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.