Ritual

During the summer of 1999, Danger and I went canoeing on the Blue River with our friend H. and one of her friends. I don't remember if Danger had done much canoeing before that, and I hadn't been in 2 or 3 years, but we turned out to be pretty good at it. We went back the next summer, and the next, and we've been going ever since. While we were in college, we had to go once summer break had properly started, but we always tried to squeeze our trip into the narrow window after our classes ended but before the public schools let out. We didn't always make it, so we did a lot of portaging during the years when we didn't get on the river until July or August.

We always rent our canoe from a local livery company, which is fine except for the fact that they never believe us when we give them an estimate of how long it will take us to make our run. They'll tell us that it usually takes people 5-6 hours to do the trip we've signed up for, and then they refuse to believe us when we explain that it'll take us 3-4, tops. Most people float the river, but we actually paddle. Last year they sort of pissed us off, because they told us we could either get off the water at 3 PM (three hours after we got in) or wait until 6 PM. We figured it would only take us until 4:00 to get to the pick-up point, but they refused to set up a separate shuttle for us, insisting that we had to catch the 6 PM shuttle they'd already set up for someone else. They basically told us we couldn't make the run by 3 PM. It was a point of honor after that, and we made it to the pick-up by 3:00. The guys who were supposed to be picked up at 3 PM? We passed them after about 20 minutes on the river. They'd already pulled over and opened up a cooler of beer. They didn't make the pick-up on time.

This year, we wanted to go early so the water would be good. We went in May last year, and it was pretty high. We decided about a month ago that we'd go on April 20 (last Friday), two days before Danger's birthday. It's a good thing we checked the livery's website on Wednesday of last week, because it turns out they're not running weekday trips until May this year. Luckily, Danger was able to borrow MacGyver's truck to haul their canoe. It took us about two and a half hours to set up the shuttle with her truck and my car, especially since our directions to our put-in point were good, but our directions to the take-out were awful. This was not helped by the fact that our spiff-dandy topographic maps, while they looked cool as hell, were published in the mid-1960s. All in all, setting up the shuttle was a pretty big pain in the ass, but I think it was worth it in the end, because we got to plot our own trip and set our own timetable for the day.

Here's a map of the 15-mile route we took, which looks somewhat more impressive on Google Earth than it did on the map we downloaded from the internet:



Have you guys seen Google Earth, by the way? If you zoom in far enough, you can see individual trees. To a geology nerd, this site almost as delicious as ice cream.




At our put-in, we met a kayaker who gave us a tip for getting around the breached dam which you're supposed to portage (head down the tributary to the right). He also helped us carry the 80-pound freighter of a canoe down to the river. Thanks, anonymous kayaker guy! Here's a shot of the dam from Google Earth. You can see the ominous whitewater even from a distance:



It doesn't really look super scary in the photo, but on the water, it was pretty intense. The kayaker guy told us it was probably about a class 2 or 2 1/2. That's the size stuff I ran on that whitewater kayaking trip I took last Spring, and it sure looked like big water to me. Luckily, the tributary to the right (bottom) was totally open, because the Blue was insanely high for this trip.

Even though we avoided the dam, we hit some pretty big water for the Blue. It's usually a very placid stream with a few riffles. There were three or four places where we went shooting through near-whitewater, and at least two of those times, the front of the boat (with Danger in it) was totally airborne. It was fantastic. After the biggest water (and the biggest air) that we caught, the GPS told us we'd achieved a top speed of 14.3 mph. Dude. Before that, our top speed was a quite-respectable 9.8 mph.

The weather was absolutely perfect. I don't think we've had better weather in the eight years we've been going to the Blue. It was warm but not hot, breezy enough to keep the bugs away, with a pristine blue sky. Even the water was pretty--blue-green instead of the usual brown. We took quite a few pictures, especially once we got down to the lower part where the river was insanely high, but it'll be a bit before I have any to share since we took waterproof disposable cameras instead of a digital.

We didn't see any other paddlers on the river, and barely anyone along the banks. Since the livery doesn't run trips on the lower part of the river and since it's still early in the season, there was barely any trash to be seen. While we didn't witness any squirrel mishaps, we did see several squirrels hanging completely upside-down in the smallest outer branches of sycamore trees. We saw several deer, and Danger saw a snapping turtle with a head the size of MacGyver's fist. As always, there were lots of turtles, and I saw a very cute groundhog moseying down the bank. We saw a belted kingfisher, lots of wood ducks, a hawk getting punked by a pissed-off crow, a pileated woodpecker, what we think were grebes (or maybe mergansers), and a great blue heron.

Overall, though, the best part of the day was just spending time with Danger, out in a beautiful place that we both love. No matter how many other rivers I canoe in my life, and no matter how beautiful they are, I know the Blue will always be my favorite.



Reading: Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce

Playing: Because of the Times by Kings of Leon