The River Bio

Miller Pony
Originally uploaded by FreeManWalking

It began somewhere over the Cumberland. That perfect blend of all things Southern, for me, it was all things Tennessee. Sitting in a blue Cheverolet pickup truck between my granny and papa. The dashboard lights shone green and the tires made that ripping sound as we hit the deck plates where the asphalt turned to concrete and headed across the Cumberland River on a Friday night. Or was it a Saturday. Memories of childhood are always hazy. The Grand Ole Opry was on the radio. “Howdy boys…” The river seemed like it was far below and the brown beams of the iron bridge hovered just above our heads, so close when going over the hump that it looked like the top of the truck would hit them.
That was a young boy’s river crossing from the big city (of 20,000 people?) to the country. To the land of hills and hollers, goats and mules. River have always been a boundary that I could cross into a different world. The next day invariably found me walking in creeks, picking up rocks full of coils and curious shells imbedded in them.
And then there was my first job on the water, sinking pony beer bottles into the deep waters of Center Hill Lake while my dad and his friends smoked short cigarettes and drank Miller High Life…there was a steady stream of bottles to sink as that blue Dixie Devil boat speed across the water only to navigate into some out of the way cove and pull up next to a party pontoon.
And the triumvirate of my water birth came in a little green john boat on the same lake when granddaddy made me and my cousin poke our own minnows onto our hooks while my grandmother stretched out in the center of the boat working on a tan. We caught lots of crappie that day and I caught a bass of some sort, probably a large mouth which I knew by my granddaddy’s reaction he’d not expected me to do.
Somewhere in those deep memories began my love and appreciation of rivers. Beware the outdoor education given to your children. From the first time my parents took me to 135 foot tall Burgess Falls with its towering hemlocks and crashing water I have known the woods and water to be an enchanted place.
Later the river became a place to test my adolescent courage. Having just bought a bluegrass album (as if that didn’t take courage enough in seventh or eighth grade) a friend and I walked up to the pickup where the man sat staring out at the water. He had a trailer full of red canoes hooked to the truck. When we told him we wanted to rent a canoe he didn’t seem too concerned about our age or any number of things I would have thought about in this day and age. He just took our money and said “Be back here before six. And don’t go over the dam.” That first trip in a canoe I explored the water on my own terms, fighting to learn to steer, keeping a keen eye over my shoulder to see if the current was pulling us toward the crumbling concrete structure that once served to generate electricity in the old days before the TVA brought all the power to Columbia, Tennessee. We explored a creek where my friend swore he saw an alligator. Likely story.
As years went by I began to feel the first stirrings of an isolation and sadness that has lain with me on and off ever since. I sought the river as a place of solitude where I could sit and read or try to catch fish while others my age drove their cars over to friends’ houses or practiced high school sports or took part in their high school social groups. We are never as isolated or outcast as we think and now I realize had I just made the effort I could have been doing what other teenagers did on July 4th,1990 instead of sitting by myself at an out of the way point up the river with a new guidebook and a fishing pole. Sitting by the water amidst the mud crusted rocks, the water willow, and sycamore shoots had become my safe haven and my excuse for the laziness that kept me from putting forth the effort to make the social connections I should have.
In lieu of going to pool parties with the long, lithe high school girls I daydreamed about I spent my time alone or in the company of the poor and dispossessed; old overweight black people and affectionate “white trash ” women who sat on the muddy banks with chicken livers tied into knots of worn out panty hose hoping a catfish would come gobble up the rancid, sticky mess. Or maybe they would have a doughball twisted onto their hooks waiting for a carp or buffalo to suck it in. I’d sit with them then, as today, knowing I would likely catch the world’s smallest bluegill.
They would occasionally ask me about random books I’d be reading (“that boy reads all the time…”): “Walden, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Essays of E.B. White, assorted fields guides. But mostly we’d talk about how to catch and prepare certain fish. Carp was a common catch and a big topic of conversation was how to get the muddy taste out of it. (More than one recommended pressure cooking carp, bones and all, like canned salmon). These people were poor and though I grew up sort of poor I knew I wasn’t really poor. There would always be an out somewhere and sitting by the river with these women its something I realized they didn’t have. These fish that constituted my entertainment were part of their diet. Which invariably made me wonder why they would through plastic and Styrofoam containers into the river after they were done with them. Old Indian myths aside, it seems to me that those most connected to the land are the first ones to poor their used motor oil in the creek. Maybe it was all the couch cushions and tires and mattresses around us as we fished that made them feel like a little plastic chicken liver carton didn’t really matter. The detritus from upstream affects more than the landscape downstream…it affects the mindset for the entire course of the river.
I remember too when I first truly lost my way in the world. College, 1991. Having nearly failed chemistry in eleventh grade I decided to major in chemistry in college with an eye on medical school. I scraped and clawed all the way. For some reason English, history, or journalism didn’t seem like an option. Once again I let outside influences keep from what I’d rather be doing. I really didn’t think my parents would approve of a humanities major. One more reason to put the young ‘uns on their own as soon as they hit eighteen. Its better for everyone, especially the kid who is controlled by fear and inertia.
By the end of that first semester I sank into a dark funk as I’m prone to do in late fall and December. The one thing I remember (actually, I remember a lot of stuff like my high school girl friend giving me a hamster when I came home for Christmas break) from that time is an essay I wrote for English 101. In the essay I embrace my funk and surprisingly, my bad decisions. I go to the river where it is muddy, slightly flooded, and the trees are grey and bare against a leaden sky. I seem to face my demons amidst the noisy, nervous flitting of hundreds of thousands of starlings twitching in the trees and the menacing caw caws of crows. But Spring semester found me back at school, headed toward that chemistry degree, however poor my grades may be.
After college I didn’t know what to do. So I re-enrolled. I drank heavily, daily. I took ephedrine and spent my time with friends as damaged as I was damaged. One was a beautiful woman with a lush problem. She held my heart through a succession of relationships with other men. The other was a homosexual hell bent on booze, acquiring more and more student loans, and the eradication of religion from his life. His family were evangelicals.
The three of us and others would seek out waterfalls where we’d sit all day drinking cheap wine and being ne’er do wells. I remember the day I was supposed to report to jail to spend my 48 hours following a conviction for DUI. We sat at Hardscrabble Falls drinking Boones Strawberry Hill wine. We laid over one another in piles on big rocks pretending to be dead. There are pictures. At a quarter till six they dropped me off at the jail house.
This debauchery went on for a year or so. One summer day while driving back from the Rhea County Courthouse where we’d been to see the site of the Scopes Monkey Trial the homosexual (Tony) and I visited Fall Creek Falls State Park. We’d been drinking beer all day. Tony’s ire was up because of the trip to the courthouse, where Tennessee had been the first state in the union to put evolution on trial. (On the way back up Highway 111 we’d stopped at a church so he could urinate on the building).
At Fall Creek Falls we stopped at the overlook then began the short but steep walk down to the base of the falls. It was a hot summer day and a mist was rising off the falls despite the low, late summer flow. Two girls stood in the mist stretching their hands up toward the falling water. One of them, the prettier of the two had on a light yellow t-shirt and no bra. Her breasts showed sensually through the thin cotton. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I looked over at Tony and saw him sipping from his Styrofoam cup of beer looking suddenly drunk, disgruntled, and not pleased with his life. I wanted to tell him to stand with us and be cleansed by the water. But I knew he wouldn’t, he’d be suspect of anything approaching that close to baptism…even in the name of a pretty girls breasts which I don’t suppose he’d have had much interest in anyway.
I moved on. It was time.
I felt the young man’s itch to explore the big waters and see something of the world. I joined the Navy. For the first time I ventured into the oceans, swimming the white sand beaches and emerald waters of the Redneck Riviera at Pensacola. I moved to the West Coast, experiencing for the first time the high sea cliffs of Big Sur, and camping on the rocky headlands of Washington State. I went to sea on a destroyer. One February, on Pro Bowl weekend, I nearly drowned in a rip tide on Oahu’s North Shore, deciding to swim the big waves despite the warnings of those who had been there before.
The oceans carried me to exotic shores I’d never imagined I’d visit. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia. And after six years at sea, like the salmon looking for that special creek, I returned home.
Lost. That is what some people are after leaving the regimented life of the military. I had ideas for careers but didn’t know where to start. After several abortive efforts at becoming a copywriter, a magazine publisher, a mower of lawns, I settled into land surveying for a year then moved on to nursery work and landscaping. I was okay with the work and resigned to the vow of poverty. But there was something missing. Something more I could give, something I had to offer the world that I wasn’t fulfilling. God’s gifts are precious but can be pestering when they won’t let us alone.
Somewhere in me was an unresolved dispute. The rivers, creeks and oceans that carried me on through the good times and bad demanded I give something back. The best advice for a writer is to write what you know so I began writing about nature. The words soon flowed into a field guide and have evolved into an ode to Southern rivers. The words keep coming.