Sunday, April 01, 2018

Float Plan

Here's where we're going.  Click to zoom in, because a 3-nighter is also a 2-mapper.



 


We'll be traveling east to west, so right to left on the first map, then continued onto the second map.  Red stars are access points, blue diamonds are campsites.  Magically delicious!


This section of the Duck is due south of Nashville, between Shelbyville and Columbia.  In fact, we will paddle directly under I-65 just before our take out.




Some landmarks of note.  Our put-in will be right below Lillard's Mill, another mill dam like the one we started at in downtown Shelbyville last year.  This one is very remote.



It is also the place that I almost drown Jack Harrington and Charlie the dog once trying to portage around it during high water.   Nathan Bedford Forrest had a similar experience trying to cross here on December 18, 1864.  https://civilwartalk.com/threads/lillards-mill.6497/

The distances and target campsites are all designed to be just upstream or just downstream of an access point because we will have rivermen arriving and departing on different days.

Our last campsite may very well be where we camped fall of 2005, the candiru infested island that was Floyd's first trip. 



Our take out will be at Negro Creek. 




Negro Creek Rd. has been in the news lately.


Guess which side this couple is on...




That pic is also worth a zoom.  There's a lot going on. 




Do you think John Graves might have something to say about this?  Of course he did...


CHAPTER NINE
Likely the bluff had a good name once before some dullard called it Inspiration Point. The nation's map is measled with names like that, pocks from the old nineteenth-century plague that made people build gazebos and well-tops of rough masonry with oaken buckets on ropes but no well beneath (unless it was a "wishing well"), and sing "Annie Laurie," and read Scott for his worst qualities, and long to own paintings by Bouguereau and, disregarding the guts and soul in the old nomenclature of American places, rename them Inspiration Point and Lovers' Retreat and Maiden's Leap. It is worst of all in the South, because the South yearned hardest to believe Scott, but the whole hinterland had the disease; in the Midwest it got flavored with Hiawatha.


Thought is has its own cachet now - yes, I like gingerbread houses, and old pictures of women with buns and with big breasts under stiff shirtwaists - it was, for me, a flouting of real ghosts and genii, an unimaginative lamina of Greco-Scotch-English never-neverism on the surface of a land that seemed too news to would-be-cultured sensibilities. You don't have to line up too solidly with the America shouters to resent it.

Now that the land looks a little older and we don't have to stare directly at the tobacco juice on the haired chins of those who made its past, the grandchildren of the Gothicists are likely to be enchanted to find that the streamlet below their house used to be called Dead Nigger Draw, but they have a hard fight with the real-estate men, staunchly Gothic all, if they try to cancel out its present title of Bonnie Brae. . . And the effort, somehow, seems little more praise worthy or genuine than their grandparents' was.


- Goodbye to a River, pp. 126-27.

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