Paddling and camping on the Mississippi River Part 3: Is touring cooler than it used to be?   by Elmore Holmes February, 2006        This paddling/camping trip I recently took on the Mississippi River was organized under the auspices of Memphis Whitewater, whose cyberspace address (www.memphiswhitewater.com) is a virtual gathering place for Mid South paddlers who like their water fast and steep.      I was a little surprised that members of a whitewater group would want to spend an entire weekend on the Mississippi River--and proclaim it on the group's website for all to see!      The Mississippi, large and powerful as it is, does not offer much in the way of whitewater thrills.  Though certain weather conditions might produce anything from small chop to six-foot seas, most of the time the river feels like a large slow-moving lake.  In other words, the river's baseline M.O. is just a small step up from flatwater.

Elmore's columns appear monthly at the Outdoors, Inc.,website: www.outdoorsinc.com

     In the paddling world I grew up in, the term "flatwater" wasn't just a word; it was a sentence.
     At the summer camp I attended in the North Carolina mountains, paddling on the camp lake was a sort of purgatory, a dreaded hoop each camper had to jump through to be invited on a river trip for some real paddling on water that flowed.
     The toll for paddling Section IV of the Chattooga, the cutting-edge river run of the time, was a formidable one: after the last rapid, the paddler faced two miles of flatwater to reach the first available takeout on Tugaloo Reservoir.
     The late William Nealy, whose cartoons made him the supreme arbiter of opinion and attitude in the whitewater boating fraternity, pronounced anyone who actually enjoyed paddling on flatwater a dorkus maximus.
     As a typical insecure adolescent male, I eagerly embraced this credo.  Determined to wedge myself into the upper percentiles of the sport's macho pecking order, I declared my allegiance to all things rapid and my disdain for all things tranquil.
     I began to spend many weekends far away from the Mid South, where river gradients are infuriatingly low.  I fell in with a group of avid whitewater boaters who, more weekends than not, hit the road to higher ground, and became intimate with Class III-V rapids in Alabama, east Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Colorado.
     My skill level climbed, and then my competitive impulses took over.  I got up the nerve to enter some whitewater slalom races, and really enjoyed them.  I wanted to compete in some national-level races, but I knew that to do so without embarassing myself I would have to start paddling more often than just the weekends, and that meant paddling here at home... on flatwater.
     I gritted my teeth and did every workout one can do in the absence of whitewater.  I set up practice gates on the sluggish Wolf River near Shelby Farms and worked on technique there.  I went to Patriot Lake and did stroke drills and sprints.  I did long paddles on Memphis Harbor and the Mississippi River to smooth out my strokes.
     It turned out that even on calm water, I wasn't wasting my time: my stroke form and boat control improved, and I got comfortable doing things that had once felt awkward.  But an even more curious thing happened: I found I enjoyed what I was doing beyond just developing skills that would pay dividends on the Ocoee or the Pigeon or the Animas or the Kern.  I developed a familiarity and even a fondness for my local waters.  I enjoyed the startling sights such as enormous catfish leaping two feet out of the water, and I enjoyed the soothing, reassuring phenomena such as the same bird sunning itself on the same sandbar day after day.
     I also learned that "flatwater" is an elastic term if applied to the Mississippi or any other open body of water.  The Big River, I discovered, had many moods over its broad range of water levels.  No day on the river offered quite the same set of paddling challenges as the previous one, and the balance, poise, and technique I had learned on whitewater served me well more often than I had expected.
     By the time my "serious" slalom career wound down, I was a sure-enough lover of the Mississippi.  I had made friends with several people who took sea kayaks out on the river, and soon enough I too was paddling one of those long boats that are useless for shredding waves or throwing ends.  My conversion to the Dark Side was complete.
     I guess I was a little self-conscious, feeling that my old whitewater pals were looking at me and shaking their heads.  I don't know for sure that they were, but if one of them had gone and done what I'd done, I know I'd have been shaking my head.  There's that macho insecurity again.
     But I was enjoying myself too much to stop.  I had found new challenges as a paddler and was developing new skills and greater fitness.
 
     So here I am, a whitewater boater who found satisfaction in touring, and I guess the question that gnaws at me is, Am I all alone, or have other whitewater paddlers made similar discoveries about touring?  Is touring really cooler than it used to be, or have I become more of a nerd as I've gotten older?
     I wish I could tell you that I've done meticulous research on the subject, but alas, my evidence is strictly circumstantial.  The Memphis Whitewater camping trip on the Mississippi will not stand up as hard evidence, as it turned out most of the participants were not former or current adrenaline junkies.  There were only a handful of proven whitewater devotees among the sixteen participants, and the most notorious members of Memphis Whitewater--the young studs who reportedly run 500-foot-per-mile creeks and pal around with Clay Wright and Eric Jackson at Rock Island--were nowhere to be seen.
     Maybe touring is just as dorky as it ever was, and my hypothesis of its greater acceptance among hairboaters is just denial on my part.  Maybe my spending less time in the whitewater boat and more time in the touring boat is a sign that I'm turning into a middle-aged dorkus maximus, just like my spending less time listening to Nomeansno and fIREHOSE and more time listening to Albert King and Amy LaVere.
     But I refuse to raise the white flag all the way.  I believe touring has some attributes that all paddlers, even whitewater boaters, can and should appreciate.  And I see signs, circumstantial though they may be, that many of the young hairboaters really do regard these attributes with a modicum of respect.
     With the possible exception of those who do nothing but park-and-play, all whitewater boaters are, to some extent, tourers.  Even as a young paddler, I was lured not just by the rapids but by all the secrets hidden down in that gorge below the highway bridge.  I found satisfaction not only in the roller coaster ride but also in the simple thrill of seeing things that few other human beings get to see.  And I know I wasn't the only one: the whitewater boaters of the 70s and 80s proudly called themselves river runners.  The urge for exploration has only intensified since I got myself a touring boat.  Now I don't drive over any body of water--river or bay, urban or remote, rapid or quiet--without some desire to get down on it and paddle out of sight.
     Becoming a good touring paddler--one who can use his energy efficiently and cover great distances with a minimum of effort--requires a surprising degree of skill and many hours of practice.  While whitewater demands a greater variety of skills, the forward stroke of the strong tourer has intricacies that even Olympic sprint champions have not thoroughly mastered.
     Touring boat designs have improved dramatically in the last ten or fifteen years.  Whenever I talk to a whitewater paddler who has tried sea kayaking and claims to hate it, I suspect that his experience was soured by a cheap bathtub-like boat design.  Today's high-performance boats glide effortlessly and are a delight to paddle.  For those seeking an extra challenge, the fastest boats are also the tippiest; but there are also some stable boats on the market that are surprisingly fast as well.
     Finally, a large open body of water, be it the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, San Francisco Bay, or the open ocean, has a majesty that can be as inspiring to behold as the most cataclysmic waterfall.  Maybe not every whitewater boater can relate, but my friend Sonny, whose river-running career spans several decades, can.  Here is what he wrote on the Memphis Whitewater message board following our camping trip:
 

     I know that this is a forum for whitewater, and the Mississippi is not whitewater, but it is still a unique and humbling experience.  The Mississippi is a REALLY BIG river, and I never get tired of trying to absorb the scale of it.  Even at record-low water, you could barely make out someone paddling on the other side of the river--it's always a LOT farther than it seems.  I kept thinking, as I looked at the stone revetments and dikes way above us and extending hundreds of yards up dry beaches, that in the spring these were under 10 feet of water and made for interesting waves and eddy currents.
     The native Americans called the Mississippi the 'Father of Waters,' and it always seems that to me.