Down The River

“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown… We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.” –John Wesley Powell, August 13, 1869

It was late on a Wednesday afternoon when I got a text from Mike that said, “going down the river tomorrow, you want to go?”

There will never be a time when I don’t want to go down the river.

These days getting on to one of nature’s great highways requires a little more logistical effort on my part. It’s not as simple as it used to be, climb in the truck, drive half way across the country and head down the river or out into the swamp.

It’ll be that simple again one day, when everyone can go, but right now there are infants to care for and toddlers that would require another canoe. Sadly there wasn’t a canoe to spare. But my wife is awesome, so she said go for it, even though, deep down, we both knew I’d be hours later than I said. That’s how river trips are. And so it goes. At least my children found this time lapse video Mike made to be just about the funniest thing they’d ever seen:

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I’ve been wanting to float through Athens for years, but I never have. For some reason I manage to get myself halfway around the world with relative ease compared to how long it takes me to float down a river that’s less than two miles from my front door. In the past ten years I’ve been to 19 countries and not once down the Middle Oconee river. Yet I know quite well that there’s no need to go around the world to see something exotic, just hop in a canoe.

Rivers make the familiar foreign in an instant. For the entirety of this trip I almost no idea where I was in Athens. I floated through an area that I have lived in and explored off and on for almost 20 years now and yet all it takes to make it utterly unknown is looking at it from a waterway rather than the land.

Powell certainly faced more challenges and life threatening hazards floating the Grand Canyon for the first time in wooden boats in 1869, but his celebration of the unknown that lies downstream captures that secret thrill that always accompanies every launch onto the water. What is down there? “We know not”.

For Powell “we know not” was literal. It is less so for me since I’m going with people who have already floated this stretch many times. Still, rivers have a way of pulling you out of your usual reality tunnel, of changing how you’ve come to see a place. I don’t usually think of Athens as a wilderness, as even having wild places really. When I think of Athens I think of what I see day in day out — houses, streets, parking lots, downtown, sidewalks, highways, shopping centers. But there’s wilderness all around that, perhaps even in that.

To be fair, this is not the wilderness that I grew up with out west. I’ll never camp along the Middle Oconee and see the northern lights dancing dramatically above thousands of feet of red sandstone. Nor will I hit rapids that crush my precious barrel of whiskey, as Powell did.

Yet as I get older I’ve found I have less need for that sort of dramatic nature and more appreciation for the small pockets that continue to exist in spite of what’s around them. Growing up out west there were vast open tracts of wilderness in which you could go (and I have indeed gone) days and even weeks without running into another soul (at least in the 80s and 90s, who knows what’s like now). It would just be me and the mountains or me and the desert. Nature out west operates on a different and very untamed scale. It’s also a thing very separate from the cities and towns that have chipped away at it.

This separateness, combined with the huge scale and awe-inducing grandeur of the west sometimes engenders a kind of snobbery about nature in me. Anything not that amazingly isolated and dramatic starts to feel somehow inferior and perhaps even not worth seeing. Similar things happen if you start to only eat in fancy restaurants and forget how great a can of tuna dumped in mac and cheese can be when you’re hungry and cold and the sun is setting fast.

I try to fight against this tendency in myself, especially with regard to “wilderness”, but it’s still there. I might write that I do not believe that humans are separate from nature, that even our worst Walmart parking lots are really no different than anything else in the world, but it can be hard to remember that when you’re staring at a map planning a trip. Chances are your route is going to avoid the Walmart parking lots. I can’t say my wouldn’t, but it might be worth thinking about why that is at least.

For this trip we put in at Ben Burton park, just a couple blocks from my house. We were, predictably, two hours late getting on the river, shuttle car mix ups and whatnot, but I had sliced open my toe with a box cutter earlier in the day and had decided not to get stitches because, well, river trip damn it. I used the extra time to fashion an entirely waterproof bandage system which, when combined with a rubber boot did in fact keep my foot dry the entire trip.

Eventually though a dozen of us put in and started, as you may have noticed in the footage above, a rather lazy river trip. The rest of the people were mostly scouting for an upcoming Georgia River Network trip, but there were a few other like me, just along for the ride.

River rats are a different bunch, even back here on lazy rivers like the Oconee. Where else will you meet a motocross photographer turned invasive species hunter who spends his days looking for ways to eradicate Chinese Privet? Or an organic farmer touring the south who had just arrived in Athens 5 hours before launch?

For most of the trip we were the lead boat. With nothing in front of us it was easy to forget that the rest of the world is out there. At one point we startled a green heron that took wing off the downed tree it had been standing on, fishing. It was close enough that I could hear its wings flexing against the air as it disappeared up the bank. Someone in the boat behind us said “heron” and then I heard someone behind that say where? And then someone else say, “up there, up the bank, it flew up into the Hobby Lobby parking lot.”

Hrm, what? Oh right, that’s a parking lot up there where the bank stops and all I can see is sky. This is not the west, this is Athens. The scale is smaller, but there’s still nature here. The green heron doesn’t care that there aren’t dramatic cliffs or peaks. The Hobby Lobby parking lot is just another thing to fly over. Maybe it too prefers the unbroken forest canopy and river bottoms, it seems to since it was down here until we scared it off, but at the same time it doesn’t fly straight off to some eco lodge in Belize just to see a forest. The world is what it is, the heron just flies over it. If you really want to see you have drop your preconceptions of what should be and see what is. And by “you” I mean “me”.

We paddled on, stopping from time to time to scout put-ins or take-outs or lunch spots or to gather some Morchella, better know as morels, one of the few mushrooms distinctive enough, with their unusual honeycomb-like structure, that even someone as ignorant of mushrooms as me can feel pretty safe gathering them wild.

We pass nature and history telling their stories together, stone walls and the remnants of bridges, their spanning portions long since collapsed, now somewhere under the water, downstream and perhaps even out to sea. Only the edges remain, stone covered in moss, with gnarled trees working their roots into gaps in the masonry, inevitable chinks in the armor of history.

There are people too. Children playing in yards that line the banks. Cars roaring past on overpasses. Coeds having sex in a red and black hammock swinging from a tree out over the water. They stop, we pass by. It’s all nature.

The river goes on, we go with it. The coeds join the herons and houses and the cars and the stone walls. The river goes on.

Until eventually it blends with the sea. We get out long before that though and make our way slowly home, late as usual. But somewhere back there on the river those molecules of water that held us afloat for the afternoon are still going, headed out to sea where they’ll mingle, end up who knows where, perhaps swept up in a storm brought up into the clouds and back over the land only to be dumped again into another river, over and over again. Every river is everywhere and it all goes on and on and on.