Thursday, November 05, 2015

Correction:  the directions in the last post said take I-40 East.  You take I-40 WEST, not east, to exit 143.  But you would have figured that out by the time you got to Knoxville.

Don't forget to BYOPlates, utensils and cups.  Plus non-disposable water bottles.    

As far as the river trip itself under the new plan:

On Saturday morning we will launch directly from our Friday night campsite and go downstream from there.   Hopefully we will have run the shuttle Friday while we're still sober.  Surely we will have run the shuttle Friday.

The total trip to the Sunday take-out is exactly 10 river miles.  This tasty looking island is at mile 7.5...




A big red-brown butterfly sat spread on the cottonwood log my ax was stuck in, warming itself in the sun.  I watched until it flew stiffly away, then got up and followed, for no good reason except that the time seemed to have come to stir, and I wanted a closer look at the island.

It was shaped like an attenuated teardrop or the cross section of an airplane's wing, maybe three quarters of a mile long and 100 yards or so wide at its upper, thicker end.  Its foundation everywhere appeared to be a heavy deposit of the multicolored gravel, and its flat top except for a few high dunes of the padding sand was eight or ten feet above the present level of the river.  All around, it dropped off steeply, in spots directly to the water, in others to beaches, and toward the pointed tail the willows and weeds stood rank.  I rooted about there and found nothing but coon tracks and a few birds still sleepy and cold on their roosts, but, emerging among cockleburs above a beach by the other channel, scared four ducks off a quiet eddy.  I'd left the gun in the tent; shots from here and there under the wide sky's bowl reminded me that busier hunters than I were finding game.  

Let them.  I considered that maybe in the evening I'd crouch under a bush at the island's upper end and put out sheets of notepaper on the off chance that more geese would come, and the off-off chance that if they did they'd feel brotherly toward notepaper.  You can interest them sometimes in newspapers.

And maybe I wouldn't.

Goodbye to a River, pp. 154-55.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/robotics/aerial-robots/parrot-pitches-bebop-2-drone-as-flying-image-processor


These ARE the drones you're looking for.