Going to Water—Wise Creek of the Ocmulgee River

by Gordon Johnston

Before the canoe carries him, he must first carry the canoe—from shed to truck, then from Vineville to the river. The drive requires strong coffee in a cup that won’t spill on the washboard logging roads, music on cassette because that’s all the old truck will play, the rising sun coming sideways into the cab, and a forbearing foot that lets up on the accelerator where key slowings, pauses, and silences are called for. He thinks of his patient foot as a governor—a means of arresting an engine’s speed and power to make arrival more gradual, usually for safety’s sake.

The pauses occur on river bridges, where he eyeballs the water level and looks for snags upstream and down. He has mastered the timing of rolling down the windows—first the driver’s side, then the passenger’s, which requires draping himself full-length across the cab. They're cranked fully open exactly at mid-bridge, where he coasts almost to a stop between Jasper and Butts counties, feeling on his face and bare arms headwind, tailwind, or calm. It has not occurred to him how fluidly he leans along the seat to wind down the glass just before he shifts gears, double-clutching, from third gear to second with the same hand. Gaps in the forest, wild turkeys, snakes, and high ridges also slow him. Seeing composes a large part of what he has come for. 

Once he leaves the state highway—the road steadily roughens the farther from Vineville he goes: pocked asphalt to dirt to gravel to clay—sightings along the road matter as much as they do along the river. These slowings—often at the same places where he has slowed before, so that they have become like stations—often stretch into pauses. His first drive through, he glimpsed in a clearing of forest two thin puppies he tried to call to him and take home, so that station has become the dog dell. (The same pups in town he would have ignored.) He idles at an overlook on a channel-spanning shoal and sees a slim red creek boat bumps over the foaming drop. For ten minutes, he hangs suspended by a buzzard’s circular glide, wings open and still, on a thermal. Often, there is also salvage of some kind to collect—a length of tie-down strap on the roadside, a tossed cooler good for caught fish, the rusty iron legs off an old sewing machine. These things beg to be returned to use. In spring and early summer, there are turtles he must deliver from the road’s middle to its shoulder, planting them in the same direction they pointed when he picked them up so he doesn’t stretch their trip. Some cooters close up with a cool hiss as he approaches, deflating their lungs to seal themselves in. He doesn’t touch the small, young turtles who might be on their first quest to mate and nest and whose brains are mapping the way. The turtles count as pauses and also as silences. Their wholeness and self-containment are profound. What other creature is so perfectly its own home?

The pauses grow more studied and serious as the put-in approaches. Is the creek that crosses the river road too deep to drive through? Will the silt in the lows suck him down to his axels? Will backwater from flood stage end the trip before it begins? He drives always into the threat of logging trucks, of a shiny new padlock on a formerly open chain gate, of a backhoe gouging into the riverside a new house’s foundation. These are rare but when they happen they hurt for years. They, too, are silences, but of a different sort—an imposed absence, like when music ceases mid-chord.

The other, better silences speak. The cessation of small talk and sales jingles and the bluster of meetings, the susurrus of Interstate 75 and of elevator music and the televisions that have colonized even schools and churches. In coming to the river he comes to be entirely subject to a place and to the processes, beauties, and dangers of its persisting, its going on in the oldest worldly way. He is choosing the Ocmulgee’s sounds—shoal chuckles, the different sighs of breeze through pine, hickory, and sycamore trees, maybe a heron croak—which never dominate his senses and which never diminish into the background.

This trip in involves all previous trips in. Today’s trip makes a map that is laid over other earlier trips’ maps. The oldest map remains the clearest and most vivid because it was the first, cartographed from failures to arrive. He remembers each of his first three attempts to find this put-in from McElheney’s Crossroads: first, a turn that took him toward the river for a mile, then swept him up northerly hills. He had asked for the river and the road gave him a Primitive Baptist church. He returned to McElheney’s and asked again, this time to be given gun-blue blackberries and a pole corral holding a mare and dappled foal. Neither was wrong. Neither was the answer he sought. So he accepted both, came again to the crossroads and took the one path left toward the answer he needed. His progress through a suspension of choices and routes illuminated the web of where he was. It felt less like a process of elimination than of exploration—of culmination.

‘The best and worst moment in a wild place is the recognition of what one has to lose. All the choices in getting here have been his.’

The sight of the river when first he found this entry to it will always flash back into his mind when he returns. The deep green of the early summer trees through which he first saw it glitter, the sun scouring the big rocks the water pours around, the foaming gyre below them—all will flow into his awareness, to be re-collected and compared to what he sees now, the river the same story in two different tellings. He will remember the adrenal spurt touched off in his chest by the current’s sound—like applause, like an unruly crowd. The adrenalin doubled at sight of the water’s boil from a bank low enough to launch from.  

That sight simultaneously disquiets him and drowns all his excuses. He must go, must commit. Always he comes wanting to meet the river in person and paddle it—but in person her volume and authority take him aback. She is legion, reckless, a downhill riot. She bullies, carves, and butts. A person sees the broken and blasted bed current has plowed, a hundred casual damages plain in any one rod of riverbank, and the sheath around their soul thins until they can see through it. The best and worst moment in a wild place is the recognition of what one has to lose. 

All the choices in getting here have been his. Once he puts his keel to the current he subjects himself to the will of the watershed, saddling himself on the power of all the thunderstorms of summer channeled into one riparian body. He can counter the current, he can resist it, but he can’t dominate or outlast it. The important choices are the river’s and they can’t be unmade. Does he cast his bread upon those waters? Of course he does. 

To come through this negotiation with gravity and gush, he must be as light as a beaver-stripped stick. The more minimal he makes himself the better. He must not impose. The shape of his boat had better make concessions to the current. His canoe sits lightly on the surface, the face of the flow, where friction with the air makes the water slower than it is below. The curve of bow and keel ease the meeting of the boat and the current. Nose and tail never directly oppose the river’s will with edges or hard lines. Rounded front, bottom, and back, the canoe could be coming or going. The vessel conducts flow, meets and manages it, alternating between acquiescence and deflection in a conversation that can be felt through the gunwales and stern. The river's argument is with itself and his canoe must not take sides—must find and ride the middle line of tension, must tune to it. He feels it like a harmonic where the boat seat cradles his rear. He remembers the buzzard on the thermal, wings still, not flying, accepting the ride.  

At dusk, when he rounds the bend below the last islet of rock and sees the bridge like a worn, ordinary altar, like a gate through which he must not pass, he won't know how to figure how long he has been bourne along. River miles and hours accrue by their own weird math. The Ocmulgee’s additions, subtractions, and divisions are geological, alluvial, animal, arboreal. Every river hour that passes leaves a remainder of infinity. How long will the last above-water branch of the submerged sycamore that toppled four years ago stay green? The pebbles below Smith Shoals are perfected and yet their polishing purls on. The forms of standing waves below Big Sneak stay while the water that is their substance goes and goes.

By the time his prow creases the silt at the bottom of the take-out ramp with a gritty kiss, there isn't much he knows. To wash away what he does, he takes a seat in the clear, sandy shallows. Soon his friend will be here in his pickup and they will carry to it the canoe that has carried him, then go. For now, he sits in the current, his body a flag rippling in the Ocmulgee's steady blow.