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So, it is only February, but Karen and I were able to spend a day together this past weekend to hatch plans for our next trip.  We are tentatively set to head back onto the Ohio River on Sunday, June 17th, and paddle for four days and maybe part of a fifth day.  We hope to get another 125 miles or so down the river.  And we look forward to paddling at a time of the year that we should not need to wear our wetsuits.  They are helpful when it is cold but a nuisance in all the ways you can imagine and perhaps some that you can’t imagine if you have never worn one!  Some of the things we are thinking about:

Does this dry and snowless winter mean that the river will be low and S-L-O-W???

It was clear when we arrived in Marietta last October that we were in new, flat, midwestern terrain.  Will that continue?

Who will be the angels who help us along the way this time?

Will we get to paddle without it raining every day?

So, stay tuned for more plans and ponderings.

We spent three rainy days on the Ohio River this time…we almost pulled the plug on the adventure this time after the first day.  We were soaked, shivering and the end of the rain was not in sight.  However, we found a park shelter and hunkered down after finding a sports bar in Paden City, WV, to get a hot supper.  In the morning (and we did stay dry and warm in the tent!) we decided to chance another day…heading out to the amazement of some of the people in the RV park who stood and took our photos as we set sail.  We paddled for about 30 minutes when the rains started again and we found another shelter and stayed for about two hours, fixing our first hot lunch and finding a heated restroom at the campground where we warmed up a bit.  We decided to shoot for a Wayne National Forest and a campground about 17 miles down.  As long as we knew we had a campground ahead, we didn’t mind the idea of getting soaked again…so we did and we were rewarded by finding a peaceful lagoon like entrance to the park…quiet and still.  We set up camp, enjoyed the bath facilities including how showers and successfully made a smoky campfire with soaked wood…but it was a campfire.  A beautiful park and refuge for us.  Finally, the third day we awoke to the potential of no rain.  We headed out with Marietta in our scopes.  We paddled the full day, only a mist of rain but cloudy…sometimes the clouds thinned enough that we got a bit of sunburn on our noses.  When we got out in Marietta, Ohio, a quaint small city on the river, the sun came out in earnest to celebrate our completing 400 miles of our journey since 2001!  So, it was worth it to us…the river continues to entrance me and gave us gifts like the siting of a bald eagle on that last day!  More later…from both of us!

And they’re off!

I never imagined I would be so drawn to river life.  I can hardly wait to get back out.  Karen and I will be going back out on the Ohio on October 2 for three days.  I have made some connections in Powhatan Point, OH, where we got out of the river in May.  Jennifer is a woman who works at the City Building there and I found my way to her by calling the local Riverside Restaurant where we had had lunch in May awaiting Karen’s son Kyle to pick us up.  Jennifer spoke with her aunt who lives on the river and she is willing to let us camp there our first night and then put Wonder, our red canoe in there as well.  Jennifer is now looking for someone who might pick us up downriver and drive us back to Powhatan Point.  I have every reason to believe that she will succeed.  We have found folks along the river helpful and welcoming.

If we do about 25-27 miles a day, we will have the good fortune of spending two nights in the Wayne National Forest along the river.  I was hoping we would get a chance to visit the Ohio River Museum in Marietta but it is closed during the week for the season.  So we will have to learn about the river through our normal processes….looking and asking questions along the way.

The goal on this trip may be to get to Belpre which will add about 80 miles to our journey.

On October 1, I fly to Pittsburgh where Karen will meet me and we’ll drive down to Powhatan Point, set up for the night and hope to get some rest for the journey ahead.  I’ll ask Chelsea if she will be able to help us again by posting photos on our blog that I will text message to her.  So, stay tuned, and thanks for your interest in following this Wonder-ful journey of ours.

Just as the river changes constantly, so do our lives. Karen decided to resign from a position she has held for 18 years. A leap of faith for her as she opens herself to what life holds for her next. I am now a year into a new job I took when I moved back from New Mexico. Karen’s oldest son has become engaged. My daughter just got a book deal with Random House. Karen and Mark have a new house to work on. And our husbands continue to be the souls willing to anchor our adventurous beings.

And through it all the river keeps flowing steadily and faithfully to the Gulf of Mexico. I want to learn from the river. I love the river, by which I mean rivers in general. But I am having a hard time learning about the peace and the strength they carry.

Since I moved back to the east coast, we can now try to plan more than a trip on the river every year or two. We want to go for a couple of trips EACH year. However, each trip still takes effort as we live in two different states and we will be paddling between two others. Getting Wonder, our red canoe, to the river is Karen’s job as she is the caretaker. Getting me there is the job of Southwest Airlines. Yes, it remains complicated.

Perhaps this time out I will learn more and really absorb the power of the river. We will return to the Ohio River the first weekend of October, hoping to catch a warmish fall and not have to don our wetsuits for this short trip. We will put in where we pulled out in May in the small town of Powhatan Point, Ohio. Karen ordered the new navigational charts and has them in hand. I have looked up some phone numbers to find people who might help us get to and from our car. My plane reservations are made.

What will the river teach us this time? Will she flow more slowly in the fall? In May we had the advantage of the spring rains. LOTS of spring rains and a fast moving river. Usually we paddle in the spring. I don’t think we have been on either of the big rivers in the fall.

So, please stay tuned as we gear up, literally and figuratively, for another few days of geting off the grid…well, with our cell phones, of course…and letting Mother Nature retrain us.

Many people are amazed when we tell them that we use the lock and dam system on the rivers for our canoeing.  Even people who live along the river are surprised to hear that we go through the locks.  Usually it comes in this form:  “They let a little boat like yours through the locks!???” The lock system is supported by our tax dollars and we are all welcome to use it.  We were told that the barges always take first priority if there are recreational boats out as well.  That’s more than fine with me.  I don’t need to fight for a spot with a 15 barge tow!  Once we did have to wait a bit for them to “lock through” a tow because, even though we were using a different chamber, they did not want us approaching the lock when the tow was coming out. 

 The Army Corps of Engineers is most often associated with floods and the mistakes that we like to pin on them.  But I find them truly amazing.  Were I a bit younger and a veteran of the Armed Services, I would apply to work at one of the locks.  We learned a year or two ago that most of the people who work at the locks are veterans so my hopes were a bit dashed. 

But back to the locks.  We were locked through three locks on this trip.  Each time we called ahead to let them know we were approaching.  The big barges use radios to contact the lock masters and we learned from one that we really shouldn’t call them by phone.  However their numbers are published on the navigitional charts so we figured it wasn’t a matter of national security!  What was good about this system was that generally the lock chambers were full and ready for us when we got there because they knew we were coming.  On the Allegheny River, we often had to wait for them to fill the chamber.  This new method got us through much faster.  Since the rivers were higher than usual and there was a lot of debris on the river, the locks themselves held a lot of logs and garbage.  One of the locks could not even be opened because of the debris. 

Each lock and dam is just that:  a dam and a double lock along side of it.  One of the chambers is larger than the other but both are large enough for many barges so our little canoe always felt a bit like a bathtub toy.  While the chamber is filling, the yellow light is blinking (it is red when they are not ready for you).  When the chamber is full, the gates open and the light turns green and a horn sounds to signal it is safe to enter.  We paddle into the chamber and tie up to a floating “pin” on the side of a lock.  I can’t remember the technical term for it but these were new.  Previously we had only tied up manually when the lock master hooked our line and put it over a pole above.

Once tied on, the water is slowly let out of the chamber.  If we were lucky, we would get to talk to one of the guys working the lock.  Sometimes we just sat and waited for the water to lower, the gate to open and the horn to signal it was safe to paddle out.  The experience never ceases to bring me joy.  The concept not to mention the reality of a lock is awesome.  Many of our locks are old and creaky and the guys who work them remind us how out of date they are.  But they are fairly simple mechanisms and so they seem to hold up indefinitely.

On this last trip, we were locked through and the gates opened and we paddled our red canoe out of the huge lock to the amazement of some fishermen along the bank who were undoubtedly expecting a huge barge, not a little red canoe to with two women paddling to New Orleans to appear.  We ended up chatting with two older gentlemen who thought we were kidding when we said we were paddling to the Mississippi.  They believed us by the time we were done…and they wished us well and told us, as so many did on the river, to be safe.

 

Tonight I was remembering a strange thing we saw on the river in May.  We were approaching a lock and dam on our second day out.  This was our first lock of this leg of the trip.  We had just left the small stream upon which we had camped at a lovely private boat club.  I was, as usual, excited to approach the lock.  Locks are one of the most amazing of human accomplishments and it constantly amazed us that our tax dollars create these gigantic chambers big enough for a 15 barge tow and yet welcoming our little red canoe as readily.  Definitely a use of tax dollars that we can feel good about! 

I was also excited to possibly meet “John,” a man with whom I had spoken on the phone several weeks prior about the locks.  We had done all the locks on the Allegheny but this was our first Ohio  River lock and we wanted to make sure the procedure was basically the same for small recreational craft.  It was.  John had expressed excitement in our trip and hoped he would be there when we arrived.  He was!  But locks are for another post.  For now I want to go back to what we saw upon approach to the lock.

My eyes caught some kind of an animal, maybe 1/4 mile downstream from us, thrusting itself out into the water FAST.  It looked like a duck miraculously swimming backwards and fast on a piece of floating driftwood.  I know that doesn’t make sense but the sight truly did not make sense to our eyes.  We watched and wished we had brought binoculars. The animal continued steadily across the river.  Even though the current was strong, the animal stayed a course to the other side.  About halfway across the river, the animal turned slightly and Karen realized first that it was a deer.  The head of the deer, sideways, looked like the duck.  The bit of the back of the deer sticking out of the water looked like the driftwood.  When it turned its head toward us we could see the ears and perhaps small antlers.

Now knowing what it was we were even more amazed that it had appeared to launch itself into the river to swim to the other side.  As usual, we amused ourselves with our typical theories about why it had crossed the river?  Was it looking for greener or tastier grass?  Did it one moment all the sudden think:  Hum, I wonder what is over there?  I guess I’ll go look today.  Maybe hormores were beckoning it to find a mate on the distant shore?  Or perhaps it had slipped into the river and kept swimming.  It was clearly a good swimmer.  It didn’t even appear to be carried downstream as it paddled across.  And how did those skinny legs get it across anyway?  We watched as it made it across in perhaps as little as ten minutes.  It studied the shoreline for a while before it pulled itself out of the water and proceeded on its way.  A brave new world for that deer?  Who knows.  But we marvelled at the experience for hours.

Later that day after we had found another private boat club that allowed us to sleep inside with heat and running water, we sat in the restaurant next door and told the story to one of the staff.  He quickly suggested that the only reason a deer would jump into the river was to get away from something that was a threat to it.  Ah.  Of course.  That made tons of sense.  But just opened up another channel of theorizing:  what scared it?

As Karen and I completed three and one half days on the swollen Ohio River, we pulled the boat out at a public ramp in Powhatan Point, OH, to call Kyle, Karen’s son, to come and pick us up.  He was in Pittsburgh and had about a two hour drive to get to us.  (no comment on the two hour drive vs. the 3 1/2 day paddle!)  We decided to spend some of the time paddling up the small creek where the ramp was.  It was very calm and we paddled under some bridges and trestles (known to us as T-R-E-S-T-L-E-S stemming from a story when John and I first met and couldn’t remember if that word had a T in the middle or not).  The trestles were clearly conveyors of coal cars as some coal had spilled out onto the pylons.  I, of course, had to have some as a souvenir so we paddled up close and I snatched a couple of pieces. 

We had seen many goose families along the river.  This small creek had its own family but this family was a bit different from the ones we had seen.  We could not tell at first what we were seeing but it was not the traditional mom and pop and fuzzy babies.  Mom and pop were there with three or four babes but there was another bird in with them.  We paddled as quietly as we could and as fast as we could to try to catch up with them.  We finally outsmarted them under a bridge where we went on the other side of a pylon, getting a bit ahead of them before we came out from under the bridge.  They, of course, were on to us immediately and turned around but not before we identified the strange bird.  Much larger than the adult Canada geese, the other parent or uncle or aunt, acting as though it was part of the family, nudging the babes and encouraging them to keep us, turned out to be a domestic goose!  It was mostly white with some brown and neither it nor the geese seemed to care that it was “different.”

It was a striking and sweet sight.  Reminiscent of the story of The Ugly Duckling, it did not look like it belonged, and yet it did belong, at least in some sense on the genus/species spectrum.  Where did the goose come from?  Somewhere up river, did it decide to jump ship from it farmyard and join its wild cousins?  Did flood waters scoop it up?  Did someone abandon it?  Who knows.  But what we witnessed, and therefore know, is that goose family represented a greater sense of an inclusive family than many of us humans can understand. 

Stay tuned for a photo.