The Perils of Shallow Water

A Green Heron fishing for his lunch.

Right now at this moment one of the biggest music festival events in the US is happening just a few miles down the road from Jack and Pam at the Lake.

Bonnaroo, which means "a really good time" in the slang of New Orleans' Ninth Ward, started in 2002 as a jam music festival in Manchester, Tennessee and has grown into a premiere destination for lovers of all things cool and lyrical over the last decade.

While we have never been, we appreciate that it's totally fun time for those who go. We understand the photo opportunities presented and would love to crawl the grounds with our cameras, filling our memory cards with the beautiful weirdness of Bonnaroo, but we've seen aerial photos of the parking situation, and the older we both get, the less we suffer things like crowds, heat, peeing in portable toilets and paying six dollars a bottle for the same beer that cost $12.99 for a twelve pack on sale earlier this week at the Kroger near the Baby House in Franklin. Cheers.

And there's a live-stream of the best acts, so at this moment, Jack and I are kicked back in the air conditioning on the couch, drinking Heineken we bought for cheap; our car is parked in the driveway, and we're watching the only band in the festival line-up I gave a hoot about live on the internet for free. The show is wrapping up, and we don't even have to drive home.

Viva le Red Hot Chili Peppers! Vive Bonnaroo!!

Yesterday Jack and I took another kayak trip down the Barren Fork from downtown McMinnville to the ramp at VFW Post 5064 for our own version of "a really good time".  This is the same route we took a couple of weeks ago and was a mostly enjoyable journey that provided for some neat bird-watching and a bit of personal growth.

A young hawk dries his wings in the sun.

As I've written before, water has always been "one of those things"...

Mom doesn't swim a lick. Dad is allegedly a good swimmer, but in my forty-seven years on this planet and all the hours I've spent with him and our family on Center Hill Lake, I've never once seen him swim. As a second-grader I was hauled to Red Cross swimming lessons at the city pool in Smithville, where I was an abject failure and barely earned a certificate of participation. Between the stories Mom told about a childhood friend of hers who died in a flood and getting fished out of the Chesapeake Bay as a five-year-old, a tale that grew over the years with each telling by relatives, the fear of getting my face wet was pretty-well ingrained in my young mind by the time the Red Cross tried to teach my chubby, fearful ass to swim.

I've always loved Center Hill Lake, fishing and boat rides. Over the years and despite my fears, I've jumped in, hung on, fell off, splashed around, gone under and come up again. I've swallowed sheer terror with skis strapped to my feet behind a boat and pure joy when I realized I could jump off the back of a friend's pontoon boat and not drown.

Jack is a swimmer. His mother taught those Red Cross swimming lessons I dreaded so to countless kids and grown-ups over the years. He and his brother and sisters grew up swimming alongside their parents in the river near their camp at Rock Island. The last time Jack and I visited his parents in Florida not that many years ago, his parents were still swimming laps in their pool.

After we met, Jack was quick to figure out that I was totally faking my level of comfort when it came to the water, and for the first time ever I came to terms with my fears and desires. I learned to swim. I learned to fall out of  boat and laugh about it. I learned to ride a tube and truly enjoy a big, bouncy boat wake.

Getting the kayaks last year was amazing. I'd been canoeing in a tiny lake at 4-H camp as a middle-schooler, but that was it. Kayaking looked like fun, and Jackson Kayak was starting to really be a presence in this area, so I was totally hip to the idea when Jack said, "Let's do it. Let's get kayaks."

Those of you who keep up with Jack and Pam at the Lake know that we've made all kinds of journeys in those kayaks and seen everything from bald eagles and snakes to sunsets, rainbows, herons and dragonflies.

A brilliant green dragonfly catches a ride on a leaf drifting downstream.

Two weeks ago when we hit the Barren Fork for the first time in the kayaks. I'd never experienced anything resembling rapids before or rattled across shoals in a few inches of water, hoping to have enough momentum to reach water deep enough to float. I had a ball. We had a ball.

Yesterday was different.

The river was down a good six inches, and while to my rookie mindset, "little water" might seem like a good thing, in reality, it isn't. Water that was thick and smooth on our last trip was now bare with rocky teeth ready to grab our boats. The riff under Beersheba Bridge was my first snag, though I did manage to get myself free from it without leaving the boat or taking on more water than I could sop out of the floor with my sponge.

The next snag wasn't so easy --

Jack crashed through with no problem, but I found myself hung between two big rocks with water rushing all around my kayak. I tried to pop myself out with my paddle, but I was clearly stuck, and the more I tried to free myself, the more water rushed into my boat. I tipped hard to the right, and my sippy cup of iced latte went flying into the current.

After the snag at Beersheba Bridge, Jack had told me that there's no shame in climbing out and "walking through" any rough, shallow spots, so after realizing that I was completely trapped, sideways and taking on water, I slung myself out of my boat into the rush of the current.

A Green Heron ruffles his feathers in preparation to take flight.

Thinking the worst was over at Beersheba, I'd stripped off my shoes and PFD, stowing them behind my seat and readying myself for a smooth "rest of the ride". Now I stood knee-deep in a rapid with water rushing around and through my white, hairy legs as I pulled on my life vest and found enough peace and calm within myself to put on my shoes, balancing first on one leg and then the other without letting either foot slip into the deep cracks between the large, slippery rocks or allowing my kayak to tip over.

This wildflower is known as Lizard's Tail or Water Dragon.

Jack realized my problem and after hitting smooth water below the riff, climbed out of his boat and back up the rapid to where I was stranded. In addition to moral support, he steadied my boat while I climbed back in and provided words of encouragement as I baled probably fifteen gallons of water out of the floorboard of my kayak once I'd made it through the rough stuff.

The water in my boat was, no shit, ankle deep. My camera box floated in the floor of the kayak. The bag with our picnic lunch didn't, but nobody complained about wet bread or a banged-up avocado when it came time to eat lunch. And I found my sippy cup a couple of miles downstream from where I lost it, and my iced coffee actually still had ice!

A look from downstream at one of the gravelly areas we had to cross. The water underneath us here is only about 12 inches deep, which is plenty. The water over the gravel is about 6 inches, which isn't.

Luckily, we encountered enough interesting bird life, such as the spectacular herons we saw along the way, and scenery to make the trip worth the effort, but we won't be doing "the river" again until after the next big rain or two, which will hopefully fall in the next few days. The waterways and the land are thirsty for it. All along the river, we saw vegetation struggling to stay green and encountered several more spots with so little water in the flow that we scraped bottom passing through. Throughout the rest of the route, Jack and I both got "hung up" in low water and had to dislodge ourselves by putting a foot out or using our paddles to push our boats into water deep enough to float us, and we're both sore from having gotten a good workout on the river.

A Louisiana Waterthrush checks its reflection in the water.

As for me, the clammy feeling of being wet-to-the-skin was resolved later with a hot shower, and despite the perils of shallow water, the day and the trip and the time spent together was our very own Bonnaroo.

A Great Blue Heron stood sentinel over the last few hundred yards of our trip.