Mississippi Adventure, Chapter IV

Wherein we almost camp on alligator tracks.

The moment has finally come for the actual floating portion of the trip to begin. Without any ceremony or any gracefulness, we slid down the steep sandy bank into the deep warm mud and crawled in the canoes. Each boat had a rubber ducky perched on the bow. It was Bob and Katy in one boat, Mark and Leo in another, and Joan and me in the other. Once we were all in, we squeaked the duckies and I played Scotland the Brave on the adventure horn to signal the beginning. The time was around 2:30pm I think.

The plan was to float down Little Bayou Pierre for a few miles to where it met Bayou Pierre then follow Bayou Pierre 10-20 miles to the Mississippi. That night we hoped to camp near the confluence.

Little Bayou Pierre is about the size of Chartiers Creek, Penn. (which some of you might remember from the wedding). However, Little Bayou Pierre has no perceptible current. We had heard that it would have no current from some people Joan talked to when trying to find a rental place. For some reason, I had difficulty believing that it could be so flat. I still don't quite understand the topology that causes essentially long skinny lakes along a river with a very strong current.

But that's the way it was. There's another thing that goes contrary to my feeble understanding of things. The bayous carried enormous amounts of sediment. They were far muddier than even the Mississippi. I always heard that when muddy water stops flowing, the sediment load falls out. So how was it that this almost stagnant bayou could be so muddy? We decided it's best to think of a bayou as thin mud rather than a muddy creek.

After paddling a short time, we beached on a muddy bar under some trees and ate sandwiches. The boats just oozed into the soft shore. Katy got out and was immediately mired in the muck; she finally crawled to firmer ground. Leo actually went swimming. The water was as warm as bath water and seemed to me like an ideal breeding ground for microscopic organisms, so I stayed in the boat.

Since there was no current, we had to paddle for every inch. Little Bayou Pierre was narrow so we usually couldn't see much past the trees on the bank. We passed a pile of junk cars, then some run down industrial area where all the metal of the hoppers, cranes, and conveyors is as black as the piles of coal around it.

Bayou Pierre was much wider. With a bit more horizon we could see farms and unfortunately, we started seeing the cooling towers of the Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Plant again. (We camped near them the previous night).

Other than the cooling towers, there weren't many signs of civilization. On the entire trip we crossed under only three bridges (excluding the bridge we started under). Two of them we went under that day. The first was a closed old box girder bridge on Little Bayou Pierre. The second was a newer but equally closed concrete bridge over Bayou Pierre. This bridge had about 5 piers in the water and the roadway between two of them had fallen in the bayou.

Near hear I remember seeing a couple of people in a fishing boat. I mention this only because seeing other people was pretty uncommon the whole way.

We kept paddling and paddling, aware that we got a late start. But around every bend it seemed like we were staring at the cooling towers again as if we were going in circles. They never seemed to get any farther or any closer.

The Bayou got narrower and thickly wooded along the banks. For a moment, I was actually concerned we were going the wrong way. It was a very uncomfortable feeling that would return later in the trip but for now the cooling towers stayed on our right, which meant we were, in fact, going the right way.

The sun was getting lower when we thought we saw a log move slowly, then submerge. Someone suggested it was an alligator but I was skeptical. It had moved very slowly with almost no wake at all and when it submerged there was not a ripple. A beaver makes far more noise and dives with a splash.

A little while later Joan and I saw another one and this time there was no doubt. We noticed it to our left and actually turned around to see it better. It stayed near us, swimming slowly for perhaps 20 seconds. We saw the whole back and tail for a moment. I would guess it to be around five feet long. Finally it too submerged silently like the last one. It was spooky. We decided to definitely not swim.

The sun was setting and 2 things seemed suddenly apparent: First, we were not going to reach the Mississippi river tonight, and second, we had to find a camp site soon. [JOAN: At about this time, Eric and Katy voiced loud opinions about how they didn't believe the Mississippi was ahead after all].

We had seen enough to know that camping was going to be a problem because the banks were usually either muddy or swampy. Firm dry ground was increasingly rare.

Bob and I decided to try the Marines approach where we leap frog down the bayou, stopping at any potential site, jumping out, reconnoitering and as fast as possible decide yes or no. He and Kate worked one side and Joan and I worked the other.

Nothing was showing up and it was getting dark now. It was hard enough finding an acceptable spot with light. Without it, we figured it would be nearly impossible.

I got out at one promising site near the base of a hill. From a distance it looked flat and the woods were open and not thick with brush. I got out with some difficulty on the muddy banks and looked around. The ground was damp mud. Not sink-to-your-ankles mud but soft ground. Normally an absolutely no-go for camping. But considering the time, I decided to look closer. That's when I discovered hundreds of alligator foot prints. They looked a little like this:

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Then near the bank I saw an alligator slide where they must slither into the water. I could make out the entire print of an alligator's body. Even though I didn't actually see any alligators there, it was still spooky. We moved on.

(Mark Twain wrote about how in his days as a river pilot, he once tried to fool a passenger into believing that the alligators were once so thick in the Mississippi, that the river had to be dredged to move the alligators out of the way so the boats could pass. It's all in this Chapter 24 of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi) As it turns out, alligators hang out mostly in bayous, not the river.)

Not far down stream Bob and Katy found an okay spot on the opposite side. The take out was very difficult and the ground was covered with a thorny brush that tore at our ankles with every step but in no time at all we made a home out of it. We cut down several vines in our way, over the objections of our esteemed crew mate Mark, who wanted to save every last one of them from human destruction. Eventually, he too gave in, when it became apparent that if we didn't cut them down, they might strangle us. He will never admit this.

By the time I finished cooking Lipton noodles over instant mashed potatoes, it was late and we were all exhausted. We didn't even have any poetry or singing before going to sleep.

Stay tuned for Chapter V, Wherein we hunt for the Big Muddy.

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