Paddle With Us

So, the planning begins.  I had the phone number of Tom Carnahan whose dock we had stopped at last year just downstream from Higginsport, Ohio, when the headwinds prohibited us from going more than one mile an hour.  I gave him a call, left a message and then got a call back minutes later.  It was great to reconnect with him and hear his reassuring voice.  He told me his wife had just asked if he had heard from us yet, realizing that it was getting close to a year.  So, they were waiting for us and that is sweet.  I asked if he thought we had given up the journey and he said no, he knew they would hear from us.  That was reassuring as well to know that others believe that we will keep going and meet our goal of getting to the  Mississippi River some day.  Tom told me his dock may not be in on May 11 but we can still camp there if we need to and carry the canoe down the stairs and put in without the dock.  When I mentioned that we could go in one mile downstream where the ferry landing to Augusta, KY, is, he reminded me that things do change in a year.  The ferry landing is all new and different.  Two stories!  My, there must be quite an upsurge in ferry traffic.  It is, of course, far from a bridge connecting KY and OH so I makes sense that there would be an investment in the ferry crossing.  Karen and I took that ferry to quaint Augusta, birthplace of Rosemary Clooney, when our journey was cut short by the weather. It was one of the best detours we might have taken!

With the Carnahans expecting us on May 10, we have a place to start and that is good.  The rest will unfold as it always has.

So, it is that time of the year again.  Karen and I plan to head out to the Ohio River on May 10th, putting Wonder, our canoe, in on Sunday, May 11th.  I noted to Karen in a recent phone call that we are either getting lazy or so good at this that we don’t spend a lot of time planning.  We pretty much know what we eat along the way.  I have already purchased some interesting sounding dehydrated dinners.  We know, from experience, that there is always somewhere to pitch a tent: in a front year of an hospitable new friend or in the back yard of a boat club.  Always, always, we know that we will find friends and the kindness of strangers along the way.  It is humbling.  And we know that we will eventually find a place to wash and use a toilet…though sometimes it takes longer than others to find said places.

So, we have only spoken two or three times since deciding what the dates of the trip would be this year. We don’t yet have our plans in place for how we are dealing with the putting in and the getting out a week later but we have a sketch in our minds of how it will work.  Besides the astronaut food, I have just purchased a new life preserver (haven’t told Karen until just now!) compliments of long time family friends Jim and Betty Grant for my 58 birthday which was two weeks ago.  Speaking of age, yes, it feels like the body has to work more and more to stay fit and not to ache after every activity.  I have been working out at the gym since January, walking/running on the treadmill, rowing on the rowing machine, lifting weights, stretching, etc, but still I cannot say that my body does not get sore every time.  Then there are the hours upon hours that I have done construction/demo work on Chelsea and Brent’s 200 plus year old new home in Vermont.  8-10 hours of paddling on the river?  God help us that the head winds are not as bad as last year when, on our final day, we could paddle no faster than one mile an hour.  THAT was not fun.

Well, it is late in the evening and I have to take my weary body to bed.  But I will amuse what readers I may have with the attached photo of me in my new “personal floatation device” which guarantees that it will not hold my head out of the water should I become unconscious or on rough waters.  Did I already say:  God help us.  Anyway, on that amusing side, here’s the question:  Do I look more like a pregnant 58 year old or a paratrooper 58 year old in my new PFD?

Have fun with that…and please follow us again this year from May 10-17 as we pass the halfway mark on the mighty Ohio River in our 13th year of paddling and friendship.  Karen, I can’t wait to see you again!

PS:  That’s the reflective tape glowing that will help them find me when I am floating down the river in the dark, trying to keep my head above water.

PPS:  Did anyone else NOT know that they now make women shaped life preservers?  “Made to support a woman!”  News to me.

 

The boat ramp at a private campground.

Syd on left, Corey on right.

The book Tony showed us.

Syd and Corey paddling a ways downriver with us!

Dear Syd, Corey and Tony,

It was great meeting you on Brush Creek. We found what we thought we would be quiet place to pull off at the ramp and eat our lunch. Little did we know that it would be the most social lunch we had the whole week. We saw your canoe but didn’t know who it belonged to until you showed up. It’s great, Syd, that you bought it to enjoy with your 12 year old son. Maybe some day he will paddle the length of the Ohio River as well! We really enjoyed talking to you all and hearing about Corey’s adventures with his friends from Michigan. Hope everything is working out for you all. Loved learning about Serpent Mound. We thought of trying to find it on our drive back to Huntington but decided it was too far out of our way. We’ll keep it in mind for next year, though.

We were happy to share our lunch fare with you and amused when you pegged us for Moms when Karen offered up the string cheese! And thanks, Tony, for letting us stay there even though it was kind of against the rules…at least your Dad’s rules! I was fascinated by the book you brought out with the image of the amount of cargo carried by barges vs. trains vs. overland trucks. That really helped in my understanding of the vital nature of the river to our economy.

Corey, it was so sweet of you to give us the crystal before we left. I am keeping it with some other tokens of power we picked up along the way. We will carry it with us again next year!

What we will remember most, however, is that you, Corey and Syd, decided to paddle out with us for a while. We have seen only one canoe in the 630 some miles we have travelled and NEVER has anyone joined us in paddling. It was very sweet to have you two, in your orange Mae West life preservers, paddle along side of us and chat for a while longer. I hope maybe you are actually reading this. If so, keep up with our blog and maybe you can join us for a bit next year as well.

Thanks again for making our lunch break so memorable. We are so happy to have met you.

Paddle well…and may you find many interesting places and people on your journeys,
Maggie

Dear Matt and Ashley,

It’s hard to believe that we paddled 24 miles the day we met you. I can tell you that we sure were glad to find your small creek to paddle up. We had looked at the maps for a place to pull off. I should say Karen looked at the maps as she is the navigator. You know, some people laugh when I say Karen is the navigator because 1) they know that we are both control freaks and wonder how we figured out who would be in the stern. Obviously Karen is more a control freak than I am. Well, that’s not really true. I don’t just don’t like that kind of responsibility. Just give me the grunt work and I’m happy (mostly) to be the engine all day long. And 2) they think one should not have to navigate down of river. Like somehow we should simply flow with the current. Well, you live on the river and you know that the river only has current when it is flooding and then you have other problems to contend with. I guess a lot of people don’t realize that a big river like the Ohio which is really just a series of lakes created by the lock and dam system. How else would the barges handle it, eh? The locks and dams are cool and I still think I want to work for the Army Corps when I grow up but they sure do slow down the flow, don’t they!

So, in the cool of the early evening, he headed towards what the map said was a public boat ramp and figured we would find somewhere to camp there. Before we got to the boat ramp, we found your dock. We went ahead to the ramp and decided that since it appeared to be a public park, it might not be the best place to stay, if it would even be allowed. So, we went back to your dock, tied up and headed up into your campground. We have become very bold on these trips so we decided to just knock on your door. I suspect you don’t get many people knocking on your mobile home door. You seemed a little hesitant as you called out and asked who it was. But you graciously came to the door anyway. You are likely among the youngest folks to help us out and you were so kind to let us set up our tent down by the river. Thanks for pointing us to the convenience store in town as well and for offering us a ride. Frankly, we are usually very glad to walk after a day in the canoe even though I especially feel a little wobbly after a day on the river. Before we headed off to the store to buy water and ice and use the facilities, including washing a day’s worth of sunscreen and sweat and grime off, we asked about the train tracks. Of course, along the river there are always trains but this track was literally within about fifty or a hundred feet of our tent. Turned out, as we told Matt the next morning, that since we were below the raised tracks, the sound was nowhere near as bad as we expected.

It was kind of fun walking into town along the tracks. Made me feel like we were hobos or something. Your little town of Vanceburg, KY, has some charm. Obviously it was a railroad and river town. Majestic old justice building, Victorian homes, train station. Hopefully all that digging up of the streets will be over soon. We needed more bug repellent so we stopped in at the pharmacy because the convenience store didn’t carry it, something I found odd since the mosquitos are the size of small birds with the appetites of a T. Rex! And they seemed to like me far more than Karen which I don’t think is very fair. I thought the pharmacy was cool because it had a lunch counter as well just like in the old days. I asked permission to take a photo which I have included below.

That evening we didn’t have to make our usual dehydrated dinner as Christine from the night before had given us ribs from the Scioto Ribber in Portsmouth, Ohio. We nibbled on those and then walked to your uncle’s deck where we saw, as you promised, the most beautiful evening view of the river. And the fireflies were busy that night as well. Later in the night, we had to get out of the tent and put on the fly because it rained a bit. When the fly is up, it is very stuffy so we tried it without the fly. It helped with the temperature until the rain came…between trains. So, we didn’t get a lot of sleep but, as usual, were glad for a place to call home that felt safe for the evening.

Thank you again for your assistance. I hope that dog and cats are doing well!

With gratitude,
Maggie

PS: The day we met you was a milestone. We had paddled over 615 miles since leaving Western New York 12 years ago which marked our halfway point between NY and the Mississippi River!

Dear Friends at the Shawnee Boat Club in Portsmouth, OH,

There are so many of you who welcomed us and helped us when we landed at the city ramp in Portsmouth. We were not able to connect with anyone in Portsmouth ahead of arrival so we took the chance that there would be room in the inn and paddled a total of 24.5 miles to get to what looked like a place we could pull out. Thankfully, earlier that day we had had the chance to rest and shower at a boat club upriver. But we were still hoping for some restrooms and showers in Portsmouth that evening.

We pulled up on the ramp that turned out to be part of city campground. After asking who we might speak to about camping there we were directed to Pat in the golf cart. She squeezed us both into the front seat and showed us where we might pitch a tent and use a crude toilet. Unfortunately, there were no showers. But she was kind enough to bring us over to the Shawnee Boat Club right next door to introduce us to you folks and we fell in love. Of course, the promise of hot showers helped that love grow! We were invited, against the general rules of the club, to paddle the canoe to your docks so we were happy for Pat to take us back to our canoe and we did just that.

We paid our $15 docking fee, wondering if ever a canoe had docked there with the big party boats before! We had scarcely started unloading when a hand reached out to help us, in fact, to INSIST on helping us. That’s how we met you, Christine. Thank you, for all that you and Larry did for us. You made Portsmouth our favorite layover. You awed us with the pride you have in your small, struggling river town, sitting along the Ohio like a Medieval fortress with its huge flood walls. This was the first time paddling that we saw so many of these walls and realized the peril that your towns await several times throughout the year when the waters threatened to swell over the riverbanks.

We met your police officers and learned of the drug problems in your town as it struggles to keep its identity in changing times. But the pride was so strong that we have no doubt that you will weather the times just as you have weathered centuries of change before. We were so thrilled to ride on your jazzed up golf cart, clinging to the poles as Larry zoomed (yeah, I know he probably wasn’t even going 5 miles an hour but next to our canoe it felt like zooming) through the streets of the town with what seemed like everyone waving greetings to you with the two strange women hanging onto the back. Hey, when you are going to get seatbelts for that thing?

It was great to go to your favorite BBQ pit, The Ribber, and it was so kind of you to buy us ribs which we enjoyed that night and the next. People downriver where we stayed the next night knew the Ribber well. I was thinking it is interesting that they knew a restaurant a whole day’s journey upriver and then realized that by car it was about 30 minutes. Perspective is interesting on the river.

The beautiful murals on the flood walls were so realistic, depicting generations of life in Portsmouth. You insisted we visit with your friends on the deck of the boat club and we loved telling our story and hearing theirs. What an interesting contrast for us paddlers to meet the man who races speed boats professionally.

And then you were so thoughtful to bring us oatmeal from McDonalds the next morning. And it was very good. I loved it when you said: “I figured you to be health conscious so I brought oatmeal!” Yes, we get out on the river every day but did we ever confess to you that we manage in no small way by indulging in a Snickers bar every afternoon? That is a habit that some may not believe did NOT start with me. Karen insists and I have come to enjoy it quite a lot.

You made it impossible for us to ever forget Portsmouth, OH. You made us promise to go see the movie 42 which I have heard from others is excellent. Branch Rickey, who signed on Jackie Robinson, was from Portsmouth. And you may have read on Facebook that my sister reminded me that she went to school in our hometown of Elmira, NY, with Rickey’s grandchild! Small world, eh? And, of course, we will not forget that Roy Rogers was from Portsmouth as well. I haven’t seen 42 yet, but I will let you know when I do!

I am sure that I am leaving out some of the details of that wonderful evening. Of course, we did have a great place to camp and wake up to a wonderful view of the river AND we took a shower both in the evening and in the morning, bought ice for the day, and headed out, refreshed of heart, body and soul.

Thank you to you all for your kindnesses and encouragement.

Sincerely,
Maggie

Dear Barb,

It was great to meet you, Ronnie and Randy at the Holiday Point Boat Club. We were so hot and dirty when we paddled into your little cove. I had called you some miles upriver to see if you had showers and ice and you said YES. Hallelujah! We were so sticky from the sweat and humidity of the night and day before with layers of sunscreen and bug repellent as well as ground in river grime. First thing we did before even finding you was find our way to the showers and it was heavenly. Then when I came to find you at the docks, you said we could pay for the ice ($1) but not the showers. You were so encouraging to me about our trip. Thanks. And I hope that you have looked up our blog and maybe you will even read this post.

As we paddled out, I remembered that I had forgotten to ask you about the strange UFO looking thing at the entrance to the cove so I called you and you explained that it was a concrete boat built by a guy some decades ago who wanted to prove that it would float. What a story you told including the fact that it was used as a speak easy on the water for the locals from the “dry” side of the river.

Well, we have depended on the kindness of people like you throughout our adventure down the rivers. As with those before, you graced us with your hospitality and encouragement.

Again, many thanks for being an oasis in our day.

Sincerely,

Maggie

PS: Hope your back is healing well from you surgery. Maybe you can lift a bag of ice now?