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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!