Summer on the river

by Elmore Holmes
August, 2005



     It was the latest in a very long string of hot and humid days.  As we crossed the Auction Avenue bridge over Memphis Harbor, the Mississippi River came into view: an opaque blanket of dusty haze hung over the brown liquid ribbon flowing through a broad mudflat gorge.
     My girlfriend Martha and I parked the car and made the long, steep descent into the gorge by way of the Harbortown Marina ramp.
     The water was at 8.5 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge--the lowest level in five years and within two and a half feet of the all-time low recorded back in the summer of 1988.
     The cause was no great mystery: drought conditions in the entire watershed, which includes the Ohio, Missouri, and upper Mississippi basins, had reduced the lower Mississippi to a paltry 50,000 cfs or so trickling between vast plains of sand and cracked mud.
     The dock, attached to the side of the marina nearest the bank, was beginning to run aground.  I walked onto it and scanned the exposed harbor bed, hoping to find sunken treasure.  Archeologists relish low-water periods on the Mississippi for the opportunity to find artifacts of Native American culture, the Civil War, and more.  I expected nothing so exotic on the harbor bottom, but would have been happy to recover one of the many items that fellow paddlers and I have dropped in the water over time: boat covers, sunglasses, sets of keys, and who knows what else.
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     But there was no time to seek gold in the Mississippi Mud.  Martha had afternoon commitments, so we got our boats off the racks--Martha her Looksha III touring kayak, I my Speedster surf ski--and launched onto the stagnant backwater that is Memphis Harbor in late summer.  Of course we had plenty of drinking water to see us through the swelter: Martha had a bottle stuck under the shock cord on her deck, and I carried a bike bottle on the console between my legs, which I had retrofitted with some bungee cord for just this purpose.
     We headed south, toward the harbor's mouth, passing beneath the Auction Avenue bridge, the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and the Mud Island monorail bridge.  Along the way we passed an old towboat that for some reason has been moored in the harbor for several months, and is currently sitting high and dry on the muddy bank.  We also passed a construction crew under contract with the states of Tennessee and Arkansas to shore up the Hernando DeSoto Bridge against the imminent threat of earthquakes.  They ought to be moving ahead of schedule with the water low and out of their way.
     We passed a few eyesores that most of the time are conveniently hidden beneath the harbor's surface: rusty pipes from long-ago dredging operations, tangled masses of steel cable that once tethered barges, and assorted chunks of concrete with rebar tentacles sticking out.  There was also the eyesore that persists at all water levels: litter.  At low water the would-be flotsam settles into the gooey muck.
     We got to the mouth of the harbor, where the Corps of Engineers had just finished dredging.  Places where I had been hitting the bottom with my paddle were now plenty deep.
     Out on the river we had a light breeze from the southwest, blowing at just the right angle to keep the sweat off our faces as we paddled both upstream and down.  We headed up to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, where the rarely-visible concrete platforms at the base of its pilings were exposed.
     We continued up along the Greenbelt Park.  The bank here is lined with revetment, a sort of concrete carpet placed by the Corps to check the river's wandering urges.  At the water's edge the revetment was crumbling and buckled, having been battered by Old Man River's current deep beneath the surface for decades.
     Across the river a series of dikes, built by the Corps to funnel water into the main shipping channel, protrudes from the bank.  Though deep underwater for much of the year, today they were high and dry.  Back when I was doing a lot of slalom racing I would paddle on the Mississippi at low water and practice moves in the eddies below these dikes.  The chief drawback was that at Memphis these dikes exist only on the Arkansas side, providing me exclusively with "river-right" eddies.
     After another half-mile or so, it was time to head back.  A towboat was coming down the river and we waited for it to pass.  It had to negotiate a "giant slalom" course of green and red buoys set by the Coast Guard to mark the deepest channel; the crux move was to get from river right over to the left-hand span of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge in less than a half-mile.
     The tow's wake reflected the low level, its waves piling high and beginning to break whenever they hit a shallow spot.  As we headed back downriver, I tried to catch a ride on the waves, but didn't get much.  Towboat wakes on the Mississippi are fickle.
     We turned up into the harbor, whose denizens were clearly in their "dog days" mode.   Everybody was looking to beat the heat: the ducks, who swim everywhere during milder weather, were hanging out in the shade under trees and bridges, and the turtles, who often sun themselves atop driftwood, were in the water with only their heads poking up for air.  The keepers of the gas station next to the Memphis Yacht Club were staying indoors where their window unit worked overtime.  Both the Yacht Club and the Harbortown Marina residents had moved their craft as far from the banks as possible to keep their boats afloat.
     We continued northward, our dock visible a few hundred yards in the distance.  The crickets and katydids sang to us with the background noise they provide every May through September.  The sweat now collecting on our brows and stinging in our eyes, we paddled steady and slow, hoping to put just a little bit more of this oppressive summer behind us.
 
 

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