Monday photo feature

When the Mississippi River is very low, it's a long, steep hike up the ramp from my marina to the parking lot.  No matter how tough a session in the boat I might have had, going back up this ramp often seems like the hardest thing I have to do when I go down to the river.

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Physical health and environmental health and robust river flows: somehow they're all connected

After a very warm September followed by some unseasonably chilly temperatures, we're finally having a few days of near-perfect fall weather.  Yesterday I got in the boat and headed out of the harbor to see what was happening on the big river.

Right at the harbor's mouth I found a barge rig moving upriver and producing some of the nicest surfing waves I'd seen in a while.  I went out and got at least a half-dozen nice rides.  My downwinding skills are anything but sharp these days, and barge wakes are rarely a true downwind environment anyway, but I managed to link runs a couple of times, and that lifted my spirits a bit in this tough chapter of my athletic life.

I visited the spine surgeon last Monday, and we concluded that my best option for my arm and shoulder achiness is simply to live with it for the time being.  As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, surgery would restrict the range of motion in my neck, and I consider that worse than what I've currently got; but the doctor pointed out that over time my current condition might worsen, making surgery a more appealing option.

So I'm choosing between bad and worse, and that's a rather disheartening state of affairs.  But getting after those barge wakes cheered me up a bit: not only was I able to coax the necessary sprints out of my sore body, but also my cardiovascular fitness seemed up to the task even though I've done just a minimum of paddling and other exercise for the last two months.

I should also note that as tempting as it is to write myself off as an over-the-hill has-been, I've in fact got some good paddling performance still in me.  Back on July 15 I raced pretty well for the first half of the Blackburn Challenge, and the trouble I had in the second half wasn't because of my nerve and muscle woes.

As I re-entered the harbor yesterday, a small boat with an outboard motor came zooming in along with me.  I quickly moved over to see if I could catch its wake, and when the two guys in the boat saw what I was doing, they shouted their approval and cooperated with me.  We cruised up the lower stretch of the harbor around 8 miles per hour (12.9 kilometers per hour) until we hit a no-wake zone and had to knock it off.

The Mississippi River dropped below -12.0 feet on the Memphis gauge for the first time ever in the middle of last week, but it had risen to -10.5 feet by the time I got back down there this morning.  It's forecast to be up to -9.4 feet by a week from now, and that's some serious high water compared to what we've had lately.  I could no longer see the bottom in that spot I posted photos of last weekend.

I paddled out of the harbor hoping to find some more good wakes to surf, but the barge traffic was idle.  So I settled for an hour of steady paddling.

There was a lot of floating litter in the harbor, largely because of the rising water level, I expect.  As I went along I picked up bits of trash until the space just fore of my footboard was nearly overflowing.  Do such deeds of good citizenship make me feel smug and superior?  Maybe.  But I would submit that my main motivation is my desire to paddle on water that's not all littered up.

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Monday photo feature

I'm a sucker for wilderness adventure nonfiction.  The best-known titles I've read include Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Into The Wild, as well as Ernest Shackelton's diaries from his Endurance expedition to Antarctica in the early 20th century.  I've read lots of stuff you're less likely to have heard of, too.  And nothing gets my juices flowing like a story that involves canoeing and kayaking.

Wickliffe W. "Wick" Walker was among the top whitewater racers in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Following a career in the elite military forces, he became one of the world's leading organizers of wilderness whitewater expeditions, his best-known of which was a foray into the forbidden Tsangpo Gorge in the eastern Himalaya in the fall of 1998, an undertaking that ended in the tragic death of kayaker Doug Gordon.  Walker's account of that expedition, Courting the Diamond Sow, was published in 2000.

I had a chance to meet Wick Walker in 2007, when we both attended the whitewater slalom nationals at Deep Creek, Maryland.  I don't think we spoke for more than a few minutes, but I made sure to share my appreciation of Courting the Diamond Sow.  I found him to be quite an unassuming, down-to-earth soul and it was hard to believe I was speaking to a giant of global exploration.

Walker now has a new book out, and my copy is pictured above.  Torrents As Yet Unknown is a collection of accounts of adventures in remote river gorges that took place in the second half of the 20th century, including Walker's own Tsangpo expedition.  It's a fascinating look into the personalities, the challenges they faced, and the evolution of the technology used in the exploration of Planet Earth.

You can find Torrents As Yet Unknown in the usual online places--Amazon and Borders and so on.  Of course, I encourage everyone to support his or her cool local bookshop whenever possible.

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Dealing with aches and dealing with mud

The quest for a pain-free existence goes on.  I finally got in a follow-up visit with the spine surgeon after my second transforaminal (nerve block) injection, which seems to have brought no lasting improvement.  The doctor reiterated his reluctance to resort to surgery, and he made a point that I'd previously been unaware of: if I do go through with a surgical procedure, I can expect to lose quite a bit of my neck's range of motion.  To me, that sounds worse than my current state of being.

The doctor referred me to a clinic that ran some electrical current through my arms to test for any nerve damage.  I'll see him again tomorrow morning to go over the results of that test, and discuss what options I've got left.

In the meantime, I remain achy and sore.  Anybody who's ever lifted weights knows that when you start a new routine that your muscles aren't used to, you'll experience soreness for several days until the muscles adapt.  Well, these days I'm feeling like that all the time, and I haven't lifted a weight in several months.  When I paddled yesterday morning, the soreness was quite burdensome even though all other aspects of my fitness checked out okay.  Once again I focused on leg drive and rotation, getting my core muscles involved as much as possible.

There's a new low-water record for the Mississippi River here.  Last Wednesday the level bottomed out at 11.52 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge.  The previous record, set last year, had been -10.81 feet.  Nowhere is the low water more apparent than at the marina where I keep my boat.  When I went down there yesterday, the river flowing right at -11.0 feet, the entire end of the facility closest to the bank was up on dry land, and most of the houseboats were sitting in the mud.  I snapped this photo from the main pier:

Those ridges you can see through the sky's reflection are mud, under just a couple of inches of water.

When I got back down there this afternoon, the water was about half a foot lower (-11.48 feet).  I took another photo of approximately the same spot:

The forecast for the coming week says the river will be on a gradual rise.  That's a good thing, because we paddlers are about to run out of easy dock access to the water.  This photo shows the one low dock for human-powered craft that's still on some water:

That water that's within reach of the dock is only maybe four inches deep.  Once I was in my boat I had to sort of pole my way out to deeper water.  I stayed in the harbor and paddled fairly easy, checking out the parts of the bottom that I'd never seen exposed before.  I saw all manner of refuse that's been hidden underwater for who knows how long.  Under the Hernando DeSoto Bridge I saw the bottom half of a department store mannequin, and that brought back a vague memory of a film that was shot in Memphis years ago with a scene in which a body was thrown from the bridge.  I wonder if the mannequin could have been the prop for the body.  If so, shame on the filmmakers for not policing their litter.

By and by I paddled up toward the north end of the harbor.  As I moved along, a couple of times I hit submerged objects with my paddle.  I checked the depth with my paddle and discovered the water was only maybe two feet deep even though I was still over a half-mile from the harbor's north end.  I decided to turn around and stay in deeper water.  There's no telling what kind of industrial debris has been hiding on the bottom for decades, and all I need is to bash my rudder on something like that.

At the end of an hour I slid into the shallow water back at the dock.  I wasn't feeling great, but I think I was less achy than yesterday.  In any case, I'm glad to be keeping a little something going as I wait for my desire to get after it more seriously to return.

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Monday photo feature

Low water continues to be the top story down at the Memphis riverfront.  As you can see here, my dock is pretty useless these days for the purpose of putting a boat in the water.  My boat is the long one in the white cover, and I've been carrying it around to the side of the marina facing away from us, where there's a dock that still has access to the water.

I took this photo yesterday, when the Mississippi River was flowing at -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.  That's just eight tenths of a foot higher than the lowest level ever recorded, which occurred last October.  The river was even lower Saturday: -10.2 feet.  I guess the good news at this moment is that the river is rising a little: the current forecast says it'll be all the way up to -9.4 feet by tomorrow evening.  But it isn't expected to go any higher than that in the near future.

To me, the most interesting thing about this photo is the grass that's growing on dirt that's normally deep underwater.  The water has been low for quite a while now.

One point I always feel obligated to make to people who don't live near the Mississippi is that the river is not "dry," as media coverage often leads one to believe.  Even at these near-historic-low levels, the Mississippi is still a very big, very powerful river.  Most of the national news coverage focuses on the economic impact of low river stages--the disruption to commercial barge traffic, primarily.  I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't be concerned about this problem--we should--but the reality is that the shipping industry is not why the river is there.  For that matter, paddling canoes and kayaks like I do isn't why the river is there, either.  The river is there to drain the continent and perpetuate the hydrologic cycle, like it was doing for millennia before we got here and like it'll be doing for millennia after we're gone.

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I'm still paddling a little

Yesterday I went down to the paddle for the first time in two weeks.  Paddling was out of the question last weekend because of my involvement in the Pink Palace Crafts Fair here in Memphis.  My weekdays continue to be occupied by work in my woodworking shop and at my rental property.

There was a succession of downstream-traveling barge rigs out on the Mississippi yesterday, and I went out to see what kind of surfing I could do.  The waves behind downstream-moving towboats are usually less solid for surfing than those behind up-bound rigs; and because of the way the pilots have to maneuver beneath all the bridges at downtown Memphis, the water is typically swirling and confused.  Nevertheless, I did manage to get several good surfs yesterday.

Throwing down the sprints to get on those waves definitely taxed my body.  My breathing held up just fine, but I could feel it in my muscles.  Both my deltoids were sore this morning, and when I returned to the river and found it free of barge traffic, I was happy to do just some steady paddling.  During this period of weekend-only paddling I'm trying extra hard to take the best strokes I can when I'm in the boat.  This morning I focused on doing most, if not all, of the work with my abdominal muscles, letting my arms be nothing more than the connection between the paddle and my core body.  Of course, it's hard not to employ the arm muscles at least a little, especially in unstable conditions out on the river.  But just the same, I tried to use the core muscles as exclusively as possible.  That meant intense leg drive--after all, torso rotation starts at the feet!

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