Scaring Herons

by Gordon Johnston

A Flint River Field Note 

     Tuesday, June 6, Eric O’Dell and I float seventeen and a half miles on the Flint from the Georgia 128 to the Georgia 96 bridge (door-to-door 8:45-6:03, on the water 10:25-4:30). Our late start is due to my torpor Monday evening, when I couldn’t get myself energized enough to load the Rogue, make sure my teenaged son had a ride to work, and choose one of the two river routes I had narrowed down to – the Ocmulgee from Wise Creek to Georgia 83 or this one. Eric doesn’t care at all about the departure time or the route -- hasn’t even gassed up his truck when I arrive at his house -- nor that it will almost surely rain on us. He says “Wet is wet,” and “I have all day,” and “I trust you,” making it all easy. I could change the trip at the take-out and he’d not bat an eye – an attitude that grants latitude. Fuel tanks filled, he follows me in his F-150 across several county lines.

     Along the way, the Elvis Costello Blood and Chocolate cassette fills my Tacoma’s cab – A Japanese/God/Jesus robot telling teenaged fortunes – for all we know and all we care they might as well be Martians…. Jimi Hendrix goes in next, his raucous, distorted guitar at odds with the chalky, sunless sky. He stands right next to the mountain. Chops it down with the edge of his hand. “Voodoo Chile” makes me think of my kayak paddle blade’s edge, each stroke slicing another yard off the miles of river. The boat ramp at 128, a slip-sliding mess of silty mud, forces me to baby-step down to its bottom to look upstream at the flow. There’s a spat of light rain, then a lightening of the sky around a brief rip of blue before it grays over again. Not a pillar of fire, but sign enough for me. Go.

     As we arrive at 96, a gusty breeze kicks up. As soon as we’re saddled on the current in the kayaks, it becomes a headwind – halfhearted, but a headwind, maybe the storm giving us a little foreplay, seeing how rough we like it. The water, caramel from the bank then clear to the depth of a paddle-blade once we’re floating on it, is a liquid mosaic of counter-swirls and upwellings that sometimes spin me in the Rogue, though I have my skeg down. The current is a satisfying dialogue between the rain-swell, which generates surprise and novelty by drowning rocks and downed trees to alter the usual straightforward flow, and the solid, long-set bounds of the river – the banks of clay and sand. Crescents of beach on the insides of bends slow the current while high, sloping, harder-faced outer bends speed it along. Willows flourish, but not in the shore-hiding thickets that I saw on the Altamaha, where alligators thrash, heard but not seen, every mile or two.

     This reach of the Flint offers fairly flat, short sandbars for camping in the first twelve miles, none of these beaches showing the four-wheeler tracks, charred logs, and derelict easy-up canopies that warn a paddler away from pitching there, nor do we see many river cabins and houses. After starting between brownish-red banks, we watch them grow lighter with the miles until eventually they’re buff white. No cypress, no palms, few pines – few sycamores, even, though they love every variety of Georgia riverbank. Few rocks of any size.

      Also satisfying to see is the Flint’s gradual transition from long curves with occasional oxbows to hairpin bends. You feel as much as watch this flow into a different form, the quickened post-rain pour of the current saving us labor. We need muscle only to slalom through the branches of the abundant strainers. Unlike the narrower, shallower Oconee, the Flint has hips that allow us room to maneuver. Eric crows over the absence of the limbo logs and flow-spanning blow-downs that made the Econfina such a workout for us a year ago as we paddled his home waters in Florida. His sit-on-top kayak has an assertive keel to track well, and this wish to make straight the path of the paddler, which makes twisty, shallow, or shoaly creeks a challenge, suits the moods of the lower and middle Flint well. We talk about how much camping gear Eric’s ten-footer could port, as O’Dell wants to overnight by water. We talk teaching undergrads oil painting and sonnet-writing, we talk our kids and anniversaries, my West Virginia friends and his West Virginia kin, other things. Both the boats and the conversation drift, as everything does that joins its nature to the river’s. You enter a motion that frees you from the usual American mania to arrive – that frees you from human time.

     We semi-glimpse an alligator leaving the left bank, slipping into the river and out of sight like a black knife into a sheath. We drive the same great blue heron down this entire section of the river – if this float had a title, O’Dell says, it’d be Scaring Herons – and we spook a doe two miles in. The herons are unusually vocal, caw-croaking with a lovely ugliness. Not all birds sing. The big one we continually flush downriver has a sidekick half his size who is one consistent color all over – an ideal denim. Evening indigo. A juvenile, maybe. Lesser in body, greater in blue. Near trip’s end, the mature heron finally scorns the river margin to land on the highest branch of a midstream strainer-tangle and face us. He’s had it with running. He has sharpened his eye to make a stand. Then he flies further downstream.

     The tie for moment of the day is between this bird on his barricade and the peregrine falcon Eric spots landing on a high snag to watch us pass. If it hadn’t been overcast, I wouldn’t have been able to see sharply enough to ID him. I remind myself of this when at last the rain comes easing decorously down with the touch and opacity of a sheer curtain. It settles in, getting louder -- a guest after a fourth drink – then louder still, and physical – the guest reeling around the living room bumping into the furniture. We paddle on, able to discern through the thunder and the thumping rain the margin of the storm in the lighter sky river right and ahead of us. 

     When lightning flashes twice directly above us, we haul out river left on the steep sand bank. Squatting under willows, safer than we would be under the taller, more sheltering  sweet gums inland, we share my sandwich. I’m strangely warmed by peanut butter and banana. Almost immediately the rain slackens, then stops. The sun cracks out, not quite full-beam, but with an amber-tinted light that seems not to rest on things but to well out of them – sand, willow-strands, river-ripple, the whole bend we can boat through now. Getting back inside the Rogue given the dropoff of the shallows is precarious, but I dodge disaster. The butt puddle in my seat soaks the last three dry inches of me.

     We pass under a train trestle – a simple, rusty iron rectangle, level, old, and elegant – seeing overhead the sharp edges of new ties against the now-bright sky, then smelling cinders and creosote once we’re a stone-skip downstream.

     Right after we got off the sunny Econfina, it was as if we were in the river, at flood stage – a pounding rain and a tree-bending blow so blinding I couldn’t see the turn on the forest-service road that would have taken us back to the highway, which added twenty miles to our trip home. I could swear the same drumming rain U-boats Eric’s F-150 today as he drives me back to the put-in.

     When Eric pulls under the 128 bridge, the road is a weird roof over us. He grins sheepishly at me in the sudden silence. It’s like being behind a waterfall, or between two of them. We bump fists, good tired. I truck-bed my boat from his to mine. 

     The rain swallows his red taillights. I linger a little while longer, savoring the warm stillness between of this dry alley. All day I have been poured between banks. Now I hold still between pours on either side of the bridge, just long enough to write this – the arrival I came for.