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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/