Info for Tomorrow

City dwellers, meet at my house at 7:00 am.

Country folk, meet us at the Leiper's Fork Market / Shell station at 8:00 am (4348 Old Hillsboro Rd, Franklin)

Rob and Pete, meet us at the Southern Skillet in Hohenwald at 9:30 am

The gauges have turned down and I think it's looking good for getting on the river, especially somewhere upstream.  

(Credit: Dave Coviello)

I will have the canoe trailer with all river gear, including canoes, except your personal coolers and drinks.  Pete is personally importing muffalettas from New Orleans for our river lunch.  

After the day trip on the river we'll move to Rob's farm near Linden, TN where dinner will be smoking and a bonfire burning.  Everyone bring your usual camping gear - tents, pads, sleeping bags - for Saturday night. 

Here's a data-packed message from Rob with directions and other useful information:

Location:

Technically, the address is 4466 Hurricane Creek Road, Linden, TN 37096. However, it’s a new address and it seems to confound waze and google maps. So, know that I am located between the two following addresses that do readily come up on google/waze: (I’m ~1/4 mile east of) 4106 Hurricane Creek Rd and (~1/2 mile west of) 4998 Hurricane Creek Rd. You find either of those and you can find me. My turn in crosses the creek, the turn-in will be on your right if traveling east on HCR, on left if traveling west on HCR. I’ll put an orange cone out by the road at my turn-in so you won’t be able to miss it. Just cross the creek (go slow, esp if it’s high, but will be fine in your truck even if high) and drive on up, you can see my cabin from HCR. Also, very important, eyeball a map before you get too far down the backroads, as you will definitely lose cell service a few miles before you get to my place. But as long as you can find Hurricane Creek Road, you will be able to find it from my dead reckoning instrux above.

 Amenities:

I have running water so no need to bring any water at all.

I have electricity for charging phones and such.

My bath house is not complete, so the toilet facilities consist of a potty chair and shovel, but it’s actually a pretty good interim setup. I have plenty of TP, but never hurts to throw a roll or two in your pack.

Coffee: I always do French press coffee out there, and if you promise not to tell, I even boil the water in the microwave when it’s raining out or I’m lazy. But I also have a propane cooker (like for crawfish boils/fish fries) that we can use to perc large volume campfire coffee in the smokehouse. Or of course we can do coffee on the fire as we do on the river, I have a grill grate there if we do that.  So just bring plenty of coffee and the club’s largest camp coffee pot. I’ll provide the water and the necessary heat/fire.  

I’ll have trash bags and all the other related kitchen sundries, but men should still bring their own Camp Cups and knife/fork/spoon/plates. But I can also get a bunch of disposable flatware and plates/bowls if just easier.  

My cabin is small and not fully finished, but it is well-insulated and fully dried in, and has room for at least 3 men to sleep on an airpad/sleeping bag on the cabin floor. Everyone should just bring their tents/bag/pads, as there is plenty of room for camping and the weather should be perfect for tent camping anyway.  

There’s also plenty of room for Frisbee, throwing baseballs/footballs, etc. so bring any recreational items you like. We have a 3-seater Polaris for excursions. My only two rules for operating the Polaris are: 1) always wear a seatbelt; 2) always have a drink in hand when operating or riding in it.

I have the firewood taken care of and can promise that you will be welcomed to the farm with a roaring fire overlooking Boiling Spring and Hurricane Creek to warm you up if the river gods should decide any or all of you all need a Buffalo Baptism.  

Oh, and men should bring their biggest and most comfortable camp chairs. I have several already there but throw in at least 3-4 good ones to make sure we’re covered.

Redirecting the Redirect

 First of all...got my test back and I'm pretty proud of it.  Hope you guys got good news like I did.

The trip is a little more complicated.  For a variety of reasons, mainly people's schedules, the lake is not going to work.  The river situation is still sketchy.  So here's the new plan.

We are going to spend Saturday night at Rob's farm near the Buffalo River, with an option for a day trip.  That will take the pressure off of the uncertainly of gauge watching in multiple ways.  Mainly because instead of trying to interpret what the gauges mean for the river, we will just go stand on a bridge and look at it.  Then discuss with a beer and ready-roll.  We may need to do that at more than one bridge if we need to move farther upstream, and that will be part of the fun too.

It will also be easier because if we decide it's safe to get on the river we'll do it without any gear.  Well, maybe a cooler or two - but no cast iron, or tents, sleeping bags, lanterns, water wheel rotisseries, sharp knives, etc.  Also no stressy decisions about where to camp and what will or will not be underwater if it's still rising.  We can even (gasp) paddle tandem!  And if nothing else, it's an excuse to hook up the canoe trailer and drive it all over middle Tennessee which is all I really want to do anyway.  

We will need an early start on Saturday for this plan.  Let's try to be on the road by 7:00 am.  I'll coordinate with everybody who is not meeting at my house about possible meet up places south and west of here.

Well, it rained.  A lot.  It's so 2020 to have to worry about flooding on a FALL trip. 

Rain is fine but the timing is really terrible.  With Wednesday and Thursday rains, the gauges won't do us any good because we won't know what the river is really going to be like until Friday and Saturday.  Like, when we are actually on it. 

It's possible we could thread the needle and get it just right, but it's more likely we would spend one or both of the nights huddled in a field wishing we had made alternate plans.  So let's go ahead and just make those alternate plans right now. 

We are going to redirect to Dale Hollow Lake where we found peaceful refuge in 2008 when the same thing happened. That worked out really well.

It being Halloween and all, I got us a permit for Graveyard Island:

 

Which is a whole lot prettier than it sounds:

There will be no rising water, but there are a couple of things we need to plan for.

First, we should assume there will be no firewood at all on the island so we need to bring everything we want to burn.  The second concern is wind.  It's a big lake and if Zeta is still hanging around we need to be careful.  That means bringing real like jackets and choosing our launch based on wind direction.  We have three different options and we can decide when we get there:

Hopefully we can choose #1 so we can paddle right over the top of the ruins of the "Drowned City of Willow Grove":

Especially the remains of the school:

The only thing that would make Graveyard Island more fitting on Halloween would be a ghost story about a tragic death and a body buried underwater right next to us.

Plus cold, clear skies and the last full moon on Halloween night for twenty years...

Canoeing in the time of Covid

A lot has changed here at the Rubble Rivers Canoe Club since we last got on a river. 

So much change and so much chaos that we are going to try to restore some order by doing the safest and easiest thing we can think of for the fall trip.  We are going to go back and refloat the same trip we did last time. 

We've never done the exact same section of a river twice, so we're bringing Heraclitus along to ride duffer and explain what the heck he means by this.  

Plus he looks like a fun guy who can really help out in the kitchen.

But 'Clitus was a bush league philosopher compared to the great John Graves who reminded us that we can only really know a piece of a river anyway:

I don't mean the whole Brazos, but a piece of it that has had meaning for me during a good part of my life in the way that pieces of rivers can have meaning. 

You can comprehend a piece of river. A whole river that is really a river is much to comprehend unless it is the Mississippi or the Danube or the Yangtze-Kiang and you spend a liftetime in its navigation; and even then what you comprehend, probably, are the channels and topography and perhaps the honky-tonks in the river's towns.  A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast, slow, clean, and filthy water, is all the kinds of trees and grasses and all the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained to its changing shores, is a thousand differing and not compatible things in-between that point where enough of the highland drainlets have trickled together to form it, and that wide, flat, probably desolate place where it discharges itself into the salt of the sea.

It is also an entity, one of the real wholes, but to feel the whole is hard because to know it is harder still.  Feelings without knowledge - love, and hatred, too - seem to flow easily in any time, but they never worked will for me.

A piece, then . . . 

Goodbye to a River, pp. 4 - 5.

Speaking of chaos, Blue Trailer was so upset about us not having a spring trip that he launched Josh and Pete's canoes in Dog Creek behind Vernon's house during a flood.

Notice how he even collected a nice load of firewood.

For those of you who didn't keep their maps from last fall, here it is again.

Map 1, Friday - Saturday:

Map 2, Saturday - Sunday:

We will meet Friday morning at my house at 8:00 am, or 10:00 am at the put-in.

We are strongly encouraging all members who plan to go on the trip to get a Covid test this week with enough time to get results back before we leave.  A group of us are going to go to the drive through testing center at Meharry on Wednesday afternoon and then meet for a beer after.  I will let you know the info about how to meet us if you want to do that.  While testing is not mandatory, anyone who chooses not to has to wear one of Floyd's orange dildo's around their neck on the gravel bar at all times to show their status.