Paddling and camping on the Mississippi River
Part 1: The Great Storm

by Elmore Holmes
December, 2005


 





     I thought I was dreaming a Pink Floyd album.  It could have been The Wall, the part where that ethereal wind is blowing, or maybe Dark Side of the Moon, where those helicopters keep buzzing by.
     But it was no dream when my tent rolled over on its side.
     It was about 1:30 AM CST, and what I had thought were helicopters was the sound of my tent fly buzzing in the wind, and what I had thought was the wind was, well, the wind.
       As a cold front moved through the area, it brought one violent storm with it, and I couldn't have been in a spot with less protection.  A friend of mine who lives in the South Bluffs neighborhood of downtown Memphis once told me that the price of their spectacular river views is occasional beatings from the severe weather systems that move across the river from the Arkansas delta.  Now, I had taken that degree of exposure one step further by pitching my little nylon tent on a Mississippi River sandbar near Shelby Forest, some 20 miles upstream of downtown Memphis.
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     Several camping gear manufacturers make tent stakes that work well in sand or snow, but I own no such stakes.  All I had were the standard stakes for ordinary soil, and they popped up out of that sand like ripe carrots.  My tent was blowing away, with me in it.
     I did my best to remain calm and devise a plan of defense against the mighty gale.  But the brilliant ideas weren't flowing, and all I could think to do was throw all of my weight against the upwind side of the tent and hope that would be enough to keep this tumblin' tumbleweed anchored in one spot.
     For the first time ever, I envied my old classmates who had taken sedentary desk jobs right out of college and become obese by age thirty.  It became clear that my scrawny frame was no match for the roaring southwest wind, and I decided to crawl outside and collapse the tent before I took flight.
     I got my tent down, and my problems were over... except that now I was out in the open, fully exposed to the wind-driven sand, and the downpour was moving in as well.  I looked over at the tent of my nearest neighbor, a girl named Tracy, and saw a flashlight shining within.  I staggered over with my collapsed tent in tow and begged for admission, and Tracy took pity on me.  We pulled my tent in after me and fished out my sleeping bag and pad.
     Our combined weight seemed to be enough to keep her tent in one spot, and we settled in as the rain hammered down.  Water dripped from a couple of leaks in the ceiling, but I figured it was a small price to pay for shelter from a Big River storm.  Eventually the weather relented, and I even managed another hour or two of sleep as dawn approached.
     By sunrise the front had moved on, and fellow campers began to emerge from their tents to inspect the aftermath.  It seemed that the part of the sandbar I was camped on had taken the worst hit.  Sonny, who had been camping not far from me in his brand-new bright-orange backpacker's tent, said he thought he was "going to Oz in an orange kite."  Nearby, Leslye was in a solo backpacker's tent that she said had "shrunk as the storm raged on until it was essentially a bivvy sack--it was like sliding into a nylon bag and having God shake you for an hour and a half or so."
     Those at the other end of our compound had fared better, having been situated on the lee side of a large willow thicket at the crest of the sandbar.  Several of them had even slept through the whole thing.  Vincent, who had chosen the northernmost tent site, had taken his share of the gale force, but stayed relaxed enough to sit up and read for much of the night.
     A very important question remained: did we still have our boats?  We had paddled down the day before from a putin near Drummonds, Tennessee, about fifteen miles upstream, and had beached our boats by the riverside, a hundred yards or so downhill from our campground.  A rising water level hadn't been a concern even with rain in the forecast, as the huge Mississippi watershed isn't affected by a thunderstorm the way a small mountain creek is.  But the wind was a different story: any boat blown into the water would be a lost boat.
     As I walked down toward the water, the scene was similar to one of newfallen snow: all our footprints from the day before had been swept clean by the mighty wind.  I reached the edge of the beach and found all our boats almost exactly where we had left them.
     Except mine.
     I had dragged my boat about thirty yards above the waterline and left it between Charles's boat and Vincent's boat.  Their two boats were in the same spot, partially buried beneath a new layer of sand.  But my boat was nowhere in sight.
     This was most troubling because it was not actually my boat.  Having spent all my money on silly race boats of one kind or another, I don't actually own a touring boat, and I had borrowed my girlfriend Martha's beautiful carbon-Kevlar Looksha III kayak for this trip.
     And now it had vanished.  How would I ever explain this to Martha?
     I stood there gazing at nothing in particular, pondering the meaning of my solitary bad luck.  Could somebody have possibly stolen my boat?  Trolls from the river bottom, maybe?
     Then, in the corner of my eye, I saw the familiar Kevlar-colored hull.  I looked up the beach and saw Martha's boat lying deck-down, more than fifty yards from where I had left it the night before.
     It became apparent that the boat had rolled to its new resting place.  As I walked the straight line from its former location to its current one, I found several items, half-buried in the sand, that I had left in the cockpit: a water bottle, a couple of straps for securing the boat to the top of a car, a bottle of sunscreen.  Why had the boat rolled while the others stayed put?  Because it was the lightest boat in the group, maybe, and because I had taken almost all the gear out of it.  Oh well.  The boat itself seemed to have no appreciable damage to the deck or hull, so while fate had messed with my mind a bit, it had otherwise let me off easy.
     I hiked back up to camp, where people were shaking the sand from their gear, digging out breakfast food, and even getting a fire started from rain-soaked driftwood.  We brewed some coffee and traded stories of the ordeal the night before.  Soon, we would be back in our boats, weighted down with our wet gear, completing the journey to Memphis.
     Were we foolish to be out on the Mississippi River in such conditions?  Some would argue so.  But Leslye, in a post on the Memphis Whitewater message board a day later, summed it up about as eloquently as anybody:
     Paddling is a step outside your regular world, a place where unexplainable things happen.  You might find yourself in a sudden rescue situation, you may be thrashed in a hydraulic endlessly, or find yourself peering into the windows of the soul of someone who was a stranger just that morning and making a connection that needs no explanation.  You leave for the weekend and come back a different person.
     You can't relate that story to an outsider.  You go to work on Monday and when your office buddies ask enthusiatically, "How was the rafting trip?" you just answer, "It was okay."  It's really something that only you and your weekend soulmates understand.

 

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