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.

Spring 2020

The Spring RRCC trip shall be Friday, April 17 to Sunday, April 19. 

Here are the pictures from Fall 2019 to keep you inspired while you are engaged in your abstractly alliterative materiel maintenance in the off season.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/T9J7QXnEfS1vpLY56 

A few final items.

The cooks have filed the menu just before the deadline and it looks amazing:

The moon phase report looks just as good as the menu:

The full moon will rise Saturday at 6:07 pm and set at 5:30 am which means it should be at its apex and provide maximum light for a 1:00 am dinner.

The river gauges just turned down after the effects of the big rain last weekend and river levels look great, too.  I think the rain will have washed out the stagnant old pools from the drought and will give us a little extra water to keep from dragging.  Could be perfect.

Oh, and one more thing you should know.

This is at River Mile 166 just downstream from our Friday night camp:

The sign is real; no idea if the danger is.  I've never seen it actually happen, but we've got 10 canoes so somebody's bound to lose the game of air purge roulette.  With the Hardison Mill dam rapids first thing Friday and this first thing Saturday, it's a good thing we bought an extra large coffee pot.

Ok, that's it. Meet at my house at 7:00 am or at the put-in about 8:30.   Pack for a 50-degree temperature swing:  mid-80's Friday afternoon and mid-30's Saturday night.   Going to be a good one.

Trip Week Details

ROSTER

1.   Dave C
2.   Josh M
3.   Jim M
4.   Pete F
5.   Phil P
6.   Rob C
7.   Rob H
8.   Skip H
9.   Stuart F
10. Vernon T

10-1/2.  Mike C (Friday only)
11-ish.  Bob D (possible Friday only)


LOGISTICS

Whoever is riding down with the trailer meet at my house at 7:00 am Friday.  Josh is picking up Stuart at the airport at 11:30 am.  The rest of us will either drive down together or meet at the put-in.  We will go ahead and run the shuttle and load the canoes.  Since it's only an hour from Nashville we may be ready earlier than usual - and earlier than Josh and Stuart arrive - in which case the kitchen crew and anyone else who wants to can go ahead and start downstream.  A few of us can hang back and wait for Josh and Stuart and watch their canoes.

Here are updated maps.

Map 1 is Friday-Saturday:

Map 2 is Saturday-Sunday

The distances are 5-11-5 (Friday-Saturday-Sunday).  Note this is a change - we are putting in at Hardison Mill Bridge instead of Carpenter Bridge which would have been only one mile of paddling on Friday.  There's a new highway bridge at Hardison Mill (Hwy. 431/106) and I didn't know if it was still a river access but I scouted it last week and it's a good one as you can see in this video.

You may also have noticed in the video that the remains of Hardison Mill dam will provide some potential immediate excitement for those of you who are starting early, and potential immediate entertainment for those of us who will be waiting at the put-in with our cameras.  Hint:  take the middle chute.

I also scouted breakfast at Marcy Jo's, which is just a few miles up the highway from Hardison Mill.





We will call ahead for carry out orders because we don't want to wait for an hour like we did at Readyville Mill last Spring.


Since we will be split up for part of the first day here is how the rest of you can find the Friday camp:

It is at river mile 166.5 where Flat Creek enters from the right (I'll mark it on your maps).  The best campsite and kitchen gravel bar is about 100 yards downstream from the mouth of the creek, so you'll need to go ahead and run through the little riffle before pulling over to the right bank.

Here is a video of it from about this time last summer (looking upstream after having just shot the riffle):

On Google Maps it is weirdly, and without explanation, labeled "Iwa Jima Island".

Because I liked the look of it, I stopped there in the middle of a quiet bright afternoon and made a solid camp on flat gravel under willows.  I was tired and my gear needed tending, and it looked like the kind of place I'd been waiting for to spend a couple of nights and to loaf through a little of what the abstractly alliterative military schedules used to call "materiel maintenance."  Islands are special, anyhow, as children know with a leaping instinct, and when they lie in public domain you can have a fine sense of temporary ownership about them that's hard to get on shores, inside or outside of fences.

Goodbye to a River, p. 149.

Bonnie and I liked the look of it.

Company Aytch

This trip will combine the favorite hobbies of several of our members:  history, literature, and malacology.

You already knew that the Duck River is the "most biologically diverse river in all of North America" and "surpasses that of all European rivers combined" in aquatic diversity of species.  This is primarily because of the freshwater mussels, which Josh has been collecting and displaying at the RRCC headquarters.

He's got the Tennessee Pigtoe, the Pink Heelsplitter and the Cumberland Monkeyface,  but we will be on the lookout for the Pale Lilliput mussel which was just reintroduced a few years ago after being on the endangered species list.

It is possible that Private Sam Watkins tried to cook and eat a Pale Lilliput when he was camped along the Duck River with the First Tennessee Regiment of the Army of Tennessee in 1863.

He wrote about it in his Civil War memoir called "Company Aytch - Or a Side Show of the Big Show."

Reader, did you ever eat a mussel?  Well, we did, at Shelbyville.  We were camped right upon the bank of Duck River, and one day Fred Dornin, Ed Voss, Andy Wilson and I went in the river mussel hunting.  Every one of us had a meal sack.  We would feel down with our feet until we felt a mussel and then dive for it   We soon filled our sacks with mussels in their shells.  When we got to camp we cracked the shells and took out the mussels.  We tried frying them, but the longer they fried the tougher they got.  They were a little too large to swallow whole.  Then we stewed them, and after a while we boiled them, and then we baked them, but every flank movement we would make on those mussels the more invulnerable they would get.  We tried cutting them up with a hatchet, but they were so slick and tough the hatchet would not cut them.  Well, we cooked them, and buttered them, and salted them, and peppered them, and battered them.  They looked good, and smelt good, and tasted good; at least the fixings we put on them did, and we ate the mussels.  I went to sleep that night.  I dreamed that my stomach was four grindstones and that they turned in four directions, according to the four corners of the earth.  I awoke to hear four men yell out, "O, save, O save me from eating any more mussels!"

Company Aytch, pp. 62-63.


On the Fall trip we are going to paddle the exact same section where the Private Watkins took an AWOL joyride in a stolen canoe to try to see his sweetheart in Columbia, Tennessee.  The chapter is called "DOWN DUCK RIVER IN A CANOE - Ora Pro Nobis."

At this place, Duck river wended its way down to Columbia.  On one occasion it was up - had on its Sunday clothes - a booming. Andy Wilson and I thought that we would slip off and go down the river in a canoe.  We got the canoe and started.  It was a leaky craft...

Company Aytch, p. 68.

But we will save that passage, and many other good ones, to be read aloud on the river by the light and hiss of the Coleman lantern.  Teaser:  Ora Pro Nobis means "Pray for us."

Sam Watkins fought in just about every battle that mattered, and marched across or camped next to many of our favorite streams.  He's got passages in the book about the Stones River (right where we were this Spring), the Harpeth, the Tennessee - all the rest of them rebel rivers.