 |
| Related Items |
|
|
|
|
|
 A canoeist heads for the water. (Photographs by Kolin Smith) |
In just 30 seconds I have him up to our canoe. He's maybe 12 inches long, a beautiful mottled olive color, possessed of a wild eye. After I unhook him, he rests in my hands for a few seconds, stunned and impossibly vivid, like a traveler from another dimension waking to the world of air and sunlight. I move him back and forth through the water until he revives, suddenly snaps his body and darts back into the depths.
My wife, Jane, and I float on, past riffles and rock ledges, giant sycamores that overlean the water and blue herons stalking the shallows. It's so scenic I can hardly believe we began the day slugging it out in Saturday traffic on I-66.
You'd need a heart of flint not to love the James River, my personal candidate for best canoeing-fishing-camping river within three hours of the Beltway. The paddling is easy, the Virginia Piedmont countryside is scenic, the fishing is at worst so-so and at best memorable. And if you go now, before the frat boys from Charlottesville start wondering how many kegs of beer they can float in an inner tube, most of the other people you see will be cows.
From its birth at the confluence of the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers in the Allegheny foothills, the James meanders 340 miles through the heart of the Old Dominion to the Chesapeake Bay. In 1607, the first permanent English settlement in the New World was scratched out on its banks at Jamestown. The river offered the best route into the unknown country to the west, and barely a hundred years after that perilous first landing, English colonists were building the regal plantations of Shirley, Berkeley and Westover along the James near Richmond and getting rich supplying Europe's insatiable demand for tobacco.
An English naturalist named Mark Catesby described a trip up the river, then called the Saint James, in 1714: "At sixty miles from the mountains, the river, which fifty miles below was a mile wide,
is here contracted to an eighth part, and very shallow, being fordable in many places, and so full of rocks, that by stepping from one to another it was everywhere passable. Here we killed plenty of a particular kind of wild geese; they were very fat by feeding on fresh water snails, which were in great plenty, sticking to the tops and sides of the rocks. The low lands joining to the rivers were vastly rich, shaded with trees that naturally dislike a barren soil, such as black walnut, plane and oaks of vast stature."
 Minor rapids add to the excitement. |
The hardest part of any canoe trip is not the paddling, setting up the tent or even discovering that the white substance you just put in the last of the instant coffee is SPF 30 sunscreen. No. The hard part is getting out of your house and into the car. In our case, the distractions included forgetting to arrange with my parents to take care of Snoop, the dog, and thus having to ask my dad to come over and pick her up. Then we noticed, about the time we passed the Virginia Welcome Center on 66, that we'd forgotten our tent and had to turn back. By this point, Jane and I were having second thoughts about spending the weekend together in a small tent.
We finally reached Hatton Ferry around 1 o'clock. The main outfitter on this section of the river is James River Runners, operated by Jeff Schmick, who quit his day job as a Pepsi-Cola truck driver 20 years ago and started up the business with his wife and two canoes. Now he has more than a dozen people working for him and on a typical July weekend will put 600 people on the river. When we pull up to his office, a 19th-century store a few hundred yards from the ferry itself (one of just two remaining poled ferries in the United States), the store is staffed only by three brown dogs whose tails thump against our legs when we scratch their ears. A few minutes later, Schmick's truck pulls up. "Kinda slow this time of year," he tells us. "Seems like everybody wants to wait until it's 90 degrees and low water before they come out." Jane and I pile our gear in the back of the truck and squeeze into the cab, and Schmick hauls us up to the put-in at Wingina, gives us maps showing where we can camp for the night and drives off.
The first moments on the river come as a shock. Suddenly our rough morning seems insignificant, a million miles away. It's just the two of us and this ancient, purposeful water, the green weeds streaming in the current beneath the boat and the sound of the wind in the trees. It's one of those bluebird days, high pressure pushing the clouds against the edge of the sky and the sun warming our backs as we paddle. Double-winged dragonflies zip along, flying reconnaissance missions half an inch off the water. There are a couple of people in one bright red canoe a quarter-mile ahead of us down the river. We know they're fishing only by the occasional glint of sun off their wet lines. Other than that, the river, which as Catesby noted appears to be the eighth part of a mile wide here, belongs to us. It is unreasonably lovely: farm fields and woods and black cattle drinking from the river like something out of an English landscape painting.
 On the James. |
Schmick has warned us that the campsite is short of firewood and that we should snag some on the way down. The map he gave us is not to scale, so it's hard to know how close we are. But when we come across the remains of a blown-out beaver dam in the channel of an island, we load up likely pieces of wood. Two hours later, when we finally swing into the campsite, the boat is piled perilously high, a bonfire in search of a match.
The great luxury of camping is that once you've set up the tent and finished dinner, there's nothing more required of you. So what you do is spend several hours poking the fire and rearranging the logs to yield the most pleasing patterns of flame. I'm an architectural fire builder; I favor the vertical, tepee style. It's how my father taught me, it's how he said the Indians did it, and it appeals most directly to the flames' desire to travel upward. Also, a vertical fire tends to collapse inward, so it burns itself out without spreading. Jane, on the other hand, favors the classic horizontal log with an even flame across it. So what we do is take turns. I manage the fire for a while and she admires my work, then we switch. We do this until we have finished the bottle of wine and the moon has set and the fire is reduced to orange coals and it doesn't seem possible that this same morning we were angry at each other. By 9 o'clock it has been dark for more than two hours and we crawl into our sleeping bags and sleep for 11 hours.
In the morning, loading up the boat, we watch a black rat snake five feet long slither out of the water and up through the grass. It stops about 10 feet away, ignoring us, testing the air with its tongue. "Are you sure it's not poisonous?" Jane asks. "Yep," I answer. The only poisonous snake that looks remotely like it is a water moccasin, which doesn't get that long, is much fatter and doesn't range this far north. Still, it's a very capable-looking animal. It lies there, its head raised nearly a foot off the ground, before slithering on.
Six hours later, we land back at Hatton Ferry. Two days on the river have left us feeling ridiculously calm, centered and happily married. Jeff Schmick comes down from the shop to get the boat and drive us and our gear the hundred yards back to our car. "Well, you guys look a lot more relaxed than when I put you on the water," he says. Jane asks if that isn't usually the case with everybody. "Oh, yeah," he says. "River has a way of smoothing the kinks out of everything."
Bill Heavey last wrote for the Magazine about getting engaged.
To Test the Waters: James River Runners is south of Charlottesville near Scottsville, about a three-hour drive from D.C. (804-286-2338; www.jamesriver.com). Other outfitters on the 100-mile stretch of the James from below Lynchburg to above Richmond include James River Basin Canoe Livery (540-261-7334) and West View Livery and Outfitters (804-457-2744). To receive an information packet from the Virginia Tourism Corp., call 1-888-42-FLOAT.
Canoeing on the James depends on the weather and water levels, but normally starts in early April. A good rule of thumb is to stay home unless the combined air and water temperature is more than 110 degrees; less than that and you're risking hypothermia. (For the river conditions and weather forecast, check the James River Runners Web site.) Bring sunscreen, shoes you can get wet in, and a change of dry clothes.
The section of river in this article is Class I and II water, meaning there are some riffles with rocks that require the ability to turn. But it's nothing a novice canoeist with a little bit of training shouldn't be able to handle.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMSxedKrrWisopbDpriOn5yarKWnsrR70qmpoqaXZLeiucSsqaKulad9dH2TcnBnoKSi