Article Image Alt Text

Pocahontas, Searles, and one muddy campsite

This is the second of a 4 part feature about a two day canoe trip down the Hatchie River
We occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at our leisure the lapse of the river and of human life. As that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine was proceeding still. There is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. All streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged, but in longer periods than man can measure. Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals. Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
“The Hatchie River is a special place,” I explained to Joel, my canoe mate, and go on to describe in great detail, perhaps, at times, to his chagrin, why. “The Hatchie is the only clean, unaltered waterway in the lower Mississippi watershed. So, from Chicago to New Orleans there is no other river flowing into the Mississippi. That is still the way God made it.”
Joel has been to Florida twice in the last month so his view of what “clean” water is seems to be quite different from my own. As he glances over the side of the canoe, he remarks “It’s just so dirty”.
“Its not dirty, it’s muddy!” I explain. The river, admittedly, does not look like much after a big rain such as the one we had just experienced. The water has become browner, and the fish still are not biting.
“The mud in this river represents everything good and beautiful about the south.”
I probably sound half crazed at this point, I think to myself, but it has been a long day of paddling. “If you put a stethoscope in the water then on this bend you would hear the blues, and on the next you would hear bluegrass”
If I were able to see Joel’s face he might be rolling his eyes at this point, and who could blame him, but I am never missing an opportunity to express my love for this place. I go on “This river is tough. When the engineers came through in the 1920s channeling every stream in their path, drying up the bottoms to harvest the timber and plant farm land, they could not do it. All these wide curves that make this journey so arduous are exactly the reason why this river was left alone.”
I know what it means to struggle against this river. I decide to spare Joel from more of my “Hatchie sonnets” and think back to the time I spent duck hunting in the flooded timber with my dad and my brother and our black lab Mac. The timber all looked the same, somehow, my dad was able to carry decoys, lead a dog and two young boys in ill-fitting chest waders, while navigating to some particular opening in the canopy that the ducks liked just a little better than the thousands of other similar holes.
I wonder why I think back on that time with such fondness? The two most vivid memories I have of those hunts were both negative. In one, I trip over a root and drop the beautiful walnut Ithaca shotgun my granddad had given me in the water, filling my chest waders in the process. In the other instance a male and female merganser landed around 15 yards from the boat we were hunting from and, somehow, the water exploded between them.
That trip, I remember that trip. It was the special juvenile early season and a lifelong friend of my dad’s Jerry Glenn Clifft had agreed to take my brother and myself for a hunt on a lease he was part of.
The canoe hits the bank. “Sorry” I murmur to Joel as I back paddle to release us from the muddy sides. My attention span has waned from my duties of steering the boat as I have been lost in thought about my past on this river were stuck on the bank, and we’ll have to step out to release our over loaded canoe. I ask Joel to swap with me and take over steering and, after we are back into the river and I need only be concerned with paddling, not steering, I let my mind drift back in thought.
Jerry Glenn was a part of the once giant Big Buck lease. The land they leased in the Hatchie was hard to navigate through and the ducks behaved wildly different some days than others, but when the ducks cooperated, the hunting could be great.

To view more, please log in or subscribe to the digital edition.