Faye & Gustav soak the South

Nothing like a hurricane to end a drought. The river has recorded record lows this past summer (e.g., 5 CFS) but has also recorded record highs on particular dates.

The Magic Marker Signature Tradition - Memorial Day Weekend 2008

At the end of every run the kids sign their names and write their memories or put a drawing on the boat they paddled. Adults too. We write the "CFS" or cubic feet per second of the river near the signatures to remind us of the level of the river that day so we will know how long a run will last, what streams will be tricking from the banks, and how the falls or shoals will be suited for swimming. Here's Davis cooling down after a run. The other 3 kids were on the "slip 'n slide" behind him. The slip 'n slide is a fast friend to all kids around the camphouse.

Cradle to Grave Girls? 84 to Landing, Memorial Day Weekend. 49 CFS at Love Shack Falls. How to Dress for Horseflies and Sunburn.

We stopped and went swimming at Love Shack Falls for an hour at 49 CFS. If we'd packed a lunch it would have been a 3 hour stop. The two girls, Harper and Kelsey, have been friends since before they could walk or talk (1997 – Present). Their daddies were friends before them. (1976 – Present). Their paternal granddaddies were friends long ago. The granddaddies had offices next door to each other and had coffee together most mornings for a couple of decades. Then a frost hit their friendship and it never thawed, which is too bad, but none of my business (RIP). Which leads me to wonder if these two girls will be lifelong friends. In 2068 when a cell phone is a small chip embedded in some small piece of personal jewelry (I'm thinking it will be an earring for women and probably men, too, but usually not as ornate, maybe even hidden behind the ear), these two ladies will be 71 and 72. That will be a young age by then, so Harper and Kelsey should be alive and kicking with energy. Will Harper whisper "Call Kelsey?" Or more importantly, will there be a weapon for wiping out horseflies on the river? This weekend I had no trouble enlisting the two stinking brothers shown here to paddle-splash attack on the sisters and mothers. Small problem. Horseflies lurk near water and locate prey by the motion of the prey. Thrashing and splashing was the horsefly dinner bell, and the horsefly is one mean son-of-a-bitch. Actually, only the female horseflies attack. Unlike other insects which suck blood through a small needle, the horsefly actually rips the human flesh and then drinks the oozing blood from the wound. That is why the bite is so painful. I have found three ways to defeat them: (1) You can smash them out of air as they buzz around you with a racquetball racquet (not usually carried on a kayak). (2) Let them land on you and then smash them with your hand. Try teaching this to an 11 year old girl who has been bitten once and has 3 more buzzing around. "Relax--just let them land on you." Better yet is to (3) Dress for the river. Horseflies and the sun are blocked by clothes, and synthetics are superior to cotton because they wick moisture away. Twenty dollars at Wal-Mart and you're set for life in a long-sleeved athletic synthetic shirt and warm-up athletic pants. Add a hat and old tennis shoes (Crocs and sandals are not good river shoes--they come off in falls, get sucked off by mud, and are not good for walking in rocky, shallow water). They horseflies land but they cannot bite through the clothes. The sun cannot burn you. Plus the synthetic clothing is much cooler than not having the skin covered. This is counter-intuitive but true. If you want to stay cool, unburned, and unbitten, check out the nerd in blue here.

May 10, 2008 - Boys at The Old Mill Dam - 100 CFS

My son is 7 and finishing up the 1st grade. I love this writing attributed to Lincoln about a little boy starting school:

"World, take my son by the hand--he starts to school today! It's all going to be strange and new to him for a while, and I wish you would sort of treat him gently. You see, up to now, he's been king of the roost. He's been the boss of the backyard. I have always been around to repair his wounds, and I've always been handy to soothe his feelings. But now things are going to be different. This morning he's going to walk down the front steps, wave his hand, and start on a great adventure that probably will include wars and tragedy and sorrow. To live in this world will require faith and love and courage. So World, I wish you would sort of take him by his young hand and teach him the things he will have to know. Teach him--but gently, if you can. He will have to learn, I know, that all men are not just--that all men are not true. Teach him that for every scoundrel there is a hero; that for every enemy there is a friend. Let him learn early that the bullies are the easiest people to lick. Teach him the wonders of books. Give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and flowers on a green hill. Teach him that it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat. Teach him to have faith in his own ideas, even if everyone tells him they are wrong. Try to give my son the strength not to follow the crowd then everyone else is getting on the bandwagon. Teach him to listen to all men, but to filter all he hears on a screen of truth and to take only the good that comes through. Teach him to sell his brawn and brains to the highest bidders but never to put a price tag on his heart and soul. Teach him to close his ears to a howling mob--and to stand and fight if he thinks he's right. Teach him gently, World, but don't coddle him, because only the test of fire makes fine steel. This is a big order, World, but see what you can do. He's such a nice little fellow."

May 10, 2008: Iron Bridge Southward – 100 CFS – 4.0 hours - Superman, Smoking and Gators – Give me another spring night without air conditioning.

Sometimes my daughter wants to know when she is tucked in, "Daddy, is there such a thing as ghosts and vampires?" My stock answer is, "No, but there is such a thing as smoking cigarettes." I put gators in the book with ghosts and vampires. A life insurance application does not ask, "Do you kayak in waters where live gators habitate?" It does ask, "Do you smoke?" "Do you sky dive?" The bean counters selling insurance know what the real risks in this world are. As we all know, Superman was thrown from a horse's back and he ended up paralyzed, and he later died from complications. But little boys and girls still take lessons at the stable and still get thrown to the ground by horses. My daughter is taking lessons now. No way would I deny her the joy of that experience because it killed Superman. It's a risk but the bean counters dismiss it as negligible, so there is no question, "Is there a chance you will be thrown from a horse's back within the next 12 months?"

My wife Topie and I canoed the river often before we had children. Occasionally we would round a bend and startle an Alligator sunning on a sandbank. “Startle,” meaning, everyone gets scared to the death, including the gator. Naturally, the gator sees the big canoe coming 'round the bend from nowhere before the humans see the gator. The gator comes barreling off the sandbank and crashes into the water right beneath your canoe. It happens in a split second. We thought it was pretty thrilling. But then Topie became pregnant with our first child. We kept running the river. We got some hoots one day when some guys in a small boat motored by and the men saw an 8-month pregnant woman paddling a canoe down the river with some lazy, worthless heap male laid out in the front with his feet propped up, reading a book (Er, me). Anyway, with a child on the way, I was less enthused with gator encounters, so I e-mailed a University of Florida professor. This was 11 years ago, in 1997, when the internet had already become a huge open source of information. University professors were quick ones to publish on it. I found a professor who specialized in the study of gators and he sent back some interesting comments. First of all, the gators in the wild, who never see humans, are not the ones that attack humans. It’s the urban gators or gators living behind seafood restaurants that train gators to associate humans with food. People feed them, and those gators become dangerous to humans because they lose their fear of humans. In the wild the gators are terrified. The Florida professor wrote that gators are afraid of vertical things, and he said to raise the canoe paddle if one ever surfaced near a canoe. Sure enough, the next time we went canoeing, a gator crashed into the water from a sandbank and popped his eyes up to watch us go by. I raised the paddle, and he zipped back under water. The warning the Florida professor had was simple: don’t get out of the canoe and go wading up into the small tributary streams in the spring—which is exactly what we liked to do. These small tributary streams are ice cold, crystal clear, and a real beauty to walk up into. But that’s where the mother gators build their nests in the spring, and if you walk up on one and she feels cornered with her young, she will attack. An Alligator can run 25 miles per hour for short bursts. The human loses that race.

This weekend, we had a father-son weekend at the river and it was a blast—two 7 year olds and an 8 year old. I was a little concerned that there might be a “two’s a party, three’s a crowd” problem because one of the visiting boys was a good friend and baseball teammate of my son and the other visiting boy was a newcomer. I’ve told my son that everyone experiences the downside of “three’s a crowd” at some point, and it’s no fun. If there’s a “three’s a party problem,” he needs to be a leader who makes everyone feel included and welcome. Well, “it weren’t no problem,” as some of my better kin folk and friends say. These three boys hit the countryside like Huck Finns without a care. We spent a lot of time at the mill south of the iron bridge. We did see a gator, and it was afraid of us. That night we watched the sun go down in a grove of Pecan trees right beside the camphouse. We slept with the windows open and the wind blew hard all night. I woke many times to gusts that sounded like hurricane winds in the Pecan trees outside the window. The sheer window dressings danced about the room and my 7 year old son slept beside me curled up in a little ball. I’m looking forward to another weekend without air conditioning as soon as possible. An electric fan humming through the night with storm winds blowing through the screens is a fine way to sleep.

Next time the big orange ball hits the water, count the time.

Sometimes when my family is at the edge of a bay and the sun is a big orange ball on the horizon, we begin counting when the bottom of the sun first touches the water. In less than two minutes the whole huge sun has disappeared beneath the horizon. That's how fast it happens. It's always a wonderful moment that reminds me how fast a day, and a life, comes and goes. My daughter finishes the 5^th grade soon, giving me roughly 7 more years with her in our home, until her high school graduation. 7 years multiplied times 52 weeks per year equals 364 weeks. 7 years sounds a lot longer than 364 weeks. I try to keep it in mind because I sure am going to miss this girl when she drives away without looking in the rear view mirror. My hope is that she will love running rivers for the rest of her life and will want to return with her buddies and put her daddy to work putting in the boats and then getting out of the way. I will wait at the bridge downstream. That would be heaven.

84 to Landing, Landing to Iron Bridge, 1300 CFS - both runs in less than 2 hours - 5 Mile walk back from Iron Bridge to The Landing

Kayaking when the water is too cold to swim is not as much fun for kids as climbing on bales of hay. So they stayed on the hay bales. On Saturday John Morgan and Pam drove up out of the blue. They put in at 84 and floated to the landing. Pam had never been on the river before and John Morgan said she talked about how much fun it had been the rest of the day. Sunday morning I put in at 8 am at The Landing in a swift river and made a run that takes 4 hours at 100 CFS in 2 hours at 1300 CFS. I walked and jogged 5 miles back from the Iron Bridge to The Landing. A dog joined me for a mile until I shooed him or her off. I've driven that 5 mile stretch many times at slow speeds of 30-40 miles per hour, and I was amazed walking it how much I've not seen while driving. I got in the Big Blue Bomb and drove back to the camphouse to get the grub worms seen above, and they drove with me back down to the Iron Bridge to get the kayaks.

Throw me some beads, Mister! January 26, 2007

January 13, 2007 - 84 to Landing - Above 2000 CFS - TIPPERS in cold water.

Alex (smiling, left) and her father Ian were our guests today and it was an adventure. Alex stayed dry and Harper and Walt did too, but all of the adults got wet. Ian got a good dose of splashing with Alex's paddle. When the warm weather comes, Alex should come back for a summer run when paddle splashing is a no-holds barred wetfest. I expect Ian would not turn the cheek under those conditions, but he was merciful with the cold water and did not splash her back. Topie and I got dunked in the cold river by a keeled kayak. We have a solo 13 foot kayak with a keel. It's an unstable boat and I have written TIPPER on the side of it to warn anyone who chooses to take it that they will probably get wet. The orange tandem is also a TIPPER because of the large keel in the front that Alex has her arms resting on. When that keel strikes a slightly submerged log, the kayak rises up on the point of that keel and the boat it falls to the right or the left. Either way, the riders are going in the water.

January 12, 2007 - Walt and his BB gun

I had a BB gun as a child and I loved it. At the age of 12 my grandaddy gave me a 16 guage Winchester pump shotgun that had been his as a child, and the same day my father gave me a book on gun safety. The only thing I remember about the book was that my daddy had written in the front of the book, "It is always the unloaded gun that kills someone. Love, Daddy." My grandaddy added the rule that you "Never point at anything unless you intend to kill it." Those two rules cover "don't kill yourself" and "don't kill anybody." The rule I've added for my children is, "A gun is not a toy--run away if another child has one." Every year I read of a child accidentally shooting another child with a gun that some parent did not lock. I can control the guns around my house, which are locked, but I cannot control the guns around another person's house. Two 7 year olds finding a handgun in a dad's closet or under his bed is a common recipe for tragedy, and as much as I hope my son understands that his job is to run away if he ever enounters such a "toy," I'd rather the toy not be there in the first place. I had a childhood friend who had been the youngest of three brothers. As his entire family sat in the living room one day watching a ball game, the oldest son was cleaning a gun, which was unloaded. It was not unloaded. It discharged into his chest and killed him with his little brothers and mother and father sitting beside him.