Monday photo feature

 

I've always loved old steel truss bridges, and we've got three of them crossing the Mississippi River here at Memphis.  This was my view of them yesterday, when the river was flowing at about 36.9 feet on the Memphis gauge.

There are plans to build a new bridge that will replace the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge as the route of Interstate 55.  Construction is supposed to begin next year.  It needs to be done: the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge predates the Interstate system and has never met the specs for an Interstate highway.  And I expect the new bridge will be an impressive feat of engineering.  But will it have the character of those steel-truss spans of the 19th and early 20th centuries?  It could, but I'll believe it when I see it.

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Weekend paddling footage

If I thought long and hard, I could probably come up with something to write about the paddling I've been doing lately.  But it's really so much easier to let some video footage do the talking.

Here's a short video of what I did Saturday and yesterday.  As I've been reporting here, the Mississippi River is flowing at quite a high level right now: on Saturday it was a little over 37 feet on the Memphis gauge, and yesterday it was a little under 37 feet.

I went out Saturday hoping to shoot some footage of the old steel bridges downstream of downtown Memphis.  But with a strong south wind blowing and a lot of barge traffic out on the river, I ended up attempting some downwind paddling instead.  The conditions were decent but not ideal, and I was not in my most stable surfski and was having trouble relaxing and paddling hard for each run.  So I wasn't really styling it out there.  The video doesn't show the most dramatic moment of Saturday's paddle, when I returned to the bank along Tom Lee Park and found several city police officers waiting for me.  Apparently somebody in the park had thought I was in distress and dialed 911.  The cops didn't hassle me; they just wanted to be sure everything was all right.  I told them I was fine and thanked them for checking.  This is not the first time I've had rescue authorities called on me, and it always makes me wonder how somebody can think I look so hapless while doing something I've spent most of my life trying to be good at.  I think the truth lies in our city's cultural ethos: over ninety percent of Memphians seem to think that the Mississippi River is a dangerous place and cannot comprehend that there are a handful of us who might actually have some fun out there.

Oh well... I was back out there yesterday, and while it was breezy again, the river wasn't nearly as rough as it had been Saturday.  So I got to make my trip down to the old bridges.  We've got three of them spanning that part of the river.  The oldest one is the one in the middle, the Frisco Bridge, which opened in 1892.  It carries a single railroad track across the river.  The next-oldest one is the one on the upstream side, the Harahan Bridge (opened 1916).  It's also a railroad bridge, and it also has cantilevered platforms ("wagonways") on either side that once allowed automobiles to cross the river.  Today one of those wagonways has been repurposed as a bike-pedestrian path, the "Big River Crossing."  On the downstream side sits the newest bridge, the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, opened in 1949.  It's solely for automobiles and currently carries Interstate 55 across the river.

Anyway... hopefully this background information will enhance your enjoyment of the video, as will the soundtrack.  I pretty much always have music in my head, and the songs here, performed by Cookie Monster, Chris Thile, the Chandler Travis Philharmonic, and Burl Ives, are as likely as any to be taking up residence in my brain.

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Monday photo feature

 

If you kept up with my sporadic posts this past winter, then you know I had a couple of "dry-land" workout routines.  Yesterday morning I stopped to take a picture of the spot where I liked to do one of those routines.  What we're looking at here is the place where I did some running and some core exercises and some medicine ball drills.

I know exactly what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Hey... that ain't no dry land!"  And you're right.  Yesterday morning, at which time the Mississippi River was flowing at about 36.2 feet on the Memphis gauge, my workout spot was under water.

At normal levels, the Mississippi is inside its banks on the far side of that row of trees.  On this side of the trees is what we call the Greenbelt Park, a nice grassy strip of land that's ideal for anybody who wants to walk, run, toss a frisbee, fly a kite, walk a dog, have a picnic, or anything else that one goes to a public park to do.  But when the river rises into the mid-30s, all dry-land activities get put on hold.  On Saturday I paddled my boat over this piece of water.

A couple of days ago I saw a social media post moaning that "The park has been devastated!!!!"  I shook my head and thought, "Come on now, knock it off with the drama already."  Nothing has been devastated.  In a week or two or three--depending on what kind of rain falls upstream--the floodwater will recede as it continues its journey to the Gulf of Mexico.  The park will be muddy for a while, and the grass will be brown, but in quick order the ground will dry out and the grass will green back up and the park will be as good as ever.  I've seen it happen dozens of times.  Then, once more, people can work out, or play, or relax, right within view of the majestic Mississippi River.

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Water from the sky and from higher ground

Some interesting events have transpired since my last post.  The weather has been the biggest story, as an extremely wet storm system moved across the Southeast and lower Midwest starting around the second of April.  Before the rain arrived in the Memphis area we had some gale-force south wind, and I made sort of a timid effort to do some downwinding out on the Mississippi River in front of Tom Lee Park.  Timid, because the water is still pretty cold at this time of year, and I didn't have my most stable surfski with me.

The first round of heavy rain moved in late on April 2, and while tornadoes visited parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and rural west Tennessee, my city was spared that kind of disaster.  I stayed indoors and worked on non-athletic projects on April 3 while the rain pounded the roof.

April 4 was actually a pretty nice day, as the rain took a break.  I got down to the river and paddled for an hour that morning.  But by the next day the rain was back with a vengeance, and I was grateful to live in a neighborhood that sits on pretty high ground.  Flash flooding was rampant in lower-lying areas as the torrential rain went on and on.

In all, about twelve inches of rain fell on Memphis in a four-day period.  And that same system of rain moved ever so slowly over the watersheds of the Tennessee, Cumberland, Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, and upper Mississippi Rivers.  There has been considerable flooding, especially in the state of Kentucky.  Now, a whole lot of water is visiting Memphis in another way: flowing down the lower Mississippi River.  The day I paddled in those strong winds, the river registered around 8.5 feet on the Memphis gauge.  Today, the reading is 36.4 feet.  I'm not sure I've ever seen the river rise nearly 30 feet in less than two weeks.  Normally, a two-foot rise in one day is considered a big deal; last Monday, the river rose 5.6 feet.

Yesterday, when the level was 35.3 feet, I availed myself of the watery abundance to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This is something I try to get out and do at least once a year, when the water level allows it: you need at least 18 or 19 feet of water on the gauge to enjoy a comfortable paddling depth around the top end of the Bar and down its west side.  Water depth was not a concern at all yesterday.  At one point I paddled over the inundated lower tier of the Greenbelt Park, where I was doing my running workouts just a few weeks ago.  For a paddler like me who starts and finishes at Harbortown Marina, the distance is usually about 12.5 miles.  With so much water yesterday, I was able to cut off some distance at the top end of the Bar and at the south end of Mud Island, and my G.P.S. device measured the distance at 19.45 kilometers, or about 12.1 miles.  My elapsed time yesterday was just over one hour, 56 minutes.  It takes a good solid effort to break two hours.

Paddling around the Bar never fails to leave me utterly exhausted for the rest of the day.  The weather was beautiful yesterday and I spent the afternoon just being lazy.

I returned to the river this morning with the intention of paddling easy for an hour.  There was a somewhat strong wind blowing from the south, and once I got out of the harbor I played around in the bumps out on the river.  Doing brief sprints out there seemed to help me feel better than I'd felt before paddling.

Right now I'm dealing with a little injury, though not one that will keep me out of the boat, fortunately.  Since Thursday I've had pain in the right side of my jaw.  It really hurts when I chew food.  Maybe it's a torn muscle, or a strained ligament... I really don't know.  All I know is that it feels like something of that nature.  I can often feel something popping in the right side of my jaw, as if the "hinge" that joins my upper and lower jaws is broken.  I'm hoping that it will heal itself in the next few days, but if it doesn't I guess I'll have to seek medical attention.  The thing is, I'm not sure if the dentist is the right doctor for this, or somebody else, like an orthopedist, maybe.

Whatever the case, I'll keep on paddling, even if I have to do it with my jaw wired shut.

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