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.
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
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