“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.