boreal forest of hemlock, spruce, fir, and pine, with white birches, sugar maples, and a few other hardwoods establishing small beachheads in the sea of conifers. Here and there the trees open up around the dwelling of a Maine cottager who holds title to the land. I found it pleasurable to come on these simple cabins, complete with outhouses. They fit in modestly with the river, rocks and trees. A few of the oldest looked like they were returning to the elements of which they were made. Most seemed to be get-away cottages, others hunting camps, with moose and deer antlers hung on the eaves. Two or three cottages appeared to be accessible by trail or canoe only. Dirt roads led to the rest. We saw just one occupied during the trip.

A midday break at one of the biggest and better-kept of the Machias cabins. Mark photo.

Living in western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge, I’m accustomed to hearing the harsh-sounding “creek” and “fork” given to waterways here that are smaller than rivers—Moses Creek, West Fork. But on the Machias I found it pleasant to come on feeders romantically named “brooks” and “streams.” Indeed, a look at maps tells me that almost all of the smaller waterways in Maine have these designations—with brooks tending to be the smallest flows. This nomenclature must go back to the area’s settlement by the English starting in the 1600s. Crossing the hazardous Atlantic and facing life in an unknown land, the colonists brought memories of their dear brooks and streams with them to what they hoped would be a “New” England. Even the many Maine waterways that have kept their original Indian names often have “brook” or “stream” tacked onto them. It makes me think the English settlers wanted to give their lips something familiar to rest on after attempting to say what to their ears would have been alien words. Try a couple of these Red-White yokings for yourself: Chemquasabmitcook Stream; Nesowadnehunk Stream. What’s in a name? In these there is a hint of the clashes that would occur when two very different kinds of people met.

As for the rapids of the Machias, they come in a confusing number of terms. There are “Rips” (as in Otter Rips) and “Pitches” (Karrick’s Pitch), “Rapids” (Wigwam Rapids One—Two—Three—and—Four) and “Falls” (Great Falls). But I began to see a kind of sense to the classifications as the trip progressed. “Rips” are the easiest: low-gradient class I-II whitewater. Read them from the boat and run. At high water rips will be washed out. “Pitches,” as the name suggests, tend to be short and feature an abrupt drop of a couple of feet, Class II-III. “Rapids” are rips combined with pitches, and we got out on shore to scout several. “Falls” are the most difficult of the whitewater—class IIIs featuring pitches, hydraulic ledges, and wave trains. At our medium-low water level, the rapids and falls were also boulder gardens, presenting us with complicated lines to pick out and follow. The names of the falls are, in the order you come to them, Long Falls, Little Falls, Upper and Lower Holmes Falls, and Great Falls. We scouted all of the falls, each of us deciding whether to run the entire thing or to portage in part or whole. We took turns being rope throwers at the pinch spots—though no one got pinched enough to need a rope.

Upper Holmes Falls is the most difficult of the whitewater drops, and we reached it on the fourth day. The river crashes down a trough of rock, with powerful plunge holes that can’t be avoided. We rated it Class IV/V.

Keeping in mind the old saying of the voyageurs, “No Indian dies on the portage trail,” the three of us in watercraft that trace their lineage back to birchbark canoes portaged Upper Holmes. After careful scouting, Mark ran it in his kayak by following a skinny line on the far left, dropping through tight notches in five closely spaced ledges.

Mark runs a far-left line down Upper Holmes Falls.

Great Falls is the last of the major drops, close to one-half mile in length, and we got to it on the sixth day. We broke the rapid down into two sections, and ran it mostly on the left. I say “mostly” because there is a wide pour-over ledge on the left part-way down that has a keeper hydraulic behind it. We scouted out a line that we could follow around the right edge of this danger, then with a quick turn dart back towards the left shore again—a move easier said than done. It’s also a line easier seen from shore than from a rock-n-rolling canoe. If you don’t want to run Great Falls, there is a portage trail on both banks.

At the bottom of Great Falls lies a pleasant campsite on river right, and it opens to a rock shelf where it’s easy to bathe and relax in the sun.

At the campsite below Great Falls.

A Boater’s Tale

If you make enough river trips, you learn that when it stirs a lake to life wind can be as big force to contend with as rapids. Third Machias Lake was so stirred. Third Lake is 6 miles long and around a mile wide, oriented northwest to southeast, and on the second day we entered it at the top with a stiff wind blowing down its length. That six-mile fetch allowed the wind to push up whitecaps. Midway down, if you stood on shore and looked out, Third Lake appeared to be a Mississippi-wide parade of waves rolling past—and the waves were doing just that, rolling past on the surface of the still body of lake water below. This is the opposite of what happens in a rapid, where the waves stay in place while the body of the river rushes through them.  

Not far down Third Machias Lake the wind began to push up swells.

It was a tailwind, thank goodness. Thank goodness too that we did not enter the lake one week earlier, because we’d have faced the head winds from one of the state’s strongest storms of the year. The storm struck from the Atlantic and, with 50mph wind driving a horizontal deluge of rain, tried to blow Downeast Maine upwest. But even an ordinary tailwind such as we had, if given enough fetch, can turn any lake into a talewind. Hear mine.

By the time we’d paddled a couple of miles down Third Lake the waves were crowding past. They’d sweep in from behind, scoop the boats up—borrowing Bobby’s apt phrase—then set them down in the trough, but only until the next wave scooped them up again. You could feel the biggest of the swells lift the stern first, then roll forward under the boat until it lifted the bow, before coming out in front.

Moving much faster than the waves was the wind, and it wanted to turn the boats sideways, settling them parallel in the troughs. We had to give strong correcting strokes to keep from broaching, while at the same time maintaining forward speed. To broach in the waves meant risking capsize. And, unless you could right the canoe again and crawl back in it, a capsize meant a swim to shore in water in the 50s, with the others put to it to rescue the upside-down boat and gear. Obviously, one capsize sets the stage for others to happen. The North Woods in general have much bigger lakes than Third—topping out with oceanic Lake Superior itself—and there are real-life tales of just such group wipe-outs on some of them, with fatalities due to hypothermia, exhaustion, and flush drowning. Third Machias Lake was big and wavy enough for us, but it did not rise to the dire conditions that paddlers can encounter.

Our goal that day was Prune Island. I’d read that it had a “fine campsite” on its lee side. The island was only four miles down the lake, but to reach it we had to double rocky points and one forested cape. Somewhat like bottlenecks, these horizontal out-juttings of land concentrated the wind, which wanted to push us into the rocks. By the time we made Prune Island’s lee that afternoon—where in a matter of a few feet of travel we went from wind and waves to calm—I felt like we’d been challenged enough.

Careful map reading kept us from having to double two of the points. The map showed that one point might have a slim channel of water separating it from the main shore—and it did, though the boat-wide passage was not visible until we were right on it. Another point was shown to have a tiny waist. We landed there and pulled our canoes a mere 10 feet across to the other side.

Our derring-do on Third Machias Lake did come with one deflating moment. While huddled on the sheltered side of a point eating lunch and pulling on protective cold-water clothing for the final push to Prune Island, we saw two tandem canoes shoot past heading in our same direction. Each canoe was paddled by two men I judged to be in their early 30s. Since they were paddling tandem, they had both ends of the canoes pegged down, making it less likely to broach. And being strong, in boats longer and faster than our solo canoes, they were almost able to keep pace with the waves. I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the four of us—the youngest twice their age, shivering in our protective clothing, and resting for a final joust with the lake—and the other four in their prime. It was almost galling to see them cruise past dressed in nothing but shorts and shirts. They weren’t even wearing life-jackets. 

Concerned that the upstarts might be going to Prune Island, skunking us out of the campsite, I yelled to the one in the stern of the lead canoe, “Where are you headed?” He yelled back, but in the wind he might as well have been speaking Passamaquoddy. When he saw me cup my ears and shake my head “no,” he smiled and flashed two fingers on his grip hand. I took that to mean their destination was Second Lake, and relaxed.

The four young guns did not stop to chat. They were vigorous, confident, but they had miles to go before they slept, including Third Lake’s final stretch below Prune Island. That’s where the wind and waves would be the highest. After that, they had one of the trickiest and longest of the Machias rapids to run or portage—Long Falls. It lies between Third and Second Lakes. We watched them shave the next point, their paddles digging in without pause. In a few minutes they were distant dots among gray waves. We turned back to putting on our water armor.

Having weathered the wind-blown lake, what a relief to find tucked away in the tall trees of Prune Island the fabled campsite–our harbor for the night. It had good sleeping spots and an old, large rock fire pit that looked to have been stacked up in voyageur days. Also, there was a view out between the trees to the lake’s final stretch of wind-whipped whitecaps. It made our port seem all the more welcoming and secure. After supper, I turned in at 7:00, to the joshing of the others. It wouldn’t be dark until near 10:00. But I noticed that they were turning in too by 8:00. I woke in the morning at 5:00 am. It was already light. Lying in my sleeping bag, I watched a red squirrel come down a hemlock tree. Its movements from branch to branch were quick and exact, and crouching on the lowest branch it looked for a long minute at the sleeping forms below. I expected hear it launch into the shrill scolding I’ve heard these “boomers” make many times. But—nature often paying no attention to our expectations—this squirrel, having contemplated the scene, silently retreated back up the trunk and went from tree to tree away.

Temps were in the 30s that morning, so to bring the campsite to life, I fired up a good blaze. While getting our breakfasts, we could see the final two miles of Third Lake that we still had to paddle. They lay tranquil and blue in the morning sun.

Four more days of exciting rips and pleasant campsites and beautiful views lay before us. Having already covered them in some detail, I’ll leave the rest for you to discover. And if the road is open to Fifth Machias Lake, please write to tell me what you find.

As it nears the coast, the Machias, now a full-grown river, flows through marsh and meadow.

Back at Bangor

On our return to the motel, we learned from Lynn that her needy guest had stayed all week. When Lynn discovered that the woman’s credit card did not work, she, with backup, had booted the woman the day before we returned. On entering the vacated room, Lynn said she found a garbage dump of Door Dash food containers and other trash, plus a stinking wet spot on the bed where the woman had urinated.

My Machias mates were to catch flights the next day for home; but for me, the Machias was the first part of a two-part trip. Becky was flying into Bangor that afternoon, and on our way back to North Carolina we planned to spend five days in Concord, Massachusetts, to worship all things Thoreau. This included canoeing on Walden Pond. So I left my three companions with Lynn and drove down the road to a more reputable establishment where Becky and I had booked a room. We met the others later at a restaurant for the post-trip victory supper.

Machias Trip Facts and Pointers

Trip dates: May 7-13, 2023.  Put-in, Fourth Machias Lake. Take-out, the town of Machias. Length, around 70 river miles, including the extra distance we paddled on Fourth Lake. The weather was dry and clear throughout, a Maine rarity in May, with a low around 30 degrees and highs in the 70s. We had no mosquitoes but there were blackflies. The flies were never more than a minor bother, and disappeared at night. I hung insect netting over my canoe “cradle” just once or twice. The state has put an attractive flyer online about the river from Third Lake outlet down: https://www.maine.gov/dacf/parksearch/PropertyGuides/PDF_GUIDE/machiasriverguide.pdf

Our informative and pleasant shuttle driver was Rob Scribner. Rob is a long-time certified Maine Guide and owner of Sunrise Canoe and Kayak, based in Machias.  He’s been down the Machias and other Maine rivers many times. We met Rob at his shop just out of town. The last day we found my truck and trailer waiting for us at the town take-out, as he promised it would be. Phone: (207) 255-3375;  Email: info@sunrisecanoeandkayak.com; also see: www.sunrisecanoeandkayak.com.

River level? I can’t say what the Machias was flowing in terms of cfs. It does not seem to have a USGS river gauge. The most exact I can be is that our flow was at a medium level starting out, dropping two to three inches each day as the dry week went on. Rob can tell you if the river is running high or low, and he can recommend the best dates to plan a trip. Or, he can run a trip for you as outfitter/guide. I’d contact him several months in advance if you want to schedule a trip.

Portage notes: There are portage trails at each of the largest rapids, but you should consult a guidebook or trip reports to find out which side of the river they are on. See AMC River Guide, 3rd edition. Signs cannot be counted on. I recall seeing just two.

The portage trail around Upper Holmes Falls had no sign and was not easy to spot from the river. It starts on the left about 100’ upstream of a concrete logging road bridge. Do not float past the bridge or you’ll be committed to running a very tough drop.  Also, do not miss the portage trail around Airline Rapids, which you’ll come to mid-trip. I saw a sign for it upstream of the State Route 9 bridge, which crosses the river at the head of the rapid. But feeling the need to live up to the tee-shirt I was wearing—it has a drawing on it of an old goat canoeing rapids, with the words “Old enough to know better, young enough not to care”—I let us drift on down below the bridge, where we made a tricky landing in fast current on the right. The rapid was easy to scout from there, and the old goats ran the whole thing.

Navigating the lakes: Both Fourth and Third Lakes have very irregular shorelines, plus islands and points. From a boat in the middle of one of these lakes it can be hard to distinguish one island from another, big islands from little ones, island from mainland, or points and bays from straight shore. From a distance individual features blend into an undifferentiated green horizon. If it’s windy, rainy, or foggy, the challenge of keeping yourself oriented goes up. Hidden in each lake’s wavering panorama of land and water is the narrow outlet you have to find to get to the next lake. Mount a compass on the thwart in front of you for immediate reference, and bring USGS 7.5 minute topo maps—as well as the knowhow to read them.

Every trip seems to develop its own saying. On the Machias it was “pretty good.” That’s what I said to the others the first couple of nights when they asked how my lightweight store-bought suppers tasted: “pretty good.” From there, “pretty good” became the reply to everything. How was your run through Little Falls? Pretty good. How’d you sleep last night? Pretty good. Is your beer still cold? Pretty good. What’s the footing like on the portage trail? Pretty good. How’s your bug-dope working? Pretty good!

PS, as in PostShots

The long-time campsite at the base of Little Falls, river left, can’t be beat for comfort or beauty.
The campsite even has an outhouse.
It’s also been there a long time.
Bobby meets Bud!

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Windstorm on the Rio Grande

Posted on December, 2022 by Burt Kornegay
Looking upstream at sunrise from our first night’s campsite on the Rio Grande, which I call “Head of Canyon Camp.” The opening to Santa Elena Canyon, the first of the river’s big canyons in Big Bend National Park, lies just downstream.

I left Cullowhee for Big Bend National Park, in Texas, on November 7, 2022, with three canoes strapped on top of the truck and drybags of food and camping gear stowed inside.  Bobby Simpson and Pat Stone were to be my companions on a nine-day 130-mile trip on the Rio Grande, and I timed the drive to pick them up two days later in Odessa, where they’d be flying in.

Our goal was to paddle the Rio where it forms the boundary between the national park and Mexico. It’s a reach known locally as the Great Unknown. You launch at the Lajitas “throw-in” access upstream of the park and take out below it at Heath Canyon Ranch/La Linda. Between those two points the river flows through the park’s three biggest canyons, Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas, as well as two smaller but beautiful canyons, San Vicente and Hot Springs. It also winds through long desert stretches between the canyons, with views of distant mountain ranges and of isolated peaks jutting out of the harsh terrain and bearing names like Elephant Tusk, the Mule Ears, Backbone Ridge, and Cow Heaven.  Most paddlers limit their trips to overnighters in individual canyons.  From what I gather, only a couple of hundred go the distance each year. This would be my fourth time doing it since 2014, when I stopped running Slickrock Expeditions there, and it would be my first with companions, the three previous trips being made alone.

Picking up Bobby and Pat as planned in Odessa, we spent the night at the Marathon Motel in the town of Marathon, north of the park, where we did final packing and ate supper at a restaurant called 12 Gage.  The next morning we drove across the Union Pacific railroad tracks on the outskirts of town—said to mark the unofficial entrance to the Big Bend—and headed due south towards the river on US 385. 

We spent the pre-trip night in cabins at the Marathon Motel.

It was hard to imagine that the modern U.S. highway we cruised on followed what had been originally the Great Comanche Trail.  One hundred and fifty years ago the trail was said to have been a mile-wide dusty scar across the landscape cut by the hooves of hundreds of horses ridden by Comanche warriors. Like an unstoppable wind sweeping south from the Great Plains during the full “Comanche” moon of September each year, these fierce horsemen crossed the Rio Grande to raid, plunder and kill anyone in northern Mexico they came across, returning later on the same route with scalps and booty, livestock and slaves. The Big Bend was known then as the Bloody Bend, and the sun-bleached bones of beasts and captives that perished were said to litter the trail.

We met our shuttle driver, Russell Johnson, at Heath Canyon Ranch.  The ranch is a cluster of low buildings on a bluff above the Rio Grande. Directly across the river in Mexico is the abandoned mining town of La Linda. The ranch originally served as the living quarters for managers and geologists of DuPont, which mined fluorspar in the mountains outside of La Linda—fluorspar being used by the company in various manufacturing processes.  When DuPont closed the mines in the 1980s, Russell’s late grandfather, one of the geologists, bought the ranch and retired there. Russell now lives at the ranch and keeps it up. He also provides a shuttle service for paddlers and lets them use the property’s river access.  He would ride with us to Lajitas, then take my truck back to Heath Canyon, where it’d be waiting for us at trip’s end. 

“Everything’s big in Texas,” the saying goes, and by the time we’d driven to the ranch, 70 miles, then more than 100 from there across the park to the river access at Lajitas, stopping en route at park headquarters to fill out the required river permit, it was noon.  Eager to launch, we unloaded the truck, told Russell we’d see him in nine days, and, after eating sandwiches in a spot of shade under a mesquite tree, slid the loaded canoes down the bank to the river.  It was November 10. We were underway at last.

About to launch at Lajitas: from left to right Burt Kornegay, Pat Stone, and Bobby Simpson.

The First Seven Days

We paddled in cool, pleasant weather day after day—not a given on the Rio Grande. Because the river flows through the Chihuahua Desert, daily temperatures, even in November, are often set on “bake.” During my previous solo trips, also in the fall, respite from the sun was as important as my midday repast of jerky, cheese, bread, and fruitcake, so I did not stop to eat until I found shade. But on this trip winds were from the north, sunlight was welcome, and we stopped to eat on any gravel bar that looked inviting. The river flowed steadily too, at a good level. There were no biting bugs, and we did not have to defend our food from bears, which we’d heard had been a problem on the river that year.

As soon as we left Lajitas behind, the sharply-etched cliffs, canyons, mesas, and “creosote flats” that form the Big Bend’s topography opened up and took us in, beneath a cloudless sky. It was easy to understand why the first Spanish explorers to reach such a stark, isolated, and silent region called it El Despoblado, the Uninhabited Land. And the Rio Grande itself, which carries you through it all, is the original “long and lonesome highway” of Texas song. To be in harmony with the place, we spaced out, barely keeping in sight of each other. The river flowed mildly, and, except when we scouted a few rapids in the canyons, or pulled over to take a side hike to some overlook or other feature, there was no reason for us to bunch up. There was time enough to talk in camp.

From our first campsite (at the arrow) we hiked up to where we could look out over part of El Despoblado. To give you a sense of scale, the arrow points to our three canoes pulled up on a gravel bar. The entrance to Santa Elena, the first of the big-three canyons, lies just around the bend downstream.

News reports make it sound as if the Rio Grande is swarming with migrants from Mexico and other countries trying to cross into the United States, and no doubt that’s true along much of the river, but not in the Great Unknown. I saw just one Mexican during our entire trip—a goatherd. He was walking behind a herd of at least 100 goats grazing on the river bank. Mountain lions and coyotes, common along the river, prey on goats, and I noticed the man carried a stout staff. He also had three large guard dogs at the front of the herd. We called to each other in passing, “Buenos dias!”

I also talked twice with other Americans. First, there were the two young women car-camping at the park’s Cottonwood Campground, which we reached on the third day. We had walked up from the river to refill our water jugs there and, seeing them sitting at a picnic table, struck up a conversation. When they learned what we were doing, one exclaimed, “You’re canoeing nine days!”—as if paddling for such a length of time was something unheard of. (Or, seeing that each of our ages topped theirs by 50 years, what she might have said was, “You’re canoeing nine days?” I can’t be sure because I wasn’t wearing my hearing aids.) They offered to drive to the park’s Castolon Store, about a mile off, to get fresh ice for our coolers. We took them up on it, and I christened them the Good Samaritinas.

Four days later, while relaxing our river-worked bodies in the pool at Hot Springs Canyon, where the water boils up out of a vent at 105 degrees, we saw two other women hiking our way on one of the park’s trails. They introduced themselves as Darla and Jill, said they were from Iowa, and asked if they could join us for a soak.  “And would you mind if we drank a beer?”” Darla asked—while pulling a bottle out of her daypack.

In short, everything about our trip the first 7 days—river level, weather, scenery, camaraderie, campsites, other people we met—had been cow heavenly. But heaven was not to last. The interlude at Hot Springs was during our longest day of paddling, 21 miles total, and, though we’d already covered 12 of those miles, we had nine more to go.  Our destination was the last and longest of the river’s big canyons, Boquillas, and I wanted to camp about a mile inside it that night. It would set us up nicely for our final two days on the river. Actually, we had no choice but to camp in Boquillas. The Park enforces a no-camping zone for paddlers that extends all the way from Hot Springs to the canyon’s entrance. So, chatting and soaking in the hot water with the women for a few minutes, we said goodbye and set off again. 

Needing to refill our water jugs once more, three miles downstream we pulled in at the park’s Rio Grande Village, an RV campground.

At Hot Springs with Darla and Jill. In the early 1900’s, before the park was established, a homesteader named Langford walled in the main spring to separate its hot, clear mineral water from that of the cold, swirling Rio Grande, and he built a small motel nearby where people could stay while they took rejuvenating baths. Today the bathhouse is gone, swept away by floods, but the base pool remains.

“Little Mouths”

Getting back in the canoes for our final leg that day, I warned Bobby and Pat that the remaining miles to Boquillas might be tough. Prevailing winds in the Big Bend are from the southwest, and when that’s the case, you can simply cruise along with a following wind while looking up at the stupendous, somewhat intimidating rock walls rising ever higher before you. My three earlier solo trips had following winds.

But on this trip, winds continued out of the north, and that afternoon they’d been building fast. I knew from experience that when cold fronts,“blue northers” as they are called in Texas, sweep down the Comanche Trail, Boquillas Canyon catches and concentrates the flow, funneling the gusts out its entrance with such force they blow for miles up the river. The closer you get to the canyon’s grand portal or entrance, the harder, wilder the winds blow.

Put another way, to paddle to Boquillas Canyon in north winds is to learn the hard way that the name Boquillas, meaning “Little Mouths,” does not do justice to what you are going to encounter when you get there. A gigantic stone maw cracks open in front of you and lets loose with blast after blast.

I first experienced these north-wind blasts in 1996, and, unfortunately, it was at the start of a three-day family trip with Becky and Henry, who was just 6. Setting out from Rio Grande Village, a couple of miles below Hot Springs, we paddled our tandem canoe into chill head winds all the way to Boquillas Canyon. When a gust rocked the canoe and slammed it sideways against a deadhead just as we reached the canyon entrance, I saw Henry grab the gunwales, and I heard my dear wife, up front and digging in for all she was worth against the oncoming wind and spray, cry out with words that have lived ever since in our family: “Why did you bring us to this place?” After we pushed into the canyon about a mile, however, and followed the canyon walls as they turned sharply south, the wind miraculously died, the river grew calm. The unexpected change after such a protracted struggle was dramatic—and so welcome.

When I experienced the sudden calm again a few years later while paddling with a friend into Boquillas Canyon during another blue norther, I named that calming turn Tranquility Bend.

It was Tranquility Bend that Bobby, Pat, and I needed to get around.

Thanksgiving, 1996. Becky and Henry in Boquillas Canyon the day after the windstorm.

We Almost Made It

Right off we were met by head winds so strong that we had to fight for every foot of forward progress. Since it is five miles from Rio Grande Village to the canyon, that came to 26,400 feet of fight.  The sun was low and the canyon walls were making deep shade by the time we reached the entrance. Already feeling taxed by the effort I’d expended, I wondered if I had strength enough to push on into the canyon and get around Tranquility Bend. It wasn’t only the in-your-face gales we had to contend with either. Downdrafts coming off the canyon walls on both sides hit the canoes with such force they threatened to bowl us over. We were in the middle of a cyclone, Rio Grande style.

I remembered that on the trip with Becky and Henry we came on a commercial rafting group at the entrance paddling as hard as they could to get into the canyon, only to have side winds push them against the Texas shore and pin them there.  As we slowly forced our canoe past the group, they called off their trip and began to carry their gear out to the Boquillas Canyon Trailhead about a mile away.

The crux of the windstorm lies just inside the entrance. There a sandbar on the Texas side as big as a city block crowds the river up against the sheer wall in Mexico. To bolster my spirits as I headed into that narrow channel, I began to chant Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” altered to suit the circumstances:

Canyon to the right of us,
Canyon to the left of us,
Canyon in front of us,
Stroked the three boaters.
Head winds and side winds,
Shot with spray and sand,
Boldly we paddled, and well,
Into the maelstrom maw of Boquillas
Stroked the three boaters.

I chanted “the three boaters” but had to take the number on faith.  There was no looking back to see if Bobby and Pat were still with me, no way I could turn and shout an encouraging word. To let up with the paddle for a single stroke would have given the wind all the opening it needed to shove me backwards or into the Mexico wall.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten through the perilous pass that I hazarded a glance back.  I was relieved to see Bobby not far behind, head down, pushing forward. (Recalling the experience the next day, Bobby said that at one point the wind slammed him against the Mexico side, and he used his hands to pull himself along the rock wall.) But then, farther back, I saw with an inward groan—“Oh no!”— a particularly fierce gust sweep down like a fist and hit the bow of Pat’s canoe, spinning it sideways, immediately followed by another blast that struck him broadside.  It was the windstorm’s equivalent of an uppercut followed by roundhouse. Over Pat went, bottom up.

Hoping that Bobby could hear me above the wind, I shouted that Pat was down, then drove my canoe onto shore on the Texas side, pulled it up, then ran back across the sandbar, throw rope in hand. Pat had managed to pull up his canoe by the time I got to him, but, chilled by the swim and now standing soaked in the wind, his body was shaking, his eyes looked shaken. When I pointed to his yellow food box, which was floating back into the current and about to go downstream, Pat yelled, “FUCK THE BOX!” But, after a moment, he waded out and grabbed it.

“Was it just a few hours ago,” I asked myself, “that we were soaking at Hot Springs with Darla and Jill?” 

We needed to make camp and get Pat into dry clothes—but not there. Pitching tents on the windswept bar would be hard, keeping them pitched harder.

“Pat, if we can just get around that bend I told you about . . . ” and I pointed into the canyon, “it’s less than a mile.” 

Pat was a seasoned canoeist, 73 years tough at the time of our trip. In western North Carolina I’d watched him run rapids that I decided to walk. He’d canoed the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In the 1960s he boated the Nolichucky Gorge in a Grumman canoe. My river name for him is The Patman.

“I’m still game,” Pat said. 

Bobby had joined us by then, and, to avoid the perilous pass, the three of us carried Pat’s canoe and gear across the sandbar to where the other two boats were drawn up, then pushed off again.

Half an hour later we still had not doubled Tranquility Bend. Bursts of wind hurtled up the river. You could see the dark streaks they made on the river’s surface coming towards you. Timing it, I would bend forward just as each gust hit, pushing back against it with the strongest forward stroke I could muster. Glancing behind me from time to time, I saw that when Pat reached a shallow spot, he would get out and slosh forward knee deep, pulling his boat, then he’d get in and take up the paddle again.

Tranquillity Bend was close when darkness joined forces with the wind to stop us cold. There was simply no way we could get around the calming turn in the canyon before night. Making out a beach on the Mexico side with a clump of small trees, I ran my canoe up, the others following. I pointed to the trees and shouted, “They might make a windbreak!”  At least we’d have something to tie to.

Pat’s fingers were numb by then, and we thought he was starting to show signs of hypothermia. People trained in wilderness first-aid refer to these signs as “The Umble Family,” as in mumble, grumble, fumble, and stumble.  Bobby headed towards the trees with Pat to help him change into dry clothes and to set up his tent. Putting on my headlamp, I started bringing up the gear and boats, Pat’s first.  Nearing the trees, and panting with exertion from having dragged the canoe, I let go of it for a moment to catch my breath and walked over to ask the others if they needed help. Bobby said, “We’re good!”

So I turned to tie off Pat’s canoe—and stood dumbfounded. There in my headlamp beam was nothing but sand. The canoe had had several inches of water in it, along with some of Pat’s gear, so it wasn’t light. But all that remained where I’d left the boat was a canoe-sized wet spot darkening the sand. I shined my light back and forth while wondering nonsensically if the other two were playing some kind of joke on me and had moved the canoe.  

I know what wind can do to a canoe. In Montana I saw wind send a canoe skidding across a gravel bar like a sled on ice. Two men jumped in to hold it down. In Oregon I saw bursts of wind tumble canoes sideways and then flip them end over end, people scattering to get out of the way. In Idaho I watched a canoe sail 100 feet through the air and land in the middle of a river. “Pull up your boats and tie them” was a refrain everyone on my western trips heard as soon as we got to camp.  All I can say in this case is that in Boquillas Canyon Pat’s canoe disappeared at the end of a 21-mile day, in the dark, in a welter of wind and blowing sand, and I was 72 years tired.

Then my light landed on Pat’s red drybag. It lay about 30 feet away from the wet spot and had been in the canoe. When I went to get it, I saw his paddle at about the same distance farther, and, going to pick it up, my headlamp revealed his spare paddle still another 30 feet on. It was lying on the riverbank. At that moment the realization of what must have happened came to me with heart-sinking clarity. When I had walked over to check on the other two, a downdraft had come off the Mexico wall and, like some fierce Commanche warrior mounted on his horse, had simply carried Pat’s canoe away, dumping out the water and gear as it went.  Wet spot . . . red bag . . . paddle . . . spare paddle . . .  Rio Grande.  The trail of abduction towards the river was as clear as day.

But there was nothing clear to me about what had happened next.  If the canoe had landed upright in the river, I knew the wind might be blowing it all the way back upstream to spit it out the canyon’s mouth, but if it had landed upside down, the current might be carrying the boat the other way.  I ran up and down the sandbar shining my light out across the river. I was still wearing my life jacket and was ready to swim for the boat if that’s what it took. But all the beam revealed was blank Rio Grande.

Back at the trees, I found Pat in his sleeping bag with his tent cockeyed and half-collapsed around him. The flaps were popping in the wind. The only thing holding the tent in place was Pat.  And Pat would have to do. I told him about his boat, then stuffed a packet of M&Ms into his hands, yelled over the wind “EAT!”—and then, before the wind could do more mischief, joined with Bobby to haul our canoes up to the trees and tie them. Even so, a few minutes later I found my boat, though tied to a mesquite tree, flipped upside down by the wind, the gear in it dumped out. 

Looking for a place to sleep, I hiked up the sandbar to the base of the cliff and came to a copse of mesquite that the downdrafts passed over. The trees stood in a kind of Aeolian eddy.  Bobby and I cut out two sleeping places among the thorny branches, then carried our gear there.  We’d have made a place for Pat too, but he was warm in his sleeping bag. All he needed, he said, was his yellow food box. So I pushed the box in next to him. While the three of us ate by headlamp in our separate spots, Bobby and I talked through the branches, and, every once in a while we’d shout down through the wind and darkness to check on Pat.

I slept fitfully, in part because of the wind, but chiefly because the thought kept gnawing at me that Pat’s canoe had been lost on my watch. It would have been better had the canoe been my own.

The windstorm was baffling in the way it whirled and buffeted us from different directions, but by the time we settled into our bivouac, I had noted one regularity about it: the downdrafts coming off the Mexico wall nearest us followed the same narrow path over and over again towards the river.  And by bad luck, I had left Pat’s canoe—“Millie,” as he calls her—in that very path.  All I could figure was that when I walked over to check on the others, a down blast had carried poor Millie away.  Meanwhile, the bailer that Pat uses to scoop water out of the boat—a plastic gallon jug with the bottom cut out, and weighing all of one ounce—lay undisturbed not 20 feet away, just out of the downdraft’s path.

Lost Then Found

I woke to a bright sky, still air, and clearing thoughts.  Pat was already up, and talking with him and Bobby, we quickly decided on the best course of action.  Since I had the biggest canoe, Pat would paddle with me, putting some of his gear in my boat, and Bobby would carry the rest of his things.  The solo canoes would be overloaded, and we’d probably have to line them around rapids,  but chances were good we’d come on Pat’s canoe. It might be pinned on a rock or caught by the river cane that hangs out over the bank. And if we did not come on it?  Well, we had 28 miles and another night to go before we reached the take-out at Heath Canyon Ranch.

Pat and Bobby try to take in the monumental crack in the earth’s crust called Mariscal Canyon, over 1000 feet deep.

Eager to get going, Pat carried his gear to the river. Suddenly I heard him whoop, and then he began to point across the river and dance.  I ran down, and, following his finger, what to my wondering eyes did appear but Millie! She was on the opposite side of the canyon, sitting right-side up on a mud bank.  Evidently, the same downdraft that had thrown the canoe into the river had blown it all the way across the channel and up onto the far shore; and there it had stayed the whole wild night.

In aerial photographs, the Rio Grande’s canyons show themselves to be great fissures in the earth’s crust.  Even though the view is from far overhead, you can sense their immense size.  But when you are within one of those canyons looking up, it is hard to grasp just how high the rock walls rise above you, how deep down between them you are. The sight of Pat’s canoe, however, looking so tiny where it lay as the base of the towering wall on the Texas side, brought home the depth of rock that contained us.  If you could place a hundred canoes end to end in a straight line up that wall and then climb them from thwart to thwart like rungs on a ladder, you still would not get out. 

We paddled across to Millie, and the way Pat examined his beached boat, you’d think a footsore cowboy in the Chihuahua Desert had found his runaway horse.  

I tend to name campsites and mark them on the map. It helps me to remember what each place looked like and what happened there. So, after Pat was saddled up and we were riding the watery trail again, I tossed out “Windblown” as a possible name for our emergency night.  Pat said “Lost Boat” sounded better to him.  But it was Bobby who came up with the name that stuck: “Lost Then Found.”

Pat reunited with Millie the morning after the windstorm.

The Blond and the Desert Sloop

The morning after the windstorm the Little Mouths of Boquillas Canyon held their breath, and we paddled with easy strokes all day.  In the afternoon we pulled over to explore a slot canyon on the Mexican side named El Guero. Its narrow opening is dwarfed by the main canyon wall and can be easily missed if you don’t know where to look.  According to an online Spanish dictionary, in Mexico “el guero” means the blond, the fair-skinned one, golden boy, or “whitey,” said as a term of endearment, not reproach.   I won’t describe the slot canyon except to say that if you are ever lucky enough to stand between its beautiful water-sculpted walls of smooth, white limestone, you’ll know it is aptly named.

Pat and Bobby hike through El Guero

Late that afternoon we emerged from Boquillas into the open desert and set up our last night’s camp.  What a contrast to the previous campsite, where, hemmed in between stone walls, we had but a constricted, straight-up view of the sky.  Now, our view extended in one direction for miles and miles over arroyos and cuestas and shrubby vegas to where solitary purple peaks stuck up above the horizon in Mexico. And in the other direction, two miles away, we watched the vertical fronts of Mexico’s Sierra Del Carmen range and, in Texas, the Deadhorse Mountains, turn golden in the setting sun. Boquillas Canyon lay between.

Cold, starry, and windless nights on the Rio Grande almost always come with heavy dew—heavy enough to soak you if you bed down in the open, as I do in my canoe. Seeing that our last night was likely to be wet, I rigged my canoe-bed with a single mast, then draped a cotton sheet—my “dew rag”—over the fore line, secured it with binder clips, and spread my sleeping bag out under it. My bed looked like a desert sloop. At dawn the thermometer read 28 degrees. I reached out of my warm, dry sleeping bag and touched the sheet above me. It was frozen stiff.  

Desert sloop rigged for dew.

The final miles to Heath Canyon Ranch were a puff.  Stepping out of our canoes at the gravel bar take-out in the early afternoon, we shook hands, and Pat danced.  It was the fourth river trip we had made together this year, and we agreed it was the best.

Afterblast

Back home in Cullowhee, I wrote my friend Keith Bowden to tell him about the Boquillas Canyon windstorm.  In 2004 Keith paddled almost all of the 900 miles of the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf (his Tecate Journals is a great read about that journey), and today he lives beside the river in Langtry, Texas, pop. 13. From Langtry Keith continues to make more paddling trips on the Rio Grande than any other living man.  His reply is worth passing on:

“One time not long ago I camped in Boquillas Canyon and the wind came up big and there was nowhere to tie the canoe, so I reloaded it with my twelve days worth of supplies and gear and went to sleep.  When I awoke, it was gone. The wind tossed it in the river, where it lay in shallow water upside down. I had to spend all the next day sitting in the loaded canoe on shore. I couldn’t paddle forward. If I left the canoe for a short walk, the wind would toss it back into the river.  Finally, early evening I was able to advance a half-mile to a camp with trees where I could tie. An hour after I arrived, the wind utterly died, and I didn’t have even a whisper all the way on to La Linda and beyond.” 

Aftershots

“White Stripe Camp,” our 3rd morning. The massive escarpment in the background, Sierra Ponce, in Mexico, parallels the river for miles.
The telltale tracks and tail drag of the Big Bend Slider, the most common turtle on the river, along with the telltale track of a man.
Retama, a small spiny tree that’s also called Mexican Paloverde,was in brilliant bloom all along the river.
The boulder in El Guero that inspired the painter Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte’s painting
“Too Good To Be True Camp,” the 6th morning of our trip. Mariscal Mountain lies in the distance. Photo by Bobby.
Weaving through an obstacle course called the Rock Pile in Mariscal Canyon.
The Patman danceth. Photo by Bobby.

River trip facts and figures

Trip dates: Nov. 10-18, 2022.

Put-in: Lajitas; take-out: Heath Canyon Ranch/La Linda. River miles traveled, 130.

River level: an adequate 525 cfs on the USGS Castolon gauge, slowly dropping to 350 cfs during the course of the trip. The ideal level for canoeing the Great Unknown, in my experience, is when the gauge holds steady in the 700-800 range.

Shuttler: Russell Johnson, Heath Canyon Ranch. Ranch # 432-376-2235.

For detailed river guides and maps to the entire Big Bend reach of the Rio Grande, see Louis Aulbach’s three books, The Upper Canyons of the Rio Grande, The Great Unknown, and The Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. All told, these three book cover more than 250 “wild and scenic” miles of the river.

For a superb travel narrative, read Keith Bowden’s The Tecate Journals, an account of his exploration of the entire Texas stretch of the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico.

A word to the wise Rio Grande river tripper: when you fill out the required permit for your trip at the park’s Panther Junction headquarters, the ranger is going to ask if you have the following four things: a spare life-jacket for the group; a firepan (whether you plan on building a fire or not); a portable potty or WAG bags; a spare paddle for each canoe. Say no to any of them and you will not get a permit.

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Welcome to South Carolina’s Black

Posted on September, 2022 by Burt Kornegay

After canoeing North Carolina’s Black River in July last year with Paul Ferguson and Bobby Simpson, I thought it couldn’t be matched for a southeastern river trip—until this July when I canoed South Carolina’s Black, an entirely separate stream.  My companions were Bobby again, and Pat Stone.

Not that I tend to rate rivers.  Any current that’s free-flowing and long enough to carry me into green thoughts in a green wood rises to the top of the list when I’m on it.  And both Blacks did that.  But rivers with identical names in adjacent states named Carolina invite comparison, and the Blacks match up in several ways.

South Carolina’s Black River

For one, both Blacks twist and turn through the coastal plain as if the word “straight” is abhorrent to them.  Rivers like this are called meandering, a term that has come down to us from the ancient Greeks. It was their name for a similarly convoluted river in what is now Turkey, the Maiandros.

For another, both rivers live up to their names, “Black.” 

When we pulled up to South Carolina’s river the first morning and started unloading our canoes, the water lay still and glossy in front of us.  It might have served as the pattern for the highly polished mirrors and lenses that went into the Webb Telescope, recently turned on space.  Our put-in was called Brewington Lake, a widening in the Black’s chief tributary, the Pocotaligo.  The “lake” would soon constrict to little more than a creek and carry us in two twisting miles to the main stem of the Black itself.  A concrete bridge spanned the water downstream. Directly upstream, vine-covered posts that must have once supported a small wooden bridge rose out of water so glistening black it could have been a pupil turned upward towards the sky.

About to launch at Brewington Lake. Louis Drucker photo

Socrates believed the serious philosopher turns his gaze from nature and all that we perceive with our senses–“they do not teach me anything.” It is through close thought and spirited discussion that the lover of wisdom glimpses truths of “the beyond,” and he will keep them fast in memory, not “write them in water or in that black fluid we call ink.” He left his student Plato to write them down. As my canoe glided away from shore, I found myself moving on “fluid” so black I seemed to be floating in an inkwell, with the trees and sky, and the canoe itself, all perfectly pictured in it, and lit up themselves from below by the light that flashed upward from the mirroring surface. I seemed to have entered a new world and a new way to know it. Socrates himself, had he been riding in my bow, might have been moved by that beautiful blending of earth and water, sky and light to dip a reed pen and write.

If you put your hand into the inky Black River, thinking to touch the world you see mirrored there, you’ll discover that the water is not black at all.  It is the color of tea. That’s because the river is a kind of earthy tea, one made from vegetation steeped in its boggy headwaters and bordering swamps. How appropriate that our launching spot was named “Brewington.” Put your hand in deeper, the water turns coppery; then, deeper still, and in certain lights, the same water, seen flowing over white sand, becomes an exquisite burgundy hue. I like to think the wild grape vines that grow in South Carolina swamps drop their ripe fruit and ferment the river to muscadine wine.

It’s not until the water reaches a depth that sunlight and eye can no longer follow that it turns ink black.  Wade into South Carolina’s Black on a sun-bright day and you’ll find that point is about knee deep. Take another step and your legs look like they are emerging from primal night. Astronomers are understandably elated that their complicated and delicate Webb Telescope opened perfectly and in just the right orbit in the blackness of space, all its lashes intact. They predict that it will let us see to the verge of the universe and time–the opening of a high-tech door of perception on the all. And the exotic images it has streamed back so far of huge, alien, cloudy realms swirling unfathomable millions of light years away do leave me starry-eyed. But the sheer giganticness of what it shows suggests some unseen and infinite power that lies within, beyond our conceptions of time and space, pervading all, down to the clearest drop of dew hanging from a leaf.  Even after we have peered through that billion-dollar eye as far as starlight will take us, have “analyzed the data” it sends back and “crunched the numbers” with the most sophisticated “AI,” we will still be but knee deep.

Put you hand into blackwater and touch the world mirrored there.

Watch a black rat snake that suddenly slithers from underfoot in the grass, and you’ll see in the way it moves the serpentine motion of a blackwater river. There is the snake’s overall direction of travel across the yard—probably towards the nearest clump of bushes —and there is its side-to-side coiling to get there. Just so, both Carolina Blacks slide sinuously in a southeast direction until their waters disappear into the Atlantic. 

On our recent trip, with a few dips of the paddle marking the intervals, I called back to the others: “We’re turning south . . . now east . . . now north . . . now back east . . . no . . .  swinging north again . . . and on towards west!” I thought the Black would wear out my compass needle with its turnings. One time the river twisted for two miles to make a mere quarter mile of straight-line, ocean-onward progress.  Trying to remain oriented was like riding a giant black snake in head-high grass and keeping up with its coiling as it went. 

The “grass” itself surrounding the aquatic serpent is made up of bald cypress, tupelo gum, various kinds of oaks, water elm, birch, ash, and loblolly pines all growing in a wide swamp corridor that the river meanders through—and that it fills to overflowing several times a year.  The Black you start on might be no more than a canoe-length wide, especially in its upper reach and wherever it splits into multiple channels.  But with heavy rain, that same river swells until it is a corridor-wide flood pulsing with power—and presenting you with another kind of orienteering challenge.

All this snaking and swelling is characteristic of North Carolina’s Black too.

We padded through sun and shade all five days.

Both Blacks flow through large tracts set aside for conservation and preservation.  Both have been singled out for recognition by their states. North Carolina’s Black has “Outstanding Resource Waters” status.  Not to be outdone, South Carolina has designated 75 miles of its Black a “State Scenic River,” the longest such riverine stretch in the state.

Black River Divergence

South Carolina’s Black might have more outstanding water than its northern counterpart. At least, that’s what I gathered after meeting Louis Drucker. Louis is a retired dentist in Kingstree, and he has lived all his life near the river. He paddles it a lot too.  When I called to ask if he knew someone in the area who could shuttle us, Louis generously offered to do it himself.  And when I asked if he knew of a spring or county park midway where we could refill our water jugs, he said—with the caveat “I know I might pay for it one of these days!”—he drinks straight from the river.  Think of being able to simply lean over your boat to quench your thirst. That makes it outstanding water for sure.  Judging by the tall, fit man who opened the door and greeted us when we pulled up to his house the first morning, I decided the Black River had not done Louis any harm.  Maybe I ought to take daily sips myself to counteract the general shrinkage that’s come with age! And so I did—in my coffee, though I boiled the water first.

The Black was drunk for thousands of years by various Indian tribes, including the Winyah and Peedee, and then for three hundred years by explorers and settlers, plantation owners, dirt farmers, loggers, riverboat workers, slaves.  I’ve read that up until the mid-19th century, when sails gave way to steam-power for transatlantic voyages, shortening the transit time, ship captains would go out of their way to fill their water barrels from blackwater streams.  Blackwater kept fresher longer than water that was clear.  Today we know that what kept the water fresh was the tannic acid in it leached from the vegetation in its swamps—the slight acidity inhibiting bacterial growth.

North Carolina’s Black differs from its southern twin by being more sought out by paddlers.  That’s chiefly because its Three Sisters Swamp, containing some of the very oldest dated trees in the world, has been written up frequently in newspapers and magazines.  And yet, belying my expectation last year, in four days on it, including a day spent in the well-publicized Three Sisters, I didn’t see another person in a boat of any type or even anyone on shore. 

But as for the less-widely known South Carolina Black: during 5 days on it we were surprised to see around a half-dozen fishermen in little electric or gas-powered boats, as well as a number of people on shore. We passed more houses on the South Carolina Black too, chiefly where the river swung to the edge of its swamp and met a fronting bluff.  We even came on two scuba divers looking for whatever curios they could find on the river bottom.  They said their headlamps illuminated the inky water for only about an arm’s length in front of them.

But as for fellow canoeists or kayakers?  We did not meet a single one.  I was delighted to hear Louis say the river was getting much more paddling use than in the past: “I’m now putting on a group every other month!” 

In five days, the only hand-paddled boats we saw were our own. Bobby Simpson photo.

South Carolina’s Black is on the verge of becoming better known.  Louis is on the board of the Black Scenic River Advisory Council.  Made up of landowners, recreationists, conservation groups, and county government leaders, the Council is striving to have 70 miles of the river downstream of Kingstree designated South Carolina’s newest park.  By coincidence, before our trip I read an article in the Asheville paper about everything falling into place for this to happen. 

As envisioned, the park will be a ribbon that connects numerous tracts already owned by the state and by various private entities–such as The Nature Conservancy’s Black River Swamp Preserve on the river’s lower reach. The progress that the Council and other parties have made in bringing about such a park, “the Black River Initiative,”contrasts markedly with what happened recently in North Carolina with a push to turn part of its Black into a state park too.  That campaign rubbed some private landowners wrong at the get-go, and, from what I understand, is dead in the water.

The two Blacks also differ in that, at the water level we enjoyed, South Carolina’s had more inviting places to camp.  If you consider that at least half of any multi-day river trip is spent in camp, you realize that this is not an unimportant difference. It wasn’t until we reached the tidal section below Pump House Landing on the last day that campsites disappeared.

Morning in camp among river birch.

I was surprised to discover that the best camping sites were not to be found on the kind of exposed sandy point bars that are common on coastal plain rivers.  In fact, we came to just one prominent sandbar like that the whole trip—and it would have fit several times inside any middling-sized one on, say, Georgia’s Oconee.  Even so, we camped on sand every night, gentle banks of it tucked away in the forest, overhung by river birch, black willow, and water elm.  We’d drive up and step out.  Thirty minutes later camp would be pitched, and we’d be barefoot and stripped to swim shorts.

Our camping while dressed in no more clothing than that should tell you another thing we liked about the Black: there were hardly any annoying insects.  I know, I know: “that can’t be true.” Or as one of my sisters wrote after reading another trip report I sent out several years ago, “This just SCREAMS mosquitoes to me!!!” 

I recently read an account by the colonial explorer, William Bartram, of a boating trip he made up the Amite River, in Louisiana, in 1775, and his experience would have given my sister cause to scream.  Like the Black, the Amite had “low banks, the land on each side a level swamp, about two feet above the surface of the water, supporting a thick forest of trees.” Bartram goes on: “Late in the evening we discovered a narrow ridge of land close to the river bank, high and dry enough to suffer us to kindle up a fire, and space sufficient to spread our bedding on. But here, fire and smoke were insufficient to expel the hosts of musquitoes that invested our camp, and kept us awake during the long and tedious night.”  The one good thing about the sleepless torment?  Bartram notes with humor that “the alligators had no chance of taking us napping.”

But having spent four nights on South Carolina’s Black, and having canoe-camped many summers on many southeastern rivers, I come home time after time to report in a whisper, “No bugs.”

All-American

Was it hot? Yes!  Even by South Carolina standards. The state baked in the mid-90s the entire week—or so we heard.  On the river, temperatures did not rise above the high 80s.  Since we were paddling an average of 15 miles a day, afternoons still felt plenty warm. But it was livable warmth, tempered with delightful breezes, tree shade, and big sailing clouds that frequently hid the sun. 

“So Warm!”

I remember waking the first morning at dawn and, looking over the rim of my canoe cradle, seeing Pat, who’d slept out on the sand, walk from his sleeping bag down to the river and wade in.  He didn’t suck in his breath, didn’t huff and puff.  His body didn’t tense up as he went under, the way it would have on one of our chill mountain rivers. Coming to the surface, he saw me and said, “So warm!” You can say that when you wake up in water that’s 80 degrees.

The thermometer did top 90 one day. We set our camp chairs just downstream of a river bend, where we ate lunch, napped, read, made notes, and engaged in a lively Socratic dialogue about two Labrador retrievers, one black, the other white, that suddenly “swam into our ken” from upstream. But rather than follow the current on around the bend to where we were sitting, the dogs continued swimming in a straight line—no meandering for them—and they swam on out of sight into a watery bald cypress forest, not to return.  Where did they come from? And where were they going?  Meanwhile, in the eddy at our feet turtles stuck their snouts up to breathe, minnows waved their fins in the shallows, and a host of shiny whirlygig beetles swarmed nonstop into one galactic-like shape after another on the water’s slick surface. Whirlygig beetles have two pairs of eyes, one pair pointed up towards the sky, the other down into the water, but no pair that lets them see themselves. When we waded in, the beetles parted into two exploding supernovas, with one cluster then bleeding back into the other again after we passed.  Our Webb was all around us.

Bobby Simpson photo

I didn’t fully realize how deadly hot the rest of the state was until we reached Kingstree, which the Black brushes against. Pulling into Mill Street Landing early afternoon, we walked about a block up to a Burger King, which Louis said would be a convenient place to refill our water jugs.  The instant we stepped out of the shade, baking heat writhed up from the asphalt, broiled us from a glaring sky, radiated off buildings, boiled out of engines.  A mere heat island?  No. Welcome to heat earth.

Burger King itself was refrigerated. I wondered how many dammed up rivers it took to generate the electricity needed to keep its interior arctic.  But the friendly women who ran it let us three par-boiled river tramps fill our jugs from the water fountain.  “Just don’t push the button that says Coke!” the manager said.  As a way of thanking them, I bought a Coke, my first ever extra-large.  We hurried through the urban oven back down to the canoes and just-right shade.  Deciding to go all-American, I managed to get down the 32 oz. of my drink.  Bobby poured out part of his.

Which Way?

Even by meandering-river standards, South Carolina’s Black is slow, and in its long, lake-like widenings it almost stops. To move we had to paddle.

But here’s a surprising thing about the lakes: they increased our chances of becoming turned around—in part because they had no predominant current at crucial moments to serve as a pointer.  One lake we paddled ended abruptly, dramatically, in four separate-but-equal-looking outlets, each headed off into the forest in a different direction.  This was upstream of a drainage called Ox Swamp.  Which way?  The one we took, far left, became narrower and narrower as streamlets angled off now this way, now that into the swamp—as if to tease us and keep us in suspense, would the water peter out? Except by going down it, there is simply no way to know if little by little a channel like that will be absorbed by the swamp, its water then gathered together again and released somewhere else as a new channel. At one tight squeeze, leafy branches grew in thick from either side. I wedged my canoe through a tight passageway that Bartram might have called a “Tipitiwitchet” (I’ll let you figure out that one), then turned to watch as Pat emerged from the quivering tangle. The river looked like it was giving birth to a canoe.  

Pat‘s canoe crowning.

I blame Thoreau for my going the wrong way on the fourth day.  It was in a dead-water lake we entered below Ervin Landing.  I was paddling down the wide-open stretch thinking about Thoreau on his beloved but slow Concord river—how, “full of reflections,” he found the river’s glassy surface to be “the more suggestive to the contemplative voyager,”— my arms moving all the while in the three-part rhythm of paddle, relax, repeat, as I watched the canoe glide through reflection after reflection, until I sank into a contemplative doze. I didn’t surface until my eye happened to land on the compass—“We’re still going east? Shouldn’t the river be twisting again?”  Stopping my stroke, I called back that we might be heading down a dead end, only to hear one of my fellow dozers shout, “Looks like a river to me!”  But putting my trust in compass and map, and not Thoreau or the river’s open, inviting channel, we backtracked and soon came to an inconspicuous river-right turn that itself looked dead-end—that is, until I saw a hint of current beckoning that way.

Going past Pump House Landing the last day, we entered the Black’s tidal reach and were lucky enough to catch the outgoing tide through a beautiful series of meanders called The Narrows.  Though the ebbing Atlantic was still miles to the east, we could feel it pulling the river and us towards it.  It was the fastest current of the week.

River Trip Log:

Trip dates: July 25-29, 2022.  Weather, dog-day hot and bone dry.  River water temp: 80s.

Put-in: Brewington Lake access, Pocotaligo River. Take-out: Pine Tree Landing, Black River. Distance traveled: 70 river miles.

River level: 380 cfs (5.8’) starting out, just right; lowering over the week to 150cfs (3.7’) on the USGS Gauge, Black River at Kingstree, SC.

Extraordinary guidebook, if you can still find a copy: Canoe Kayak South Carolina, by Paul Ferguson.

Shuttle driver and Black River paddler extraordinaire: Louis Drucker.

Charleston Post and Courier article on the coming state park: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/local_state_news/scs-ambitious-black-river-park-project-will-provide-public-access-to-waterway/article_48a1eaf0-8b44-11eb-833b-27fecc289923.html Not that the article gets everything right. It quotes a naturalist who, in regard to the Black, its plants and animals, says, “The rare is commonplace.” It’s a clever phrase, but the opposite is true. He also states: “You can’t love a place until you know a place.” Again, the opposite is true.

A memorable fancy:  A young fisherman we hailed one evening when he boated past our camp told us he worked for a man who had recently bought 1000 acres along the river for a turkey-hunting pleasure ground. The landowner, he said, was from western North Carolina, and, it turned out, I knew him. He owns a resort in Cashiers where in Slickrocking days I used to provide evening entertainment for his guests. I would demonstrate primitive skills like fire-by-friction and shooting a river-cane blow gun, tell Cherokee myths and pioneer tales, and spin stories of adventures I’d had in the Blue Ridge.  When I walked in front of the audience, I would fancy that I was a modern day version of Robert Burns brought from the rural hinterlands to Edinburgh to entertain Scottish nobility. If only I’d been a poetic genius and the guests had been noble!

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Condo Wild, a Triplet Report

Posted on May, 2022 by Burt Kornegay

Every spring for a week or more Becky and I travel to Florida’s Amelia Island, where, like song birds that return to the same nesting site each year, we rent the same condo over and over again. Amelia is the state’s topmost barrier island on the Atlantic, just across the St. Mary’s River from Georgia’s bottommost island, Cumberland. Our condo has palm trees beside the veranda waving their fronds in the sea breezes, and the blue sea itself waving beyond. The waves are so close I can carry my whitewater canoe down to ride them. Becky combs the beach for shark teeth, seaglass, and fragments of fossil turtle shells washed up by the waves. We sleep at night to the sound of the surf.

That is on the ocean side of the unit. On the mainland side lie inland waterways to canoe in our tandem and greenway trails to hike. Miles of bike paths lead us to state parks and through beautiful residential neighborhoods fragrant with flowers and shaded by old live oaks. For us it is Florida at its condo finest.

1. Condo Bound

Much as we like the condo, we never fly straight to Amelia but spend several days driving there on back roads, some just one step up from dirt.

One of the roads this year took us to Griffis Fish Camp and Landing, on the Suwannee River. It is just outside the boundary of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and we made a canoeing day trip there that I highly recommend.

Griffis Camp was started by fishing guide Lem (Elemuel) Griffis in the 1930s, and though you may not have heard of it or of Lem, Jimmy Carter has. Born and raised in the Okefenokee, Lem became known as Georgia’s best story teller, and people came from all over to hear his swampy tales and wit–including the Carter family from Plains when Jimmy was a boy. Carter recalls that one time Lem took him fishing in Billys Lake, which is a widening of the Middle Fork of the Suwannee in the Okeefenokee, and when they returned to camp Lem swore they had pulled so many fish out of the lake they had to haul water in to fill the hole.

Lem Griffis spins a tale, from Floridamemory.com

I first learned about Griffis Camp in 1989, twenty-one years after Lem’s death. The camp was run by Lem’s son Arden then, and I used it as the base camp for canoe trips I led in the swamp. Arden was a tall, thin man—like his father, to just by photographs. Unlike his father, Arden was quiet, reserved, factual, private, though always polite and courteous. You would not have seen Arden in front of a mike. He lived in his father’s house at the camp, where he took care of his aging mother. Whenever I pulled in with a group, Arden came out in a buttoned-up shirt.

Though Arden attended to his appearance and to his mother, when it came to the camp itself, he ran it with benign neglect. When I stayed there with groups, it still had the look and feel of his father’s “old Georgia,” in a deteriorating state. In earlier years the sign out front had read “Griffis Fish Camp and Motel”—the motel being a strip of four rooms built by Lem near the road. But when the motel fell into disrepair under Arden, he closed it, and rather than making a new sign, he simply put duct tape across the word “Motel” on the aging old one. If you were driving down the road, you came to a sign that read “Griffis Fish Camp and . . .” As for the camp’s septic system, Arden kept razor-back hogs in a pen directly behind the small, white building that housed the showers and toilets. We joked that you could hear the hogs squeal with anticipation whenever we flushed.

When Arden died in 2007, his affable brother, Alphin, now 91, began to run the camp. Alphin was formerly a teacher and school principal, and then, once he retired, an avid world traveler with his wife. Now that the camp is under his charge, he has made “Old Georgia” new again. The motel has been taken down, a new sign put up, and the hogs are gone. He has also turned the camp office into a museum where he displays alligator skulls and turtle shells, Indian artifacts and mounted animal heads (he knows taxidermy), along with curios he’s brought back from his travels. On the morning Becky and I arrived, Alphin was kind enough to drop us off at the Stephen Foster State Park in the wildlife refuge.  From there we canoed an eight-mile route through Billys Lake and the River Narrows, then down the main stem of the Suwannee back to the camp. It’s the day trip I recommend.

Day-trip’s end: Griffis Landing on the Suwannee.

From the state park boat ramp, we turned west on Billys Lake, and right off began to see a lot of alligators. It was a sunny day and they were basking on the dense mats of lily pads and spatterdock that flank the open water. Most of them simply watched us go by, or they slowly slid in and submerged until only their eyes remained above the surface.  But you never can be sure about gators, and several big ones—real drama queens—thrashed a lot harder and louder than necessary just to go under, throwing up showers of glittering spray.

Turning into the River Narrows, which flows out the western end of the lake, we found a forested, tightly winding stream that was a delight to navigate. We followed the channel as it gradually opened up to mixed “prairie” and bald cypress groves, before coming to an end at the Suwannee Sill.

The Suwanee Sill is the name for a five-mile-long dam across the Okefenokee’s oozy western outlet built by the federal government in 1960 for the good of the swamp. The idea was that the sill would protect the Okefenokee from frequent wildfires by backing up and keeping its water level unnaturally high. In the 1990s, however, a new generation of federal employees had a new idea: they decided the sill was abetting the swamp’s demise. In the Okefenokee, it turns out, fire and water do mix. The swamp–which is more accurately termed a peat bog–fills a large, shallow depression in the Coastal Plain, and if is not frequently cleaned out with frequent, fast-moving fires, its beautiful Billys Lakes and Grand Prairies and delightful waterways begin to fill up with accumulating peat. In preventing fires, the massive sill was helping the Swamp to bury itself. So, after the earlier expense for the public by the sill’s needless construction–and its offense to the swamp itself–the government opened the spillway gates permanently to approximate the swamp and river’s pre-sill natural flow.

The Okefenokee was brimful the day we were there, so rather than having to carry our canoe over the sill we simply ran it through one of the spillway gates, then ate lunch a short distance beyond on a small island of sand that rose not more than three inches above the water. While we were eating, a gator watched us from in front and another from behind. They did not seem attracted to crackers and pimento cheese.

The trees that line much of the Suwannee below the sill, growing right out of the inky water, are almost all Ogeechee tupelos, nyssa ogeechee. It’s a gum tree related to black gum that is found in the rivers of southern Georgia and northern Florida.  They are also known as Ogeechee limes because the lemony fruits were used by settlers in pies. Most of the tupelos we saw were no bigger than dogwoods in size; but if you camp overnight at Griffis then paddle 15 miles farther down the Suwannee the next day to a take-out at the aptly named town of Fargo, you’ll see some very big female Ogeechee tupelos. To me they look like thick-waisted southern mommas standing in the river, their fleshy arms spread wide to embrace the oncoming flow of the snake-black current.   

1. The Condo

The first thing we did on arriving at the condo was to go see Go, Pher, Tor, and Toise. Those are the names I’ve given the gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) that have their burrows in the dunes, two on either side of the boardwalk that goes from the condo to the beach.  We like to watch the big turtles eat the scrubby vegetation, which they do with rapid bites, and tromp along in the sand to stare at each other.  Occasionally they do more than stare.

Male gophers (“gophers” being what Floridians call the tortoises) grow battering-ram extensions called “gular projections” on the front of their plastrons or belly shells, and with them they butt each other over territory and females. One morning on our trip the year before, we were excited to see that the biggest of the gophers, Pher, had crossed under the boardwalk and taken a ramming stance on the apron of sand in front of the burrow of Go, a smaller male. And Go was there too. He was standing in his burrow’s entrance, with damp sand still clinging to his back. It looked like he had just emerged to find himself confronted by big Pher.

For several minutes the two turtles stood perfectly still, squared off about a foot apart. Then very slowly, as if he hoped to find a way out of gular jousting with big Pher, Go began to swing his head from side to side, as if saying “no.” To which Pher reacted immediately with fast, vigorous up-and-down shakes of his head, “Yes! Yes!” Go froze. The two stared at each other for several minutes. Then Go slowly swung his head sideways again,”no”—countered by Pher’s “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Go froze.

Up until then I did not know if tortoises could move backwards easily, or go backwards at all. Their scaly front feet are shaped like shovels for forward digging, their elephantine back ones are made to push forward with power. But when the smaller turtle waved his head “no” a third time and then Pher went “YES! YES! YES!” even more vigorously than before, Go was gone! That turtle shot backwards down his hole so fast the sand on his back was left hanging in the air. When we finally left, Pher was still standing there staring down into Go’s hole.

This year we did not see big Pher, or the female Toise, but Go was there, and Tor, along with a host of other creatures. Wildlife biologists say gopher burrows are so extensive that more than 300 different kinds of animals have been found living in them. The burrows are underground condominiums, making gophers a “keystone species” when it comes to healthy wildlife habitat. When a gopher goes down his hole, think of all the squeezing by, crawling over, and rubbing elbows that must go on there in the pitch black! The teeming life underground might be why we also saw three black racers in the dunes, two coachwhip snakes, an eastern milk snake, five rabbits, and dozens of Carolina anoles racing around. Though not a burrow dweller, we also saw a red-shouldered hawk perched daily on the railing, from where it looked down at all of the above. We spent so much time looking too that other condoers on the way to the beach carrying chairs and umbrellas would pause to ask what was going on.

The most memorial going-on happened when we had our binoculars trained on a cute sandpiper walking through the dune vegetation looking for tidbits to eat, all the while wagging its tail feathers. Suddenly, like a dark bolt the red-shouldered hawk fell straight down out of the Florida blue and crushed the little bird into the sand. We were just 20 feet off, and the hawk stared back at us as if to say “Mine.” Oddly, the finality of the strike brought to mind a short counter-culture video I’d seen in 1969 called “Bambi Meets Godzilla” where Bambi is the the flower child of purity and all you need is love, and Godzilla the soul-destroying Establishment of conformity, mammon, tradition, and Vietnam.

The raptor sprang back into the air, sandpiper clutched helplessly in its talons, and flew to the adjacent condo complex. We could not see what happened next, but we had a good idea of the little bird’s fate. At home we have watched a red-shouldered hawk pin down frogs and chipmunks beside the pond in our yard and with its cruel beak rip the creatures into pieces of flesh that are still quivering as they go down.

3. Condo Done

One morning I was surprised to meet another couple on the boardwalk who had been living in the complex when we were there the year before. At that time, a full year of condo living was not in the couple’s plan. Their plan had been to stay just long enough for their retirement house to be built on the island. But the plan had gone “agley,” in part because of Go, Pher, Tor, and Toise, or their gopher kin at any rate.

The couple explained they had already bought what they thought was the perfect lot for their dream house when they discovered it had an imperfection: three resident gopher tortoises. If the gophers had been mere drunks or squatters or homeless people, getting rid of them would not have been much of a problem. But gophers are not human beings; in Florida they are a Threatened Species. And since rampant home development is one of the chief reasons for their decline, the couple couldn’t simply hire someone to make soup out of their turtles or to trap and release them in someone else’s lot. Before a shovel could go into the ground wildlife regulations stipulate that permits have to be secured and the gophers have to be humanely relocated to a compatible and protected site. The regulations also require the removal to be conducted by a person with the necessary training, a PhG. The couple told me that on Amelia there is just one man with the credentials to do this.  He’s known as the Gopher Whisperer.

Unfortunately for the couple, there are many other retirees on Amelia Island who want to build dream houses too. To judge by how many private jets passed low over our condo daily to land at Amelia’s airport, the species Homo Sapiens, sub-variant Wealthianus, is not threatened. And many of the house lots they buy also have gophers. We see the burrows on undeveloped land wherever we ride our bikes. This means the demand for tortoise relocation is high. Naturally, this being the situation, the Gopher Whisperer charges what the market will bear. Evidently it will bear a lot. In this couple’s case, they had to wait 2 and ½ months for the Whisperer to secure the permits and properly remove their gophers, and it cost them $22,00o. That comes to $7333.00 a turtle! They told me the removal had finally been completed, along with final inspections and certification. Only now was the first shovel about to go into the ground.

Naturally, the first thing Beck and I did after hearing this was to ride our bikes over to see the couple’s lot. It was our peddling destination for the day. To us the lot looked like a hot, overgrown, scruffy sand pile, a place much more suitable for gopher burrows than it did for a million-dollar house—especially considering that any house built there is slated for relocation in the future by a rampant Atlantic.

The people living next-door must have thought so too. On their mailbox post they’d nailed a yellow warning sign:

The following morning I happened to meet the couple again on the boardwalk and told them we had been to see their house site. Feeling a Lem Griffis sense of humor rise in me, I added that while we were, we’d watched a mama gopher walk past the tortoise sign into their lot, looking for a place to lay her eggs.

The husband scoffed and walked on towards the beach. The wife put her hand to her forehead and cried, “Don’t do that to us!”

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TalakPea Means “Canoe it”: The Pea-Choctawhatchee

Posted on April, 2022 by Burt Kornegay

It was the perfect storm. It was not the perfect place to camp in the storm.  

Four of us—Bobby Simpson, Pat Stone, my son Henry, and I—had launched that morning on the Pea River in the town of Elba, Alabama, the start of a six-day trip. Our goal was to canoe the Pea through lower Alabama to its confluence with the Choctawhatchee, near the Florida line, then follow the Choctawhatchee into the Panhandle.  Six days would not give us enough time to reach the Gulf, but we hoped to cover 100 miles. The first 60 would be on the Pea.

The air was warm and dry when we launched, but the wind was up.  We knew it was being pushed by a storm that had buffeted the nation’s midsection the day before, February 2, prompting meteorologists to name it the “Groundhog Day Storm.” Weather maps showed an angry squall line that looked like a giant forward slash extending from Texas to the Great Lakes, and moving east.  Backing up the computer model with 135 years of down-to-earth experience, Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil, “the seer of seers and prognosticator of prognosticators” as the town folk call him, had seen his shadow and, sensing the oncoming blast, hurried back down into his snug hole. 

It was warm and dry when we left the Lodge on Pea River to launch. Photo by Jack Brunson

What we did not know was that the combination of warm and dry would end five miles downstream at a 20-foot-high dam across the Pea, the Elba Dam.  Now, you might think that a dam that big would make the day feel even warmer than it was by forcing us to portage our boats and gear around it, and for the first century or so of the dam’s existence (it was built in 1911) you would have been right.  But on a stormy night in 2020, the Pea, known in Alabama for its destructive floods, swept away the dam’s midsection. People woke the next morning to find smooth water flowing through a 100-foot-wide breach. Not a trace of concrete remained. So, we simply paddled through then landed to look at the damage the Pea had wrought.  That’s when a cold rain slanted across the river, sending us into rain parkas, rain pants, and gloves.

Our campsite that night was a low, exposed sandbar with barely room enough for the four of us to camp.  Previous high water had deposited a coating of mud on the sandbar, so I dubbed it Camp Mudhole. 

We were thankful to have it!  A few miles below the dam the rain-spattered Pea had carried us into a wrecked forest.  Trees were flattened on both sides of the river, and those still standing had their tops wrung off.  A jungle of briars and vines covered the banks.  I wondered if the destruction had been caused by the dam-wrecking storm.  With night almost on us, I also wondered where in the wreckage we were going to camp. Mudhole was it.

The word “perfect” means thoroughly or completely made, having all the right elements well joined; and whether it was Zeus or Thor, Yahweh or—to draw on the only homegrown storm gods I know—the Cherokee Ani-Hyuntikwalaski  (“the Thunderers”), as daylight dimmed it became clear to us that some great god of weather was perfectly fashioning our storm out of wind, clouds, electricity, and rain.  Hearing distant rumbles, seeing flashes to the west, I imagined a colossal groundhog crossing Alabama on thunder feet, oblivious of the small group of humans pitching tents below.

Pat is an accomplished storyteller, and, unknown to me, he had brought a copy of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” some lines of which I’d included in a previous trip report.  And after we wished each other heartfelt goodnights, I suddenly heard the heroic verses come from Pat’s tent, his voice, like that of a bard of old, sending them forth into the teeth of the impending marmot:

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees.  All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea . . .

Although the others were in tents, bed for me was my canoe, which I stretch a tarp over when the weather is vexing.  That night the tarp was stretched so low I had to crouch to get under it.  Every grommet was tied. Luckily, Mudhole had clumps of willows growing on it and they made dependable anchors. Their rooted stems rarely give way in a blow but do give a little when placed under sudden strain. That slight elasticity helps to keep ropes tied to them from breaking and grommets from ripping out.  If my shelter gave just enough in the storm’s opening blast, it would probably ride out the gale.

When the storm struck, its leading wave of wind crashed down on the tarp, plastering the thin material against me and the canoe.  Plastered was good!  Plastered was what I hoped for.  When tarping in a storm, shrink-wrapped is far better than finding yourself suddenly exposed to the elements under a ballooning sail and splitting seams. 

And if the river topped the sandbar?  Well, unlike my fellow campers, at least I was in my boat.

II.  The Color of Water

Over the years I have paddled on rivers with all kinds of names—English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Cherokee, Algonquian, even Kenyan Kikuyu names, as in Tyne, Bonaventure, Rio Grande, Nantahala, Eden, Machias, Thika, and meaning, respectively, prong or spike, good adventure, big river, noonday sun, paradise, bad falls, burial,—but this was the first river I had been on named after a vegetable. The Pea? But “Pea” is what is on the maps.  And Pea is what the businesses in Elba have to work with to attract fishermen and paddlers to their stream, businesses like Pea River Outdoors, which shuttled us, and the Lodge on Pea River, where we spent our pre-launch night. 

And work it they do. “Come Pea with us!” “Everyone has to Pea!” “Let the Peaing begin!” are some of the slogans I heard.  And evidently to good effect. I was told that in the summer the Outdoors shop stays busy renting canoes and kayaks and shuttling floaters on a popular nine-mile stretch of the river above town. 

“Pea,” however, did not begin to work for me until I read that the Muscogee Indians who lived along the river for generations had called it Talakhatchee and that Pea was the white man’s translation of that original name. In Muscogee, Talak is said to have meant “pea green,” the river’s normal color—the color we saw before the storm turned it mud brown,—and hatchee meant creek or river. Talakhatchee meant Pea Green River.  In time, white settlers forced out the Muscogee, and they dropped the “green” too. The river became the Pea. 

Draw by the river’s past and present, it red and white, I began to think of it as the TalakPea.  For me that meant, “Canoe it.”

The river started out pea green.

III. Pea River Gorge

The next morning the brunt of the storm had passed.  We emerged to spitting clouds and a boldly flowing Pea.  Standing on the edge of the sandbar, Henry pointed out that you could see the Pea rising.  Bobby said if we just got in our boats, the Pea would float us off.  I checked a USGS river gauge after the trip and saw that the river swelled that day from around 1100 cubic feet a second to 3600, three times its average volume. At that level, Camp Mudhole would have been several feet deep in Pea.

The river soon carried us out of the wrecked forest.  Limestone walls rose on either side. They were green with fern gardens and mosses, and glistening with cascades.  In one bend we came to two springs shooting out of the top of a wall like fire hydrants. Pat christened this scenic stretch the Pea River Gorge.  And it went on for miles.

Unfortunately, to see the gorge I had to keep wiping my eyeglasses, because wind-whipped rain—Ulysses’ “scudding drifts”—swept in and continued for all those miles too. It slanted under my hat brim, growing harder and turning colder as the day went on.

Searching at midday for a windless place to eat, we turned up a feeder called Tiger Branch and were delighted to find it had carved a miniature gorge of its own, roofed with palmetto fronds and a forest canopy. The walls closed in until a tiger could have leaped across.  Stopped in our upstream progress by a small rapid, we backed out to where the channel widened enough for us to turn around, then stood on shore to eat.

Exploring Tiger Branch

Our campsite that night was on a bank safely above the still-rising river, its sand carpeted with fallen leaves and nestled in trees. Even so, wind gusts shook my tarp several times during the night, waking me up. Hours later I opened my eyes to a glowing east.  It was going to be a dry day.

But not a warm one.  The Pea remained beautiful, but cold winds blew from out of an ice-blue sky, prompting us to stop early for our third night’s camp.  Thanks to Henry’s strong sawing arm, we got up a stack of wood for evening and morning fires. I named that camp “28 Degrees.” 

IV.  Choctaw’s River

The waters of the Pea return to the Muscogee language when they join the Choctawhatchee, near the town of Geneva.  The name “Choctawhatchee” is a combination of Choctaw and hatchee and means “river of the Choctaw,” a Muscogee-speaking tribe.  Arriving at the confluence, we found ourselves on big water indeed.  Bulked up with the TalakPea, the Choctawhatchee enters Florida as one of the state’s largest rivers. 

Given the choice, I’ll always pick a small, intimate stream over a big one, but the farther we went down the Choctawhatchee, the more I liked it.  It began to divide around islands and meander through a world of gooseneck bends, oxbow lakes, dead river channels, soupy sloughs and oozy guts.  The words of Thoreau came to me:

“When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp.  I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum.  There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.”

That evening we camped on a sandbar as big as a city block.  Roaming over its welcome expanse of clean, white sand, I saw that each clump of willows growing on it had gathered its fallen leaves under it like a skirt, the leafy forms perfectly matching the shape of the bare willow stalks above.  “Wind shadows,” Bobby called them. The leaves were so feathery, why hadn’t wintry blasts scattered them hither and yon? Why hadn’t the river itself, which had washed the sandbar clean, swept them away?  Whatever the mechanism involved, here was a sign of beauty at work in the hands of nature.

Willow-leaf wind shadows on white sand

While we were eating supper a fleet of clouds sailed over us from out of the east, turning rosy as the sun sank behind the horizon. Henry had recently taken a weather course for his job as a wildland firefighter and he identified them as being altocumulus floccus.  Hearing a hint of rain in that, I thought about setting up the tarp.  But then the clouds passed to reveal a starry sky. 

As if they had put themselves into reverse, identical-looking clouds sailed back over us in the morning from the opposite direction, headed towards the sunrise.  Pat swore he recognized two of them. But this time, ominously, alto darkened to strato, floccus to fluccus, the temperature dropped, and, as we shoved off, rain began to fall—and, once again, it fell nonstop all day, thwarting our plans for swampy exploration. To stay warm we had to paddle.

V. We Took One Break

Spotting a man in an orange poncho at a boat ramp almost hidden in the mist and trees, I angled over to ask him if there was a shelter we could get under to eat lunch.  He shook his head no, but then pointed downriver and said, “I’ve got a houseboat on the other side, just around the bend. The door’s open. Go on in. It’s nothing much.”  Thanking him, and eager for a break from the rain, we doubled the bend, only to learn how right he’d been: it was nothing much.

We had passed quite a few houseboats on the river, all of them built on the same plan. They were simple one-room sheds or cabins bolted down to metal pontoons and hauled to their locations by powerboats, where they had been tied to trees next to shore. Many looked like they had been there for years, and some had been kept up. As soon as our houseboat came into view, however, we saw it was more dilapidated than most, and it was moored out from shore in strong current. A landing dock floated behind it that did not inspire confidence. Its planks were rotten, some broken through.

Pat dubbed it the Choctawhatchee Hilton.

The landing dock did not inspire confidence.

Clambering up onto one end of the houseboat, I opened the door to a room that was about the same size as the cabin Thoreau lived in at Walden Pond—though the houseboat shelter outdid Thoreau’s in the simplicity of its furnishings.  Thoreau’s cabin held a bed, a small writing desk, a table, 3 chairs, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” Homer’s Iliad, a few cooking and fireplace utensils, and “a looking-glass three inches in diameter.”  Thoreau might have used the mirror to comb his hair before walking into town, but I suspect he mentions it chiefly as a humorous reminder that one reason he moved to Walden was to live up to the Greek maxim inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, “Know thyself.” But I digress.

The houseboat contained just two pieces of furniture: a bunk bed (the lower one for solitude, I suppose, the upper for a fishing buddy) and a bedside commode.  The commode was the folding kind sold in medical supply stores, made of lightweight aluminum tubes, with a toilet seat attached.  Positioned under the seat was a slide-in-and-out plastic bowl.  A roll of toilet paper was at the ready on the bunk.

One bunk for solitude, two for lunch

Curiously, though Thoreau gives a thorough inventory of his furniture at Walden and also describes in detail his daily activities—how he built his cabin, hoed his beans, got up his firewood, cleaned the floor, slept, cooked, what food he ate, what he read, when he bathed, the clothes he wore,—when it comes to how he relieved himself, he does not say a word. Did his cabin have a chamber pot?  Was there a privy next to the woodshed in back?  Did he use a plein-air latrine? 

The natural reticence we all feel when it comes to defecation no doubt accounts for Thoreau’s silence on the subject.  But to note that he says not a word about it is not to say he has nothing playful to say.  Anyone who reads Walden with both eyes open can’t help but see that it is chock-full of double meanings and wordplay. I could point out many examples. Thoreau is so prone to puns, even groaners, that when in his private journal he lists his faults as a writer, the first thing he puts down is, “Playing with words,—getting the laugh.” 

So, after telling us he tended two acres of beans behind the cabin—beans being a staple of his Walden diet—I can’t help but wonder if there is a humorous undercurrent of meaning in his repeated remarks that, unlike the other farmers of Concord, who increased their lands’ fertility by spreading manure on them:

“I put no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter”; 

“I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it”;

“Such was that part of creation where I had squatted.” 

It may be pure coincidence, but these and other instances of his use of the word add up to a lot of squat.

The houseboat’s prosaic commode, however, with its slide-in-and-out bowl, told it straight about where its contents were to be dumped: Choctawhatchee.

And all the while it rained.

V. Swamptawhatchee

Late afternoon we came to the concrete slash across the river made by Interstate 10.  The sky was thick with clouds, but the interstate’s two bridges were packed with vehicles churning up a rival storm cloud of their own. Rain slung off the tires shot up into the sky.  Once or twice I caught sight of a head in a window, but, taken as a whole, the interstate looked and sounded like an autonomous machine of linked parts roaring down a track towards a destination of its own, not set by the heads within. The philosopher Martin Heidegger says, “The modern age rages towards fulfillment of its essence with a velocity unknown to the participants.”  But the velocity is known when seen from the seat of a canoe.

Paddling in the bow of a tandem with Pat, Henry said the traffic barreling past made him want to go faster, faster.  All Pat had to do was steer.

Unhurried and spacious, always novel in design, quiet in a way that is older than words, our river was an interstate too, having carried us in two states. And once it left I-10 behind, we could not tell if the Choctawhatchee was rising higher and still higher or if the land had sunk, but one thing was clear: there was water, water, everywhere, nor any place to camp. The Choctawhatchee is said to have some of the largest sandbars of any north Florida river, but not that day. Even a sandbar so big it registered on my map turned out to be submerged.

Swamptawhatchee

If you paddle in southern swamps a lot, in all kinds of weather, you come to appreciate certain trees that grow there, like American holly, beech, and various kinds of pine. Needing to keep their roots dry, trees like these often indicate where islands are in a sodden world, as well as borders of firm ground.  I kept my eyes peeled for their familiar forms and eventually saw ahead the green tops of a loblolly pine grove rising above the gray swamp forest like a botanical billboard.  No thirsty camel-mounted traveler seeing palm trees clustered around a desert oasis could have felt his heart leap higher than I did in my canoe at the sight of those pines. The map told me the grove was near an abandoned river channel off the main stem. So, weaving that way around the swollen trunks of bald cypress and tupelo gum, we soon spotted dry ground and ran our boats up in a pine woods. 

Henry’s arm worked rhythmically, the saw blade sounding in the kerf, and soon we had the tarp up and a bright blaze going to warm the outer man.  To warm the inner, Pat pulled out a flask of firewater. 

Although it was an hour’s paddle behind us, several times during the night I woke in the dripping swamp to the rumble of I-10.  The others heard it too.

V.  Day Six

At noon we came to a bump of sand rising out of the dark water and stopped to eat. We were 102 miles downstream from Elba and one mile upstream from Cedar Log Landing, our trip’s end. No sooner had we gotten out of the boats than the stubborn clouds parted, the sun came out hot—and we basked.  When she met us at the landing an hour later, the shuttle driver, Rae, told us it was the start of what was forecast to be a glorious week.

At the beginning of our trip Punxsutawney Phil had been partly right in his prognostication: it was not going to be six more weeks of winter, just six days.

River Trip Log:

Dates: 2/3-8/2022.  Put-in: Elba boat ramp, AL. Take-out: Cedar Log Landing, FL.  Estimated distance traveled: 103 miles.  Maps used: USGS 7.5 minute topos.

River change over the course of the trip: USGS Pea River Gauge near Samson, AL:  1100-3600 cfs; USGS Choctawhatchee Gauge near Pittman, FL: 3200-7800 cfs.

Shuttle service: Pea River Outdoors, Elba, AL. 

Lodging in Elba: The quiet, clean, comfortable Lodge on Pea River, owners Jack and Jane Brunson.  We stayed the nights before and after the trip.

The door to the Lodge on Pea River.

Guidebooks: The Carolinas and Georgia are blessed with comprehensive river guides for paddlers, but Alabama is not.  Falcon Press does have a new book out, Paddling Alabama, by Joe Cuhaj, but it describes just one short section of each river it covers.

For a clear overview and understanding of the state’s waterways, read Alabama Rivers: A Celebration and Challenge, by Bill Deutsch.

Also: go to Alabama Water Watch and Alabama Rivers Alliance.

Florida has a more comprehensive guide, Canoeing & Kayaking Florida, published by Menasha Ridge Press.  Get the 3rd edition, by Johnny Molloy. 

By chance, while writing this report I saw a news article about the Muscogee, who were deported from Alabama to Oklahoma 200 years ago. They are attempting to reestablish a presence in Alabama: https://news.yahoo.com/muscogee-return-south-nearly-200-174851574.html

Was it a good trip? You bet. At 150 miles in length, the Pea is no garden-variety stream. The upper Pea, and the East and West Forks of the Choctawhatchee, all in the southeastern Alabama, wait to be explored.

This Curious World: A Guide's Guide to Exploring Wild Rivers, Woods, and Words

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North Carolina’s Black River: The Trip Back

Posted on August, 2021 by Burt Kornegay

I was driving home from a canoe trip on the Black River in eastern North Carolina when Thoreau’s point-blank assessment of the human condition came to mind: “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” The famous line is in the opening pages of Walden. I thought about Thoreau because even though I was avoiding the interstates by taking what are normally lightly traveled back roads, a habit of driving called shunpiking, every road I took that day was crowded—crowded with people who, to judge by the speeds they were going, the tailgating and horn blowing, the license plates from near and far, did seem desperate, desperate to go somewhere, anywhere. It was the 2nd summer of the Covid pandemic, when millions had been vaccinated and travel restrictions had been lifted. People were going just to go.

Stopped in road construction on NC107 approaching Cashiers later that afternoon, only 30 miles from home, I turned off the engine and, with an eye on the flagman up ahead, drifted back in memory to the Black.  The Black is one of North Carolina’s best-known rivers, and some of you reading this have probably paddled it.  If you don’t know the Black, it makes up in rural Sampson County and, undammed its entire length, flows south to join the larger Cape Fear River, near Wilmington and the coast. In 1994 the state designated the Black as having “Outstanding Resource Waters.” Free flowing, beautiful, clean: that’s a lot going for any river these days.

But the Black is well-known chiefly because of a watery expanse of forest towards the river’s lower end containing ancient bald cypress trees, called the Three Sisters Swamp.  Most people who paddle the Black do so to see the trees in Three Sisters.

Following Paul Ferguson into the Three Sisters Swamp

Waved on around dump trucks, paving equipment, and helmeted workers improving NC107 to accommodate still more traffic, I remembered Thoreau does not mollify his soulful diagnosis.  Instead, he doubles down on it: “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Then, looking straight out of the page at the reader, he says, “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.  There is no play in them, for this comes after work.”  

As if in confirmation, when I pulled over to stretch my legs in Cashiers, I saw the stoplight at the intersection there hemmed in all four ways by vehicles of every make and model with people in them working hard to play.  What’s it gonna be, East to Brevard? West to Highlands?  South to High Hampton? North to the Cherokee Casino and then over the Park to Dollywood?  Let’s raft the Nantahala on the way!  Ride the Tail of the Dragon! Do the Biltmore House!  Cashiers looked like the crossroads of a recreational drunk.  Thoreau ends his short, blunt paragraph with, “But it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” 

Had it been just the day before that I canoed with two friends in the Three Sisters Swamp?  The bald cypresses were big, gnarled, and mossy, their bases swollen.  Some showed scars where lightning bolts had sizzled down their trunks into the black water. The tops of others had been flattened off or knocked cockeyed by hurricanes.  Floods greater than any we have on record had tilted a few.  But, for all the years of storm and strife they had lived through, the trees did not look desperate, a peculiarly human word that means literally “without hope.”  By the same token, the trees did not look hopeful either.

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” says the poet Alexander Pope—but not in the trunk of a bald cypress. 

In terms of longevity, the bald cypresses on the Black are far older than the oldest of trees here in the Blue Ridge.  It’s thought that a few of the oaks and poplars in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and the Great Smoky Mountain National Park might be 500 years old.  There are even longer-lived hemlocks—or at least there were.  In the past thirty years the oldest of them have been killed by the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive pest.  When I felled trees on our Moses Creek land for lumber to build our house, the oldest, based on the annual growth rings I counted on the stump, was a slow-growing hickory.  That tree had sprouted around 1800.  A Cherokee hunter might have brushed against it when it was a sapling as he moved through the woods in search of deer. 

The oldest bald cypress accurately dated in the Three Sisters, by comparison, has lived for at least 2,627 years!  According to the Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research site, which keeps track of such things, it is the third-longest-lived tree in the world.  By 100 BC, when it was over 500 years old, that cypress probably would have been equal in size to the trees in Joyce Kilmer, but considered in terms of its lifespan, it was still knee-high to a jackrabbit.  Some of the Sisters cypresses are probably even older.

Bobby Simpson paddling past the oldest dated bald cypress, with an older-looking but hollow one in the foreground.

I’ve read that bald cypresses might live for 4,000 years.  Certainly the they come from a family of long livers. Bald cypress is one of three species in the United States in the Taxodium genus, the other two being the long-lived redwoods and sequoias of the west.  Bald cypress is the eastern sequoia.

When I guided trips on the Ogeechee River, in Georgia, I took groups to see a truly giant bald cypress that looked four millennia old.  Its trunk was 13 feet in diameter at breast height, 37 feet in circumference.  That’s bigger than any Three Sisters tree I saw, and twice the girth of the biggest poplars in Joyce Kilmer. Its “knees” were taller than we were.  But because bald cypresses also tend to become hollow as they age—I’m tempted to say, like aging men!—it is difficult to find ones sound enough to core for an accurate ring count.  On the Ogeechee, the sequoia-sized cypress I measured might have been four millennia old, but in that time it had become the mere shell of a tree, its core rotted out.  And that’s the case with most of those growing in the Three Sisters Swamp too.

With my paddle, I rapped a cypress rising out of the water near the oldest-dated one.  Its trunk was bigger; it looked more knotty and misshapen, more set in its ways.  It gave back a hollow reply.

It gave back a hollow reply.

A Trip Further Back

The Black’s cypress trees sprouted from seeds during the same centuries that the Greeks, Romans, and Judeo-Christians were laying the foundations of our civilization, its thought and beliefs.  But the trees still stand—and stand still—in the very spot in which they rooted, letting the river, weather, and last century’s commercial logging operations—what logger is going to waste his time on hollow trees?—eddy around them and go on down the stream of time, while, with an ever greater velocity of change and increase in velocity, our western civilization seems to be following the trajectory of a Jeff Bezos rocket hurtling outwards towards . . . a vacuum?—leaving behind the ground and roots that nourished it. 

I bring in Jeff Bezos because I was canoeing in the Three Sisters at the same time that he was rocketing out to have a few dizzy minutes in space. He calls his rocket company Blue Origin, but there’s nothing “original” about the notion that riding a contrivance fast to some out-of-this-world experience will somehow make you fulfilled and happy, or wiser.  That fiction has lived longer than even the oldest bald cypress.

         We ride machines for amusement,
We ride them to the moon,
We’ll ride machines to happiness
When witches ride on brooms.

To find true happiness and wisdom, Thoreau made the case in Walden that it can’t be done by going ever newer and faster while turning our backs on our originating philosophies and religious teachings and great poems—our Homers and Platos; our Aeneids, Testaments, and Macbeths.  Happiness and depth of thought come hand in hand. But as they crowded into the steam trains of his day to be carried 20 miles to Boston at what was then the breath-taking speed of 20 mph, Thoreau’s fellow Concordians hung their hopes on the most up-to-date ways of knowing and going. To them our classic works were echoes from a “dark age.” And little has changed in that respect.  A letter to the editor of the Asheville newspaper a couple of weeks ago said those very words. Here is Thoreau’s timeless reply:

“They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them.”

Dwell on that for a moment. You’ll notice that Thoreau enriches his meaning by balancing “They” and “talk” on either side of “only.”  Tilt it one way with emphasis and it reads “They only talk . . .” (they who have never known, that is, truly read the great writers). Tilt it the other way and it becomes, “They only talk . . . “ (their mouths are full of empty words not true knowledge). Drawing now on John Milton, one of our classic authors, such people are “blind mouths.”

Bezos mat strike yet another Amazonian gold mine in space tourism. He may win more NASA contracts. He may land on Mars. But he’ll never rocket his way to true happiness. He’s more likely to find that mother lode by walking into his local library.

Stopped again on NC107 at still another construction site, this time just one curve away from to the turn-off up my beloved Caney Fork and home, one part of Thoreau’s famous assessment of the human condition did not jibe with the highway desperation I saw: there was nothing quiet about it.  Today’s desperation is seething, driven, loud. 

I notice that the word “noise” comes from “nausea,” and nausea goes back to our classical roots: the ancient Greek nautes, as in nautical.  It was their word for sailors, and literally means “sea-sickness.” Greeks associated sailors with the stomach-roiling and loud vomiting peculiar to their form of travel.  Nautes traveled to exotic places, but they also were a nauseous-noisy bunch.  And all around me in the construction zone—Good lord, I was part of it!—there resounded a kind of mechanized nauseousness. 

Rather than New Shepherd, a better name for JB’s rocket”ship” would be Astronautes. 

But back to canoeing the Black.

The Trip

My river mates were Paul Ferguson and Bobby Simpson.  It was Paul, in fact, who, knowing the Three Sisters well, showed Bobby and me that oldest-dated cypress tree.  We started our trip just south of Clinton, at a river access locally known as Cleon’s Place, and ended it four days later and 50 miles downstream at a shady landing called Newbys. The Black begins to turn tidal after Newbys. 

When he was on a canoe trip in Maine in 1857 Thoreau wrote: “Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe,” and 164 years later the road we followed was paved glossy black, with a beautiful forest reflected in it. Depending on what I looked at, my canoe seemed to be gliding on top of one forest, shimmering in the morning light, and through another waving in the breezes.  We were traveling through two worlds at once. We had the road to ourselves too, and did not see another paddler or power boater the whole trip.

Cruising down a glossy river.

This wasn’t my first time on the Black.  I used to guide canoe trips there when I ran Slickrock Expeditions.  To be accurate, I ran canoe trips that ended on the Black.  

The Black is formed by the confluence of three tributaries in Sampson County—Six Runs Creek, and the Great and Little Coharies.  A few miles farther down, the inky South River flows in.  In my estimation, all these streams taken together make Sampson County the most water-blessed county in the state. It would take you days to explore them. I would start well up one of the tributaries with a group and we’d canoe-camp down it for 3 days, then paddle out into the Black for the final few miles.

A Slickrock group about to set out on the South River, a tributary to the Black, in 2012.

On those earlier trips, the Black always felt big and wide when we reached it.  But this time, without the experience of the smaller streams for comparison, it was intimate, just right.  And it was quiet. That’s because the Black flows through nearly uninterrupted forest, opening up only here and there to a house or small community.  It passes under few bridges, most of them lightly driven.

In Slickrock days, Sampson County residents Ralph Hamilton and Cebron Fussell helped me with the canoe shuttling. They’d drop us off, then meet us at the end.  And Don Meece was a font of information. They were river paddlers all, and all were members of Friends of Sampson County Waterways, in Clinton. This is a group who, along with paddling the local streams, keeps boat passages open in them through fallen trees, strives to keep stream accesses public, and calls attention to sources of river pollution—which in Sampson mainly means overflow from industrial hog farms after big storms.  On my recent trip with Paul and Bobby, it was sad to know that in the past year first Don, then Cebron had canoed down another river, the Styx, or maybe it was the Jordan. And Ralph, due to a near-fatal logging accident, was no longer the vigorous man I once knew.

I rendezvoused with Paul and Bobby at a place called Mossy Log, and we camped there the first night.  Mossy Log is a river community of a few houses on the Black upstream from the NC41 “Tomahawk” bridge; and at the uppermost end there’s an old-time fish camp that looks every bit its age.  Or as Bobby remarked, it appeared that whatever had been brought into the Mossy Log camp over the years—be it a lawn mower, refrigerator, canoe, Jonboat, picnic table, frying pan, or vehicle of some type—had stayed there, with its replacement parked next to it once it wore out. The camp’s full name ought to be Mossy Log and Rusty Metal and Weathered Boards.  We liked it and were the only ones there. 

We were the guests of Danny Baldwin, who was born and raised on the Black and who, like those mentioned above, is a Friend of Sampson County Waterways. Danny told me he had lived with his wife in Mossy Log for 20 years but then moved to Clinton after their house, even though raised high above the ground, had been entered twice by the Black, the second time disastrously in 2018. That’s when Hurricane Florence let loose a near-Biblical flood.

Our first morning, Danny showed up with a canoe trailer and shuttled us upstream a dozen miles to Cleon’s Place.  From there we paddled leisurely back down the Black to Mossy Log, where we camped a second night.  The next morning, our boats now loaded with camping gear and food, we launched at the camp and spent three more days exploring the river down to Newbys, including through the bald cypress forest in Three Sisters on the final day. Newbys is the first public access below the oldies.  

The Trip Way Back

Danny wasn’t the only friend of the river we saw at Mossy Log.  Philip Bell was another.  He drove in from Clinton to meet Paul and order several copies of Paul’s excellent guidebook, Paddling Eastern North Carolina.  Philip struck me as being a frank, open and friendly man. He was compactly built, in his 50s.  When he was a boy, Philip said his father took him fishing on the Black, and Philip still owns a cabin there. 

Philip also turned out to be Coharie Indian, a tribe native to the area. He said the tribe has 3200 members.  Seeing that the Black’s frontage is being bought up today by people who build houses and lock up large tracts of land behind No Trespassing signs, Philip said the Coharies were buying property that comes available to ensure future access for themselves.  He made me want to be Coharie—and I am in spirit.  Buy on!  The tribe had recently bought Cleon’s Place, and they let us use it to launch.

Pointing to my canoe, Philip told me about an old Coharie dugout canoe that a boy had found a couple of years earlier in the South River and dragged to shore.  Carved out of the trunk of a longleaf pine, and remarkably intact, the canoe measured 12’ 9” long, 20 inches wide amidships, and was about a foot deep. Philip said it had been taken to the Underwater Archaeology Preservation Branch, at Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, where it was determined to be about 640 years old. There the canoe was treated with a preservative to keep it from disintegrating in the air.  Now, Philip said, the canoe is kept at the Old Indian School outside of Clinton—a building the tribe has also bought and turned into The Coharie Tribal Center. 

As I listened to Philips’ story, I decided to go see that Indian canoe someday, and my own canoe would go with me when I went, a Mad River Guide.  My Guide’s hull is of modern Royalex, not wood, and it was made in 1997; but it descends in form and spirit from the ancient line of open boats, to be paddled by a single blade. 

The next day, while cruising down the Black and admiring my canoe’s beautiful reflection in the river, I thought about how the word “canoe” itself harks back to the blue-water origin of both the dugout canoe and mine.  How far back is that? 

A word doesn’t accumulate annual growth rings the way a bald cypress does, so the exact age of “canoe” will never be known.  But as I paddled along I did figure that it was 529 years old at least, and probably much, much older. The word came from the Arawakan language as spoken by the Taino islanders of the Caribbean.  And I had come across it when reading the log book that Christopoher Columbus kept of his first voyage, in 1492. 

The word “canoe” was unknown to Columbus when he started his voyage. After sighting land on October 12, whenever he saw what he thought to be “Indios” paddling out to meet him, sometimes in a hundred craft or more, in his log he used the Portuguese term for African dugouts to describe the boats, almadias.

On October 13, for instance, Columbus wrote admiringly: “They came to the ship with almadias that are made from the trunk of one tree, like a long boat, and all of one piece, and carved marvelously in the fashion of the land, and so big that in some of them 40 and 45 men came.  And other smaller, down to some in which came one man alone.”  Searching for a way to describe the implement he saw the islanders using to propel their boats, he compared it to the wooden paddles used in Europe in his day to pull loaves of bread out of ovens: “They move with a paddle like that of a baker, and go marvelously.”  According to Columbus, the men also had what modern canoeists would call bailers: “And if the dugout capsizes on them,” he noted, “they then throw themselves in the water, and they right and empty it with calabashes”—hollowed-out gourds.  That description by Columbus is the first written record of the watercraft of the Americas—of America’s autochthonous boat.

Then, on October 25, having learned the Taino name for their boats, Columbus wrote: “Estas son las Canoas.” And canoa—canoe—it has been ever since.

A Sisterly River

I’m no Columbus, and you’ll not find here a daily log of the Black River voyage I made with Paul and Bobby, giving distances traveled, prevailing winds, compass points followed, soundings taken, locations of suitable campsites, or the lies we told each other in camp after we’d quaffed a dram of rum. I won’t be telling you that naked men, speaking in a strange tongue and paddling wooden canoes, came to meet us. But I will log you this: in addition to the Three Sisters, I also discovered the Four, Five, and Six Sisters.  And if your trip is at the robust water level we enjoyed, you can discover them too.  Here’s how. 

Below the Three Sisters, whenever the river makes a bend or loop, watch for small channels, “cut-throughs,” that peel off from the main stem and angle across the bend.  Follow those beckoning rivulets, if you dare, and you will enter a beautiful forest containing, along with other kinds of trees, old cypresses.  If the cut-through lives up to its name, it will also carry you back to the main channel on the opposite side of the bend.

Black River canoeing mates.

Paul and Bobby are fine canoe companions, but on the last day I felt more and more drawn to see as many Sisters as I could.  So, after we left the famous grove and paddled toward Newbys, whenever the main channel bent left, I took a shunpiking cut-through to the right.  And when it bent right, I swerved onto a less-traveled route to the left.

Once, while turning off into the forest, I heard Paul say to Bobby, “Burt likes to take cut-throughs, you know.”  They were patient with me in that.  Sometimes the cut-through would take me back into the main channel on the far side of the loop just as the two of them arrived at the same spot.  I’d emerge from the forest and we’d hale each other.  But when the cut-though turned out to be convoluted or, even more adventurous, blocked by fallen trees that I had to pull my canoe over, they’d stop and wait for me.  Once they even improved on the time by eating lunch while they waited. 

Once the cut-through was so straight and clear—and the main thoroughfare itself so crooked—I had to wait for them. 

Back to the Black

Still stopped in construction traffic on NC107 close to home, I realized that any similarity between the Three Sisters Cypresses and human beings goes just so far.  All that is alive in the trunk of a bald cypress lies in its circumference, its cambrium.  A bald cypress lives on without its core.  But for humans, the core is what is most alive.  Heart rot is fatal for man. 

I began to play with a possible way to heal myself of any desperation that might be hollowing out my core in those pandemic days.  I saw myself returning to the Black. I would set up camp at an access called Henry’s Landing, and each morning canoe the meandering river down through Three Sisters and all the other Sisters to Newbys, 10 miles, then ride a bike on country roads back to the start. Both the paddling and pedaling would be shunpiking ways to travel.  And while sitting on the riverbank in camp or when floating in an eddy next to a bald cypress, I would read my way back into our classic roots.

How long would such a filling-up take?

Thoreau tells us he lived at Walden Pond for two years, two months, and two days, and, as he notes in a journal entry, he didn’t leave until “about 2 o’clock in the afternoon.”  That’s an unhurried length of time. There’s a satisfying completeness to it.  Following his example, I saw myself living on the river for two, two, two, and two too, and in that time any desperation in me might be filled with rich soil and seeds of hope, watered by the ancient Black.

Last morning’s camp on the Black.

River Trip Log:

Dates: July 18-22, 2021.  Put-in: Cleon’s Place, at the NC903 bridge. Take-out: Newbys, at the NC53 bridge.  River distance: 50 miles.

River level on the USGS Tomahawk Gauge: 1200 cfs, and, following a frog-choking rain on the 1st afternoon, slowly rising to 2400 by trip’s end.

Guidebook: Paddling Eastern North Carolina, 3rd ed., by Paul Ferguson.  Also, here’s a link to Paul’s informative article about his search for the oldest dated cypresses in Three Sisters: http://www.pocosinpress.com/Methuselah.pdf

For other reading that pertains to the Black and its tributaries, see: Friends of Sampson County Waterways: https://www.visitsampsonnc.com/partners/friends-of-sampson-county-waterways/

Also see: The Coharie Tribe: https://coharietribe.org/

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Georgia in June? The Flint

Posted on July, 2021 by Burt Kornegay

“GA in June?” Monroe asked when he heard I was packing for a canoe trip on the Flint River: “Sounds snakey and buggy.”

He had emailed me an article about Montana’s Blackfoot River, knowing I used to run trips there, and when I wrote back to say thanks, I mentioned that I was looking forward to my upcoming river adventure in southern Georgia. That elicited his unenthusiastic response.  Ironically, anyone who paddles and camps on Montana’s Blackfoot River in June, and on many other rivers in the state, knows why the mosquito is said to be the state bird—while I spent five days in June on Georgia’s Flint and did not hear a single telltale whine. 

And, no, my trip did not happily coincide with some freak cold spell that pushed into southern Georgia and temporarily shut down insect life. I took a thermometer to record the daily temps, but on the first day carelessly left it in the blazing sun for a few minutes and it suffered a heat stroke. The mercury shot up in the column so hard that, when I brought the thermometer back into the shade, the upper 10 degrees of red stuck to the top, addled, while the rest sank to a wistful 81 and stayed there for the rest of the trip.

As for the Flint being “snakey,” I hoped Monroe would be right.  Seeing snakes are one of the reasons I canoe rivers. The highlight on a recent canoe trip made with friends at Merchant’s Mill Pond State Park, in North Carolina, was our coming on not one but five water moccasins sunning together on a island about the size of a couch. But to my dismay, on the Flint I saw no moccasins or snakes of any kind.

Sandbar camping on the Flint

What I did see and hear all day every day in the trees and on shore were more kinds of warblers than I knew, along with wood thrushes, wrens, cardinals, owls, red-shouldered hawks, yellow-billed cuckoos, great and little blue herons, fish crows, ospreys, various woodpeckers, and many other members of the feathery tribe. I’m convinced that birds sing, hoot, and call with more gusto on jungly Deep South rivers than they do here in the rocky Appalachians where I live. Monroe is a birder; he would have identified some of the choral voices I didn’t recognize.  

As I skimmed along the densely wooded shore, I also heard—sometimes so close and unexpected it made me jump—the loud squalls of wild hogs spooked by my sudden near presence.  No wonder they’re called “sounders.”

I didn’t merely hear hogs close by, I saw them too. One afternoon I let the current carry me to a cluster of feral sows and piglets relaxing in plain sight at the river’s edge. Some were lying on their bellies in the mud, others were on their sides or backs, all were wiggling and wallowing, rubbing their snouts in the cool swampy goo and making oozy oinks of contentment, “as happy as a pig in mud.” It looked like Porker Beach. The day was so hot; I almost felt tempted to join them!  That is, until watchful Boar Hog, hidden in deep shade on the bank, jumped up at sight of me and with deep, alarming grunts sent the whole harem squealing into the forest, leaving behind the clumps of mud flying through the air.

Two or three times a day I saw alligators basking on the banks, and they would bolt too.  But though the pigs ran for safety into the forest, the gators plunged deep into the water out of sight. 

In his Flint River User’s Guide, Joe Cook says that some of the biggest alligators in Georgia have been caught and killed on the Flint.  Looking into it online, I read that one of these trophies measured 13’ 7” long and weighed almost 700 lbs.  A gator that size would have a girth as big as the biggest boar hog. The article said that after the four hunters hooked that particular gator—this happened at night by flashlight—it took them four hours and many bullets before they could haul him into their boat. 

Fast-water Swamps

You may recall from the “Sea and Shoal” report I sent out in April that the upper 150 miles of the Flint flow free.  On the April trip I canoed half of those miles through the Piedmont with friends Mark and Bobby, and we took out at the GA128 “Hawkins” Bridge, where the river enters the Coastal Plain.  On the June trip, going solo this time, I launched at that bridge and explored the remaining 75 miles down to where the current dies in the backwaters of Blackshear Reservoir.

In contrast to the Piedmont reach, I came to no whitewater shoals in the Coastal Plain.  This meant there were no deadwater “seas” to plow through either.  The river kept flowing the whole way, often slowly, but picking up speed in spots.

The green ash, which grows along the Flint, has paddle-shaped seeds, called samara.

If you are paddling a river in the Coastal Plain, here’s a simple way to predict the speed of the current ahead.  If the map shows a straight section, the river is going to slow down.  The longer the section, the slower the current is going to be.  If the map shows a meandering channel ahead, you can count on the river speeding up.  The speed seems to be proportional to the twistiness of the meanders.  The tighter the river turns, the faster the it will go—until it “flashes tail” through the swampy thickets “like a disappearing snake,” to quote Robert Frost.

It’s as if the river, sensing it can’t reach a certain spot by going in a straight line, is determined to make it there in the same length of time even though the serpentine route it has to follow is three times as long.  Since Coastal Plain rivers twist the most where it is swampiest, I think of those stretches as being fast-water swamps.

I paddled the meandering Flint through several swamps, the named ones being Magnolia and Beechwood Swamps. In her Canoeing & Kayaking Georgia, Susan Welander says that “Magnolia Swamp . . . slows the flow of the current.”  Don’t believe everything you read. That’s precisely where the Flint speeds up.

Besides faster current, I also found in Magnolia Swamp—no surprise this, since it was Georgia in June—blooming magnolias, their creamy white flowers set off by rosettes of dark green glossy leaves.  One morning  I plucked a fragrant blossom and kept it in the boat all day.  One flower is all it takes to make a bouquet.

Siestas and a Southern Tale

One way I cooled down the hot days of Georgia-in-June was by wearing a straw hat and a light-colored cotton shirt and pants, kept wet with frequent dips.  In camp in the evenings, fully dressed meant a t-shirt and boxer shorts.

I also kept cool by canoeing mainly in the mornings and late afternoons, sticking to the corridor of shade near shore. It was pleasant to paddle along while weaving around cypress tree trunks and going under branches.  Midday, when the sun stood directly overhead and the trees pulled their shade in tight against the bank, was siesta time.  Picking a sandbar grove of willows and river birch, preferably one that caught a breeze, I would set up a mini camp, eat lunch, nap, swim, read, write, study the maps, and explore the surrounding forest.  The three to four hours would pass too fast.

Day Three’s siesta was the best.  While exploring along the bank, I came to a small multi-trunked tree with a shapely form barely visible inside.  “What is that?” I thought. Wedging my head in between two of the trunks for a better view, I found myself face to face with a mannequin—a female mannequin to be exact. 

“Apollo and Daphne,” by J.W. Waterhouse, 1908. 

Before the trip I’d been reading Metamorphoses, by Ovid, and sight of the female form imprisoned within the tree immediately brought to mind the Greek myth he tells about Apollo and Daphne. Daphne was a young, beautiful water nymph—nymphs being demi-goddeses who lived in rivers and springs—and when the god Apollo (wounded by one of Cupid’s arrows) saw the lithe beauty and fell in love, she ran for her life—or for her virginity, at least.  Of course, her attempt to escape made the girl even more desirable to the infatuated god:

. . . and she was lovely
Even in flight, her limbs bare in the wind,
Her garments fluttering, and her soft hair streaming,
More beautiful than ever.  So ran the god and girl,
One swift in hope, the other in terror,
But he ran more swifty . . .

Sensing Apollo hot at her back, Daphne called out to her father, the river god Peneus, “O help me!”  And Peneus, hearing his daughter’s cries, at the last instant saved her from Apollo’s grasp by changing her into a laurel tree:

  . . .  her soft breasts
Were closed in with delicate bark, her hair was leaves,
Her arms were branches, and her speedy feet
Rooted and held, everything gone except her grace,
Her shining.

“Daphne” is the Greek word for laurel, and according to the Greek myth, the metamorphosis that saved the nymph from Apollo’s lust is why we have laurel trees today, with their smooth, shiny, aromatic, evergreen leaves.

I wish I could say that the tree I found with the mannequin inside was a laurel, but it wasn’t.  That’s to be expected since I was in Georgia, not Greece.  But it was the second-best tree, a water elm, planera aquatica.  Water elms grow along the deepest of Deep South rivers, like the Flint, and their trunks arch gracefully out over the current, making pleasant shade to paddle in.  They’re one of my favorite trees. 

How did a female mannequin become trapped in a water elm in a Flint River swamp?  The nearest town where mannequins might be found, Montezuma, lay miles upstream.  Standing back and trying to make sense of the situation, I saw what was needed was a Southern myth.  So, turning from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to something I remembered in Joe Cook’s Flint River Guide . . .

Once upon a time in 1994, according to Cook, the most catastrophic flood ever recorded on the Flint happened when Tropical Storm Alberto dumped 21 inches of rain on its headwaters. The Flint, rising 30 feet, swept into Montezuma, flooding its stores. Those swirling waters, I now saw in mythic vision, had pulled the mannequin out of the town’s department store, where she modeled feminine attire in the storefront window, and swept her downstream, now the river’s captive. But as Alberto moved on and the Flint felt its power starting to abate, it deposited the mannequin in the water elm for safe keeping, intending—as some day it will—to return for her in a future flood. 

Time passed, 27 years to be accurate, and the water elm, lonely in the humid swamp, began to grow protective arms around the stranded mannequin.  She was the best thing that had ever come his way, so much more lovely than alligator, snake, or hog.  And he filled her hollow torso with rich sediment and roots.

Then I happened along.

I had learned years ago when canoeing with Becky to keep my eyes peeled for river booty.  Here was booty indeed! 

The water elm did not give his prize up easily.  Like a palisade, the tightly spaced trunks defended the treasure within.  As I pulled and pushed at the branches, I seemed to hear the tree groaning, “NO!  NO! Anything but her!”  But I was persistent.  Reaching in this way and that, gently tugging, lifting, dislodging the tree’s clinging roots, I eventually extracted the mannequin from his embrace.  Then, carrying her back to the river and washing off 27 years of swampy buildup, I saw that in that time the mannequin’s skin had slowly darkened. Just a couple of patches of the original white still showed.  So—wedding Greek mythology to a Southern tale—I named her Dusky Daphne. 

I placed the mannequin in the bow of my boat and paddled on.  But not far.

Dusky Daphne free at last.

Was it a coincidence that that very afternoon, around the next bend, in fact, I came to one of the most attractive places I’ve ever seen on any river?  It was a smooth, flat, clean sandbar with a willow grove in the middle offering a shady bower for camp. The bower’s back was to the setting sun, and the long willowy branches extending on either side like curtains opened eastward to a beautiful view of the river. 

Was it merely a coincidence that I found this perfect, move-in-ready campsite right after liberating the mannequin?  I wonder.  It could be that, thankful to be free at last from the clutches of Apollo and Alberto, of swollen Flint and lonely Water Elm, Dusky Daphne gave it to me as a gift. River nymphs have that power.

Back home, when I produced the mannequin and gave it to Becky, she promptly renamed it “Kathleen.”  I drew a blank at that.  Becky explained that in a story called “Romancing the Stone,” set in a long-ago time and place called Hollywood, an actress named Kathleen Turner had just such a divine svelte form. 

Nearing the Take-Out

Besides Dusky Kathleen, here’s the rest of my Flint booty list:

1) A “Don’t Tread On Me” confederate battle flag superimposed on the stars and stripes, the image of a rattlesnake coiled in the center, ready to strike—my one snake of the trip.  The flag was pinned with tent pegs to the face of a tall bluff fronting the river, and I climbed to retrieve it.

2) A fossilized oyster shell found at the base of another bluff.  According to a scientific tale called “Plate Tectonics,” once upon a time millions of years ago the oyster had lived in a sea that covered the Peach State. 

3) Two magnolia blossoms still fresh.

4) A half-gallon of delicious tiny yellow tomatoes, several jars of homemade jelly and relish, a walnut pie, and two fried apple pies.  I bought them on the drive back home when I stopped at the farmer’s market held every Saturday in the courthouse square in beautiful Monticello, Georgia.

Home with booty from the Flint

The Moral of This Trip Report?

Check out Georgia in June!  —But check it out prudently when it comes to booty.  Henry lectured me about the risk I took when I climbed up the 40-foot bluff for that confederate flag, pinned there like a defiant billboard, with bullet holes shot in it for good measure by some Greek redneck or Georgia Apollo. And the risk he had in mind was not my falling 40 feet.

River Trip Log:

Dates: June 14-18, 2021.

Put-in: the GA128 “Hawkins” Bridge, west of Roberta. Take-out: Turkey Creek Campground, off GA27 west of Vienna, owner Zach Griggs.  Find it online.

River level: USGS gauge near Carsonville: dropping over the course of the week by half, from 1250 cfs to 650 cfs.  A good sliding level.

River Guidebook: Canoeing & Kayaking Georgia, by Suzanne Welander/Bob Sehlinger, Menasha Ridge Press.

Trusty, reliable, and pleasant shuttle drivers: Wanda and John Minnick.

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Turning Big Rivers into Little Ones: The Satilla

Posted on April, 2019 by Burt Kornegay

“Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.”  Thoreau, 1857

When canoeing big Western rivers, such as the Colorado in the Grand Canyon, Idaho’s Salmon, Oregon’s Rogue, I watch rafters and kayakers head into the crux of the rapids. There in the center of the turbulence is the bronco ride, the biggest thrill.  Canoeists more skilled than I am go there too. And sometimes I have no other choice than to go head to head with the rapid too. But my preference is to keep my eye peeled for shoulder routes and the smaller waves. I look for weak spots, move from eddy to eddy, take the rapid slant. If the main drop is where the “meat” is, I approach it through the sides. Call it taking sneak routes if you want; I call it turning big rapids into little ones.

I run whitewater that way in part because, being an Eastern boater, the whitewater rivers I am used to are narrow and rocky. The Colorado flows at 25,000 cubit feet a second, or more, dropping an average of 15 feet a mile in the Canyon. Yesterday I was on a river here in the Blue Ridge flowing a mere 250 cfs, a trickle compared to the Colorado, but with 80 feet of drop. So, when driving West, canoe on my truck, I also carry with me the kind of water I know and feel at home on. I look for eastern lines in western water. The skill comes in spotting a possible route–often convoluted and tight–then running it with practiced strokes and deft moves. The pleasure comes in staying in control of my canoe and emerging tested but dry. More than once I’ve heard a westerner tell me I just ran a rapid in a way he’d never seen before. “No way my raft would fit there.”

We do have rivers in the Southeast comparable to the biggest in the West in terms of water volume, most of them moving slowly across the Coastal Plains And when exploring them, I often angle off the main channel too and go where others don’t, turning a big river into a lot of little ones.

Like glistening black snakes gliding through tall grass, these rivers meander and braid through dense bottomland forests and swamps. The main channels tend to be open. It’s easy to cruise along and keep track of your location, that is if you’re paying attention to map and compass or depending on a satellite to tell you where you are.  But the main stem is only part of the real river’s flow. More of its water often lies behind the forest on either side–there in writhing channels that swing towards every point on the compass, sometimes almost coiling snakelike back on themselves.

It’s that medusa of waterways that I like to explore, with its “dead” river channels, its “cut through across the neck of long meander bends, its oxbow lakes and places with intriguing names, such as Kneeknocker Swamp and Knox Suck,   Paddling those hidden channels of the river also means having good control of your boat. The opening between trees can be tight and offset. It’s like nature’s slalom course. It requires even more skill in orientation, in keeping one’s bearings and finding your way through a watery,.vegetative maze. There will be no long views out to get your bearings. The risk is that of become lost or having to backtrack against the current, or simply stuck and out of luck.

If Becky’s along, it’s “God forbid we stay on the open, reasonable, guaranteed route!”  But this March, on the Satilla River with paddling buddies, I turned a big river into little ones a lot.

The Satilla pulls itself together from small creeks and seeps south of Douglas, Georgia, and flows southeast for over 200 miles to St. Andrew Sound and the Atlantic, on the way making one giant bend to the north as it wraps around the Okefenokee Swamp.  The Satilla and and its many tributaries are said to form the “largest blackwater river system” within Georgia.  Keep in mind, that’s blackwater, not white. Blackwater deignates a river that starts and ends in the Coastal Plain and remains “black” with tannins from decaying plants in bogs and swamp. On March 11, fellow paddlers Bobby Simpson, Tim Carstens, Maurice Phipps, and I drove down to explore the Satilla’s lower half. Bobby and I paddled solo canoes, Maurice and Tim took a tandem.

 Shortly before we left, a friend in North Carolina’s Lumber River Canoe Club, Don Meece, sent me several photos from a Satilla trip he’d made ten years earlier.  Don’s photos show a river at low water, around 250 cfs on the USGS gauge near Waycross, winding tranquilly between sandy banks and around sandbar points, hemmed in by dense forest.  Little current is to be seen. 

That was not the Satilla were were heading for.  Heavy rains had swept through the region, raising the river to nearly ten times the water volume Don canoed—and just slightly below flood stage. At normal levels, the Satilla is said to have sandbars just about every bend; and Don’s photos show his camps on them.  But the only sand we glimpsed lay below the current’s dark surface. Campsite for us would have to be wooded levees and islands, and even they were barely above the flood.  Dig down a few inches in camp and there was the river welling up.

When I told Don what our water level was going to be, he wrote,

“Take a hammock.”

Although we did not have the easy pull-in campsites, our brimful Satilla turned out to be at a perfect level to make it into a lot of little Satillas–giving us the chance to explore “where no man has gone before,” or to get lost.  Since I’m back home writing about the trip, obviously we didn’t get lost, at least not in the sense of “they were never seen again,” though I was momentarily bewildered a couple of times. Every day we took adventurous cut-thrus, paddled down grown-over channels, and followed what I call inside passages—where you parallel the main channel but stay in the watery woods.  In turning the big river into little ones the skill lies in the use of map and compass, in trying to develop a feel for where the various forest currents are going, and, in general, sniffing your way along, trusting your sense of direction. Since these routes tend to be natural and ever-varying slaloms, it also takes boat control.

I say “try” and “trust” because once you part the screen of shrubbery bordering the main channel and head into the swamp, there’s no guarantee what you are going to find.  The trees and cypress knees might grow so thick it’s impossible to fit through.  I decided to by-pass one swamp because its name on the map, “Kneeknocker,” hinted of what happens to those who venture in.  Or the current that’s been taking you in the direction you want to go to link back up downstream with the main channel might suddenly veer off towards what, on the map, looks like a place that could be named “No Exit.”  Or the small channel you are following starts bleeding off now on this side, now on that, and each time the small road you started out on ends up being nothing more than a trail.  Sometimes the current dies completely, leaving you in slack water surrounded by forest.  “Which way?”  Most concerning is the thought that you come to a place where the current goes underground! 

I’m not joking about bold rivers that suddenly become subterranean.  At normal-to-low water levels, the entire Alapaha River, which is the next river west of the Satilla, having flowed through Georgia for over 150 miles, disappears into several dangerous sinks, siphons, suck holes, as the locals variously call them.  It doesn’t re-emerge into the light of day again until, 25 miles downstream, make that downundersteam, it meets the Suwannee in Florida at a place called the Alapaha Rise.  When the Alapaha is high, containing more water than the sinkholes can suck in, you can paddle above ground on down to the confluence of the two rivers. Tim and I did this on a canoe trip in the 1990s. Otherwise, the Alapaha’s river bed below the sucks is a ribbon of dry, white sand.  People hike it, ride horses on it, try out their four-wheel-drives.

It was with a sense of adventure that we turned off the Satilla’s main channel. The river would immediately fan out and split into currents braiding through a forest dominated by bald cypress and tupelo gum.  Here and there we’d come to brushy hummocks and old river levees just showing above the flood, with big loblolly pines, laurel and water oaks growing on them.  The trees looked too big for the slips of land that held then up.  A thick understory of palmetto, American holly, and tree farkleberry grew around their trunks. 

Once we had to pull the canoes over an old, man-made earthen berm. And once we came to an expensive boardwalk that, we learned later, extended into the swamp from a resort called the Great Satilla Lodge.  Often the passages narrowed until they were barely wider than our boats.  As we wound around the dark, swollen tree trunks—sometimes pushing with our hands—the sides of the canoes squeaked against the bark.

The contrast between paddling the wide river and shunpiking through the swamps is dramatic.  On the main channel, you cruise along with bright blue sky above, with hats on for sun protection. But the instant you turn off, you enter a cool, green, twilit forest penetrated here and there by shafts of golden light.  It will be tranquil in there, with bird calls making the solid tree trunks sound again,” to borrow a line from Frost. Pileated woodpeckers accompanied us with their raucous chatter, owls made the swamp twilight eerie with their wails, and we could hear the complaining cries of red-shouldered hawks wheeling above the canopy. And if the trees along the main channel are bending in an upstream headwind, one you enter the swamp, all the bluster will be left behind.

One of our favorite off-the-river routes came on the fourth day linking Long Lake, Round Lake, and Dead River. And after reaching the main Satilla again, we waited a while for Bobby to emerge from the trees.  It was so beautiful in there, he said, he was in no hurry to leave.  

The best parts of blackwater rivers often lie hidden in their bordering swamps, waiting to be discovered.  And though we might not have been the first people there, we may have been the first in a long time.

The Trip

We did not start on the Satilla but on the Alabaha (think “Alabama,” but with an “h” for an “m”). The Alabaha is a small, totally canopied stream that flows into the Satilla east of Waycross.  We paddled the Alabaha for around 12 miles, camped the first night, then paddled on the second day to its confluence with the Satilla.  That Alabaha campsite came with so many barred owls, I named it “Hoot ‘n Toot.” 

Our weather for the week was generally clear and sunny, with day temps in the 70s, nights in the 50s, but one morning we woke to rain  We set up a tarp over a campfire then ate breakfast and talked.  When the rain obligingly stopped, we put out the fire, struck camp, and launched.

In turning the big Satilla into little Satillas, we might have explored seldom-traveled routes; but this doesn’t mean we were traveling alone. 

 Tim is a birder and here is his list:

“The best birds for me were the Swallow-tailed Kites, which we saw on multiple occasions. We also saw Turkey Vultures, Osprey and Red-shouldered Hawks. And we heard a lot more: Barred Owls every night; and Northern Parula, White-eyed Vireos were frequently heard during the day. I also heard or saw: Wood Duck, Anhinga, Great Blue Heron, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Pileated Woodpecker, American Crow, Fish Crow, Tree Swallow, Belted Kingfisher, Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, Cedar Waxwing, Yellow-throated Warbler, Pine Warbler, Wild Turkey and Northern Cardinal.  We are still uncertain about whether we saw/heard Black-crowned Night Herons or Yellow-crowned Night Herons.  Also, I believe you saw what you thought might be Tricolored Herons, but I believe you said they were too far off to know for certain.”

Deer, swimming hard, crossed the river right in front of us twice.  And once a large, yellow rat snake swam past.  When I caught up to it, it stopped mid-channel and held its “ground.”  I also saw several river banks that had been uprooted by wild boar.

The most memorable encounter with wildlife happened when we were setting up the fourth night’s camp when a male anole or Carolina chameleon, around 6 inches long, came down a tree trunk as if to see what in the heck was going on.  He put on a manly display for us, by doing what looked like push-ups while inflating a purple flap in his throat, the dewlap.  I fancy I can see in Tim’s photograph a look in the reptile’s eye that says, “There’s only room for one of us in this swamp.” 

Probably due to the high water, we saw no big reptiles, and by that I mean alligators, but the Satilla was full of mating gators. That’s my name for any dark, knobby log that, rocking up and down in the current, looks like an alligators mating with another below.  Mating gators can be found just about anywhere there are downed trees and current. The upstream end of the log is snagged on the river bottom, while the river pushes against the free-floating downstream end, shoving it under the surface, until the wood’s buoyancy pulls it back up again.  Caught between the forces of push and pull, the mating gator rocks away.  Where the current is gentle and steady, mating gators rock rhythmically, as if in meditation.  But where the current quickens, they can rear as much as two feet then plunge heavily and deep.  A mating gator may be nothing but wood; but if you put your hand on it, it will feel alive. 

One of the biggest such gators I’ve ever seen was rocking too hard to approach safely. It was on another Georgia River, the Ogeechee. I was leading a group of public school teachers there on a four-day trip when I spotted the monster splashing water with abandon in a place where the river grew wild.             

“There’s a mating gator!” I said, pointing it out to the group behind. 

Before I could explain, I heard one woman in the stern of a canoe ask her partner, “What’d he say?”  And the other woman, up front, whispered out the corner of her mouth:, “He said there’s alligators up ahead, and they’re fucking!”

But that’s not what I said.   

We had the Satilla to ourselves the first couple of days, but as the river began to widen, an occasional powerboat passed. Luckily, we did not see more than a couple of them a day. I say luckily because to a paddler even one powerboat can make a river feel crowded. That’s because you never see a powerboat once. This is as invariable as a law of nature. Powerboats go back and forth, up river, then down, now here, now there, now from one side to the other, always making a lot of noise and stirring up the water, sometimes leaving a blue plume of exhaust. If it’s not “Turn around, I forgot something!” then it’s “Go here!” or “No, go over there!” or simply “Go!” I’ve heard those very words yelled over the engine’s roar. To a canoeist, such boaters don’t look like they know where they are going, but they’ve got to get there fast. They are so alien to a blackwater river, slowly following “its ancient inclination to the sea.” True to the law, though we saw fewer than a dozen different powerboats on the Satilla, we never saw any of them once. 

River Booty        

Here’s something I did see once: river booty.  One thing I learned from Becky over the years is to keep an eye out for treasures floating in the current or lodged on shore.  It could be a turtle shell, a lost paddle, a beaver skull.  When Henry was little, we took home a lot of basketballs and soccer balls in our boat.  If Becky’s in the canoe with me, we become pirates prowling linear seas.  So, even when Becky is not there, I keep my eye peeled for something special to bring home. 

At our fifth night’s camp on the Satilla I spotted a rich prize washed up on shore, covered with needles and fallen leaves: a metal crib, the whole thing, in perfect, if weathered condition.  Unable to figure out how to carry all of it while paddling through the jungly swamps, I brought home the arched headboard, which I could pack flat.  It is embellished with steel leaves and rose blossoms, and now it decorates one of Becky’s flowerbeds.  I named the place “Crib Camp.”

Besides the metal roses, we saw swamp azaleas in full bloom, yellow Jessamine, cross vine, flowering willows, and white hawthorns. 

My favorite flora came the last day, when we reached high ground called Magnolia Bluff.  According to guidebooks, that solitary bluff contains one of the few tracts of virgin forest remaining in Georgia, with magnolias thought to be 500 years old.  When still far off on the river, I could see their glossy, dark-green crowns above the other trees.  We pulled in at an abandoned and dilapidated landing called Godley (it was Sunday morning, but we had Godley to ourselves), and hiked along the base of the bluff.  The tall, thick trunks of the magnolias stood among equally stately loblolly pines, bald cypresses, and oaks.  And the forest was hung from top to bottom with streamers of Spanish moss.

By the time the Satilla reaches Magnolia Bluff it has become very wide indeed and is subject to the tides.  So, rather than paddle on to St. Andrew Sound, another 2 days, we took out at a place called Burnt Fort, where GA 252 bridges the river. 

River Trip Log:

Dates: March 12-18, 2019.

River levels: According to the USGS gauge at the GA 121 bridge, where we launched, the tiny Alabaha River, rain-swollen, was flowing around 600 cfs. USGS guage near Waycross, for the Satilla itself: 1600 starting out.

Our shuttle driver, Ron Easton, runs a campground on the Satilla called Deep Bend Landing.

Distance covered: 95 miles of the lower Satilla.  The upper half of the river is said to be boatable too, though its channel will be much narrower.  I hope someday to turn it into even littler ones.  Thoreau has it right.

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