Two days on the Hatchie

This is the first of a four part series about a journey down the Hatchie River in two canoes
Part 1: A little town, full of forgotten history, beside a little river
“Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Essary Springs is a funny place, I explain to my friends as we take the left fork on the South bound Essary Springs Road. We drive past “Essary Springs By-pass” We look over at the bypass; a one-lane quarter mile chip and seal road, the truck full of young men erupt into laughter in spite of us all waking at 4 a.m. just two hours before. We drive by an old building that could have been a farm house,
“That is the original Freed-Hardeman University,” I gesture at the dilapidated building covered in peeling white paint. “I think there used to be a sign….” We next drive past Oak Grove Church. I mention, "they still baptize in the river.” I stare a little too long to the church on the right and we miss our destination; a stream on the left, running up to within a few dozen yards of the road, across from the church, The Hatchie River.
Ben Pennington makes a crack about the “guide” missing the place we are putting in our two little canoes. I shrug my shoulders  “I’m no guide,”  truthfully, no one in this group needs a guide. Even Leb, Ben’s 16 year old younger brother, is a veteran of canoe trips at his young age. My canoe partner, Joel Hall of Selmer, TN, remarked” It’s funny I’ve never canoed the Hatchie, I usually go a couple times a year to the Buffalo.” I nod and think about the trips my youth group made to the Buffalo River and even the Spring River in the North Ozarks. Only Ben had canoed these waters before and only he and I had been in them.
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