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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m testing the comments box, which I just added.