TheBanyanTree: Way Down Yonder on the Chattahoochee - Part IV

[B Drummond]

Next morning I got up, stretched luxuriously, slow as molasses, like
an old hound dog does after he crawls out from under the porch after
a long nap, and even though I was still tired after sleeping in
misery all night long in spates of 15 to 20 minutes at a time,  I
swear that long, slow stretch felt better than getting worked over by
a $200.00-a-session masseuse on speed and looking for a good tip.

I fired up the stove and had a pot of water boiling in a flash.

You see, I didn't exactly head off down the river  unprepared.  I had
packed compass, cell phone (even though I had no service for almost
the entire trip), tent, tarp, stove, coffee, fresh water, hatchet,
citro candle, change of clothes, sunscreen, granola, and enough stuff
to weigh the boat down so much, that before I reached Franklin, had me
wishing I wasn't so . .  uh . . . well, well prepared.  It's just
that I headed off, uhhh . . . down the river unprepared.

I broke camp and, with the light of day and the unknown removed from
the next set of shoals by said light,  made it through the shoals  
with no
difficulty.  They weren't nearly as bad as they sounded approaching
them in the faint light of the night before.

Within a couple of hours I had passed through another set of shoals,
some more islands, and came up on the second power plant on the river
between Whitesburg and Franklin:  the Hal Wansley Plant.  This plant
was way noisier that the Yates plant and had lines passing directly
overhead  on the river that crackled and sizzled and hummed
constantly.  This was a plant hard at work and the lines would have
to have been carrying something in the neighborhood of 500KV (500,000
volts) of electrical current.

My fishing luck changed about a 1/2 mile down past that point when I
caught the first of 3 bass on the trip.  It was encouraging to boat a
nice fish and with renewed confidence in being able to negotiate the
future shoals I felt upbeat for the first time since earlier in the
day before.

But that wasn't to last.

Within a mile or so more down the river I encountered the baddest
shoals yet.  These were so bad that I, after repeatedly crossing in
front of them from one side of the river to the other, couldn't
determine a safe place to shoot the hooch.  I did what I considered
the sensible thing and put to shore on the far right side of the
shoals and surveyed the situation.  Portage was the word because the
best crossing there would have meant a 2 foot drop of the boat
straight down into the shallow water and probable damage
to the boat.  I had chosen wisely it seemed.

The sun was up well into the sky and I was tiring after paddling for
6 hours the day before and another 5 or so that day.  So that meant
unloading the entire boat, dragging it over piles of driftwood, river
sludge, mud and rocks, around the shoals and then reloading it to
continue down the river.  In the process of doing so 4 teenagers came
up on 4-Wheelers to a small sandbar just below the shoals on the same
side of the river and, after staring at me like I was from another
planet or something, for about what seemed like 10 minutes, they
finally asked me, "Ja catch enny fish?"  A true fisherman always
answers, "Naw, they ain't bitin",  they say,  so, naturally, I
couldn't disappoint 'em.  After they stared again for a few more minutes
with mouths agape, I worked up the courage to ask them,
"How far is Franklin from here?"

"Aw, it aint far," was the collective reply.

(by then I was thinking that I had to be nearing Franklin mainly
because I had been on the river longer than I thought I would be and
surely I had to be close)

"What would you say, then?  It's maybe a mile or two more down the
river?"

"Yeah, sumpin like that," they replied, then tore off again on their
4-wheelers back into the woods.

Then it dawned on me.   This is the reason that nobody knew anything
about this part of the river.  This is the reason I, the best I could
tell, was the only boater on this part of the durned river.  This is
the reason those boys looked at me with all the fascination of
someone seeing an alien from another galaxy.   Most people have
better sense than to take a boat on this part of the river, and it's
all because of them dadblasted shoals and low water that I was,
well . . . uhh . . . unprepared for.

But the mysterious country apparitions HAD told me good news.
Franklin was just down the river, just a mile or so I had guessed . . .
and so they had confirmed.

I pushed the freshly loaded boat off from the shore and found that I
paddled with a new vigor.



End of Part IV