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Canoeing on the Red River
June 2007
Adams , TN
posted by The Brandon
This trip was more spontaneous than they usually are. In the week before the trip, my friend Jason and I were talking about possibly going on a canoe camping trip on June 1st and 2nd. He wanted to take a final trip down the river before he headed off Mexico for his missions trip. I talked to him earlier in the week, and he said he might not be able to go. One of his uncles in Indiana was in the hospital having some procedure done. His dad drove up there to be with him, and Jason needed to stay with his family. I text messaged him on Friday while I was at work to see how grim the situation was looking. His dad was coming home that night, and he said he might actually be able to go on Saturday.
I had planned to get up early that next morning, but at some point, the electricity went out, and my alarm clock didn’t sound. I guess the battery was dead. I woke sometime after 10:00 am. An hour or so later, Jason called and said we could go and that he had some leftover frozen rib eye steaks from a family cookout a few days prior. After the call ended, I then started to pack some of the gear I knew we would need for a day trip into the back of my Blazer.
I was in the kitchen filling up a couple of Nalgene bottles with water when Jason arrived in the legendary green ’93 Ford Tempo. That thing has been to hell and back. The doorbell rang, and I yelled to tell him the door was unlocked. There were a few other food items and some charcoal that we needed to buy, so we loaded the canoe onto my truck and I followed him to Kroger. While we were trying to decide on flavors of Gatorade, a woman started to walk down the aisle. Jason looked and pointed at the gallon-sized bottles and loudly exclaimed, "Look at those jugs! They’re huge!" The lady on the aisle heard him but wasn’t looking when he said it. She looked slightly offended and immediately turned around and left the aisle. We laughed like a couple of juveniles.
After buying everything we needed using the Spanish version of the U-Scan line to confuse the employee watching that area, we left the Springfield Kroger and started driving toward Adams to begin our trip. I told Jason we would go to Port Royal first to drop off his car, and I would let him pick up my truck at the end of the trip. We arrived at the Red River Campground and had started our 7-mile float by 2:30 pm. After getting in the canoe, we saw two guys that worked at the campground. They were loading some of their rental canoes onto a trailer. One of them was carrying an aluminum canoe on his shoulders. He couldn’t see what he was doing too well and hit the other guy in the head with one end of it. That guy stumbled and nearly fell into the river. I knew right then it was going to be a good day.
A few minutes down the river, there was a family standing on a gravel bar. They looked as if they had been playing in the water. They seemed like nice enough people. We all said hi, had our brief moment of meaningless dialogue, and then went our separate ways. We had only been on the water for around 20 minutes when we decided it was time to eat, which is becoming typical on my trips. I am guessing we started grilling at 3:00 pm. The charcoal had barely been lit when we saw two canoes coming, a man and boy in one and a woman and girl in the other. They didn’t seem to be very proficient in the art of paddling. The father-son combo lost control of the canoe, causing it to turn sideways, and the other boat slammed right into its side. Jason later told me he heard the man say in a funny, Woody Allen-like voice, "Oh geez. I heard a crack. Let’s pull over here to check it out." I somehow didn’t hear him say it, but from that moment until they left, everything that came out of Jason’s mouth was mimicking that guy’s voice. He sounded like one of those overly self-conscious people, filled with senseless worry. One by one, they walked into the surrounding woods to find a suitable toilet tree and left shortly after soiling our humble kitchen. By this point, we had already put our steaks and white corn on the grill, and I was taking the opportunity to take some pictures while Jason carried on with his usual meandering, slightly insane but always amusing banter. It didn’t take much longer for our food to finish cooking. For lunch, we were having rib eyes, fresh white corn, and ramen noodles, the inbred cousin of the pasta family. It wasn’t quite the best meal on the river I have ever eaten but still good nonetheless considering we had minimal planning time.
The lunch break took roughly an hour out of our trip. Before leaving the gravel bar, I found a really interesting looking rock with lots of fossilized reeds or some other kind of thick stemmed plant in it. Jason said I should shellac it and use it as a paperweight at work. As we were putting the canoe back in the water, he happened to look down at the ground and spotted an arrowhead. Downstream, we found a rope tied to a large tree branch overhanging the river. Jason wanted to swing and play in the water for a bit, so we took another short break for that. Ahead, we spotted a whitetail deer taking a drink from the river. We soon came to the site of last year’s incredible Memorial Day canoe and cookout trip, right across from the waterfall. I believe it was also the birthplace of canoe jousting from that very same trip. It was around this point that it started to rain lightly, and it gradually got heavier over the next thirty minutes until it became a torrential downpour, complete with thunder and lightning. Luckily, I brought my boonie hat with me this time to keep the rain out of my face. I almost always bring a small tarp in my backpack just for those rare occasions of unexpected rain, but for some reason, it wasn’t in there. I still had my paracord, but the tarp was MIA. Wherever it was, it wasn’t there when I needed it. On the other hand, there really wasn’t a good place to stop where I could have improvised a shelter, as most of the bank along the river is rather steep. It seems like every trip I take with Jason involves some unexpected challenge. This was the second time I’ve been caught out with him in a thunderstorm. The storm was brief, but the rain continued. The rain ended around the halfway point of our seven mile trip. Near the halfway point between the campground and Port Royal, there are some power lines that cross high above the river. After the rain had ended, we saw a family of ducks waddling along a gravel bar. They seemed very unaffected by our presence. Most of the ducks I have encountered on the river are much more timid than those.
It started to rain again shortly before we arrived at Port Royal, but it didn’t last for long. When we came to the end of our trip, we carried the canoe and all the gear up to the parking area. I dug through my dry bag to find Jason’s phone and keys and my keys because he had to drive back to the campground to get my truck while I waited with the boat. It was almost 8:00 pm when he came back with my truck. We loaded everything, tied down the canoe, and headed back to the campground for the final time before our trip was formally brought to an end. The sun was down when I got home, and I didn’t even bother to unload the canoe from the top of my truck. It was a good trip. Good food, good adventure, and good times.
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