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OCONE RIVER
continued from page 9
smelled from the river with great excitement. We
all follow, and the road leads past an odd tupelo
swamp set high above the river, through a couple
of gates, and past a strip mine of some kind. We
wonder what kind of industrial property we've
found ourselves on.
Then, we hop a fence, round a corner in the
road, and our whole crew materializes out of the
swamp before the eyes of a bunch of teenag
ers hanging out in the yard of the last trailer at
the end of a dead-end street. I ask them which
way to the restaurant and get what seem like a
few contradictory answers. A lanky guy maybe
18 or 19 points to the right, and a goofy young
girl confuses me and points left. She asks me
"Whatchy'all doin'?* and I tell her, then ask for
directions again. Having fun now, they befuddle
me once more, and I shout “Well, which way is
it?!" Just then two younger boys walk up and
one says, "Yesterday," as if to answer my ques
tion. I laugh out loud, then start walking.
We all enjoy the walk through the trailer paik
with dusk coming on. In the end, all we have to
do is follow the neighborhood's one paved road
in order to get to Jack's, as our destination is
known. Two boys on one bike tag along and show
us the way regardless. We pass a yard full of folks
cooking out, and a few of us are greeted with
a pleasant question from the guy manning the
grill: "Out for an evening stroll?" Yep, we answer.
Then he sees the rest of our crew coming
up the road in the twilight and shouts, *
"Boy, when y'all go for a stroll you take
the whole family!" He decides he'll start sg
charging a toll on his street. At the end of 5
the block, a badass dude passes us on his ^
Harley, and nods hello.
Jack's On The River seems pretty fa
mous for East Dublin. Some framed news
paper articles profess so, and a bulletin
board mostly dedicated to turkey-hunting
pictures (the dominant theme of the whole
establishment) manages to share a corner
of its space to show off Gov. Sonny's visit
to the place; the vent hoods over the deep
fryers all have "Sonny Country" bumper
stickers on them, too. We gorge ourselves
on fried catfish, quail, steak, hushpuppies,
and iced tea (vegetables are scarce on the
menu). We close the place down before
finishing our feast, then hobble back to
camp and get in our tents with the fullest
stomachs of the whole trip.
I sit up a little while to let the quail
digest, and reflect on how much the look
of the river has changed in and around
Dublin. Just above town, we started see
ing a lot of higher ground on both sides A pair
of the river. The swamps have given way
to bluffs and high banks with a different kind of
forest reminiscent of the Piedmont. Fortunately,
the view from the river is not a particularly
urban one here in Dublin; from the naturalist's
perspective, in fact, this city presents some of
the most distinct terrain of the trip. Now that
I think about it, the higher ground is likely the
reason for the town's being here. More than that,
though, the Oconee has begun to take on the
took of a big river these past two days.
and dials. We leam that Scott is on a detour to
Commerce—that is, the wrong damn way—and
we won't see him until tomorrow. It's a long
story, and the only loss in the end is a melted
block of cheese that stayed in the trunk of the
car during the day's delay. Other than that, we're
all glad to see Scott when he finally catches up
with us at a boat ramp 10 miles out of town
(which happens also to be hosting one hell of a
backwoods party) on Sunday evening.
? IIJ F 1ft doming out of Dublin, those
J U ll L. 10 high banks fade away and we
re-enter the swamp, but the river continues to
look bigger than it did above that town. There
were places below Milledgeville where the river's
deep channel, off the side of the submerged •
parts of sandbars, was barely wider than an aver
age creek. There it looked like, if the water were
to drop just a couple of feet, the whole Oconee
River would have been just a little steam. But
now it has the feel of a full-grown river, even if
it is running low.
JUNE 19
We pull over at a place called
Berryhill Bluff. Dean hops
out and explores the sandstone outcrops high
above the river. Paddling alone, I go up the
wide, still creek alongside the bluff. I say hi to
a few round young boys out fishing and scared
of snakes. The quiet one of them wears a t-shirt
that says "Kiss Me I'm a Country Boy." I spot a
Louisiana W.nerthrush feeding along the bank of
hadn't put that fact together with the claim of
paradise. "Paradise?" I asked. The others were
still exploring the far end of the bar, where a
half-dozen tiny springs of cold, clear water burst
up through the sand and ran in rivulets across
the bar to meet the river. Somebody went swim
ming and discovered more springs in the bed of
the river itself. (I'd parked my boat near one of
those, it turned out.) In my excitement to see
these wonderful little fountains, I hustled across
the bar barefoot and stumbled on a driftwood
limb. At least the wound has given me some
thing additional to remember that magical camp
by—after a week on the river, all the sandbars
start to run together.
I|Jp OI We're finally getting into
J UII Li im I some floodplain forests that
are a little bit nicer, a little more mature than
what we've been seeing for most of the trip. Way
back on day two, we met a young kayaker from
Sandersville who told us about the logging of
the whole Ball's Ferry Swamp above Toomsboro
a generation ago. He said he'd met some of the
old-timers who did the cutting. Said it had been
a huge old-growth forest—"probably an incred
ible place"—until then.
It was along that part of the river that one
morning Rick and I battled our way to a sur
vey point in an unending thicket of river cane,
monster vines and small 20-foot tall Chinaberry
trees. It was really a bizarre place, and not a true
forest at all—one outcome, it seemed, of the
JUNE 17
"You know, we never used
to take a cell phone on the
river," I remind Bryan, speaking of our lo-fi river
trips of a few years ago, when the crew was
smaller, the food was worse, and if we did come
to a road, it rarely took us to anywhere good.
"I swear I think it's only making things more
complicated." Bryan, Jesslyn and I are sitting
on the bank of the river cooking beans, cleaning
boats, and waiting for our friend Scott to calL
He's meeting us today to come along for the
second week of the trip. Poor Jesslyn brought
her phone "just for emergencies," but we've gone
and fiddled with the plan. We called Scott late
last night after dinner to tell him to meet us at
Jack's instead of at the highway bridge, which is
a mile upstream. We're done with our golf course
survey, most of the crew has proceeded down
stream, and at 10 minutes until meeting time,
Scott hasn't called. Bryan picks up the phone
of young White Ibis in the morning fog.
the creek—a songbird that likes water, but we've
found it to be rare in the Coastal Plain, though
common near bluffs that resemble the Piedmont.
Below the bluff, we come to a fairly old cut
that the river's made—the trees have grown up
in its old bed almost to match the surrounding
forest. Just before coming into the new part
of the river, though, we pass right through the
middle of a perfectly straight line of snags and
old stumps perpendicular to the flow of the wa
ter. The stumps stand just where they once grew,
which used to be the hank of the river. The river
has since moved tons of dirt out of its way; it's
cut itself a new channel, but it hasn't moved
these stumps of old stubborn trees.
I |J VJ Q rt Morning. On the sole of my
J U Pi KL LU left foot I'm constantly re
pairing a puncture wound, and on my right I'm
now wrapping my sandal in duct tape to try and
keep it alive for the rest of the week. Not sure
which is worse. The sandal, I guess, has just had
enough of this life of hot sun and river water.
The puncture wound I received in my excitement
upon arriving at the beautiful sandbar where we
camped a couple of nights ago. I was the last to
arrive, having paddled alone all day, and when I
got there someone was calling it "a Bartramish
paradise" or something like that. I got out of my
boat in the shallows along the bar and noticed
how cotd the water was on my bare feet, but
regeneration that follows clear-cutting. (I did
see a large ash stump in there, with a few young
trunks spiouting out of it.) That was the worst
example we came across, but much of week one
was that way: little in the way of recent logging,
but a landscape giving us the general feeling
that acres upon acres of old-growth had been
thoroughly gone over, leaving a range of young
forests and downright thickets in their place.
Wednesday afternoon. Five of us set out to
trek up the highway to Glenwood. the last town
anywhere near the river for the rest of the week.
It's ridiculously hot, walking along the shoulder
of the highway. Passion flowers are in bloom. A
pecan grove provides brief, welcome shade. We
haul our trash with us so we can throw it out
somewhere; we could fill the bag 10 times again
with all the litter on this*roadside: beer cans,
coke bottles, a desiccated dog carcass, the liner
notes from the Pussycat Dolls CD. Scott finds a
new. white Corona visor—a giveaway someone
didn't want. (Later, he washes it in the river,
which only makes it dirtier.) We make it to the
little town at last, and visit all three stores it
has to offer: a gas station, a small grocery and
J & C's restaurant, where one can find a service
able Cuban sandwich and greasy-good fried plan
tains. Marie-Line asks James (the J of the name)
what in the world he's doing serving Cubans in
Glenwood, GA. "Moved up here from Miami in
'88." he answers. "Where y'all from?" Marie-Line,
who grew up in rural Quebec with French as her
first language, and in her English has the accent
to prove it, gives him the short answer: Athens.
Paddling down to camp from the bridge, we
notice that the water has turned clear again.
It was clear at the start of the trip, coming out
of the dam, but in Dublin the wastewater ef
fluent from some kind of factory clouded it up.
Whatever it was, it smelled like a pulp mill, and
it came cut of a pipe under the water's surface in
the middle of the river. A great brown boil surged
and bubbled there, and its silty look changed
the river downstream. It's stayed that way until
today, and the change back to clarity seems like
it must have been abrupt, though we didn't quite
notice it when it happened. Odd.
-INF 00 ^ ate ^ st ttie ^ eat
J U li Li £m£m finally broke into a thun
derstorm. This morning, a cool mist lays on the
water off our sandbar, where a small flock of im
mature ibis wade, foraging.
By midday, it's hot again, and Bryan has dis
covered a mess of mussels living in a tiny pool
of water near the top end of our bar. The pool is
deep, but it's disconnected from the river: sooner
or later this summer, barring a miracle in which
Georgia Power lets some more water out of the
dam, the pool is going to dry up. While the rest
of us eat lunch and pack the boats for the day,
Bryan spends an hour solemnly pulling every mus
sel he can find out of the pool, and putting them
in the river where they can survive the summer.
111N F 00 *- ate ’ n a ^ ernoon '
J U 11C tm J we have a pleasant
surprise where a county road (the last
bridge on the Oconee) crosses the river.
There's a store here with all the essentials:
ice, cold beer, potato chips, chocolate
bars. Even better. Three Rivers Bait and
Tackle is only about 50 yards from the
river. A nice, new set of wooden steps
even helps us get up the high bank. The
man inside explains that he just put them
in this year; the old steel steps washed
out last year when the river ran high for
seven or eight months. But this year, he
says, the river's been as low as it is now
since the spring, when the pnwer company
started holding water at the cjm and
the river dropped fast. The man's elderly
mother chimes in: "Like pullin' the plug
out of a bathtub."
JUNE 24
Our last day on the
river is quiet and
uneventful. We paddle only a mile or so
from camp and come to a place some of us
have been before: the confluence known
to many as The Forks, where the Oconee
and the Ocmulgee form the Altamaha.
Two years ago, four of us arrived here from the
other direction, having come down the Ocmulgee
from Lake Jackson. The two rivers me?t here in
a head-on collision, and even at such low water,
a swimmer can feel strange currents where th°y
mingle and swirl.
From there, it's only a mile or two more to
the US 221 bridge, where we take out. We use an
old boat ramp, which the river has abandoned at
low water, and have to trudge through mud to
unload all our gear. Far off downstream, towering
thunderheads are piled up on the horizon. They
almost look like they're coming in off the coast,
hitting the barrier islands. Happy as I am to be
heading home. I’m sad we're not paddling that
far on this trip.
When our ride arrives, we pack up and head
to Hazlehurst for lunch, then hit tne 'oad to
get home by nightfall. Driving north on 441.
we take our downstream journey in reverse on
the uplands west of the river. On the north side
of Milledgeville, we cross over the arm of Lake
Sinclair that used to be the Little River. To our
surprise, the lake is completely full. Floating
docks sit an inch or two above their moorings.
Shouting over the wind in the car, I make a ter
rible joke: "Oh—that's where all the water is!"
My companions are true friends, and they each
grant me a chuckle.
Ben Emanuel
10 FLAGPOLE.COM • JULY 26, 2006
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