Newspaper Page Text
JESSLYN SHIELDS
111 |J r 1 O We put in at Milledgeville,
J U PI El I U on the fall line. Our starting
point is a boat ramp beside the highway bridge
just east of downtown. In a perfect world, we
might be putting in at Athens—right downtown,
say, or even upstream of town, somewhere up in
Jackson County. If we did that, though, we'd no
sooner be underway than we'd have to paddle
Lake Oconee and Lake Sinclair, back to back,
and carry all our gear around the two reservoirs'
dams: no fun.
We also might have put in at the dam just up
stream of here, where the Oconee is backed up to
form Lake Sinclair, but last winter I chatted with
a Georgia College and State University student
who does a lot cf paddling around here, and who
advised me that if we put in at the dam, we'd
have to walk the whole way down to the highway
bridge in town. That stretch of river, he warned
me, is often terribly low—all rocks—when
they're not letting much water out of the dam.
A hot day in the middle of the dry June of a
hot and dry summer fits the bill for low water.
and I’m glad we've taken the college kid's advice.
Here at the bridge, the river is low, its water an
eerie shade of lake-water green. It works itself
into a minor riffle where it passes between the
crumbling pilings of a former bridge, but what
there is of downstream flow looks generally
pretty weak. A few young guys are slowly walking
around neck-deep in the river, holding their cans
of beer up above the surface and looking at us
funny. Other than that, the start of our two-week
journey is unceremonious. We unload the four
canoes and all the gear from our trailer and from
Rick's dad's pickup, swipe a Dale Earnhardt cooler
out of the truck at the last minute, and send
Rick's little brother on his way home. Then we're
on our way downstream. Starting out, we have a
crew of eight: Dean, Caroline, Jessica and myself,
who all live in Athens, Bryan and Jesslyr, who
just moved back there from Missoula, MT; plus
Rick and Marie-Line, who these days live in (of
all places) Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Rick grew
up in Georgia like the rest of us, but I haven't
figured out how he convinced Marie-Line to join
Birdwatching by boat.
us for a camping trip down here in the middle of
June.
We're below all the shoals of the Piedmont,
but the banks and the river bed are still rocky in
most places here, and we notice it especially with
the water so low. In one spot, we come upon a
grouping of huge boulders along the left bank.
They look like giant rounded chunks of north
Georgia's bedrock, taken out of the ground and
tumbled down to a resting stop here at the very
bottom of the Piedmont. We travel only a few
bends downstream before coming into a long,
straight stretch of river—the fell line straight
away—that probably was the river's last little run
to the ocean back in the days when an ice age
had the lower half of Georgia submerged in sea
water. In one of our drybags is a book by the late
Georgia scientist and naturalist Charles Wharton
called The Natural Environments of Georgia that
shows a satellite image of this very straight
away-thought to be one of the first aquifer-re-
chargo zones of the Coastal Plain section of the
river. All of Georgia's big rivers pass through a
straightaway just like this one where they drop
off the edge of the Piedmont and into the Coastal
Plain. The Oconee's is partici larly long and
straight, and in my mind's eye, I can see that
satellite picture as we paddle down it. At the end
of the straight, we'll go around a bend: from that
point forward, we'll be in the swamp, where the
river will twist and turn and double back on itself
like the Mississippi in the Delta. We won't get
there, though, until tomorrow.
Tonight, our camp is on a low, damp sand
bar—not a real sandbar, but just a little sand
flat that would be part of the riverbed if the river
were any higher. We've only paddled a few miles,
and we're still more or less in Milledgeville. but
it's nice and quiet down here on the river. Our
crew of eight old friends, six of whom will do
the whole trip down to the Altamaha, cooks and
enjoys a dinner—of some groceries that are still
fresh, which will be a rarity soon, and some beer
that's actually cold, thanks to Dale Earnhardt—
and settles in for the night.
JUNc 11
In the morning, we do the
survey of birds and riparian
vegetation that we'll do at points spaced every
10 miles down the river. (We used GIS software
to plot the points, and out here we use a GPS
unit to find each survey area; we'll record data
and observations from these successive stops
on every day of the trip.) The land above the
sand flat is a young forest, viny and thorny, and
getting hot as the morning wears on. With the
greenbrier and some poison ivy, the forest isn't
the most pleasant place to be, but then again
it's shady. Also, I'm reminded of why we do these
survey points on our river trips. Stopping every
10 miles to look around lets us know what's in
the floodplain that we're traveling through. The
river is only a curvy line that cuts through this
landfonn, these swampy lowlands. Whenever I go
canoeing, I spend most of my time looking up,
looking left, looking right, wondering what's up
there. These randomized survey points at least
force us to check in on the landscape above the
river, to learn it for half a day at a time and
know what it looks like.
Lunchtime, Sunday. After we've finished the
surveying, we all go for a swim in the river and
find the water surprisingly shallow most of the
way across. The sandbar extends under knee-deep
water for 30 yards or so, and then before you
reach the opposite bank there's a deeper chan
nel, maybe only five yards wide, where most of
the water flows. We're all still swimming when
our Atlanta contingent—three friends joining
up for the next four days—come paddling down
stream in a massive aluminum canoe they've
borrowed for the trip. Kathryn is a nature pho
tographer (of a particularly artistic bent), and
her friend Kathy, an environmental activist and
community organizer, has brought her six-year
old son Logan along. We all do some catching up
over a lunch of fruit and bagels with peanut but
ter (standard river issue), and then set out for
the day's paddle.
The river's flow is particularly slack in the
straightaway, but it's only a couple of miles be
fore we round a bend and enter the swamp. Here,
every bend of the river has a sandbar sloping up
above the water; in the evening we find our camp
on one of those. This is real sandba- camping: a
lot like going to the beach, but if yau pitch your
tent too close to the woods, the mo.quitos will
remind you that you're still in the swamp.
■ IJ r 1 O "Where'd /all put in at?"
J U11H I im Milledgeville, Rick and I tell
the man standing on a boat ramp in the middle of
the swamp watching our flotilla pass by. "Where
y'all headed to?" Down to the Altamaha, we re-
The bridge in the background is the Sparta Highway outside Milledgeville. where we started our trip.
8 FLAGPOLE.COM • JULY 26,2006
NEWS & FEATURES I ARTS & EVENTS I MOVIES I MUSIC I COMICS & ADVICE I CLASSIFIEDS
JESSIYN SHIELDS