#20 Buffalo City on the White and folks you meet

Buffalo City and the folks you meet on the river.

I pulled into the first landing area I saw when approaching Bufflao City access area. I got my body out of the little canoe, as quick as I could. While I was standing around trying to get some circulation back into my tired tail and stiff legs, I noticed and overheard a guy taking a creel survey. He would talk to people who came in from the White. Some folks he approached and others such as myself he did not. I was curious how he chose whom to ask about their catch. I guess to the trained observer the real fishermen were obvious.

I was planning on motoring up the Buffalo and spending the night on a gravel bar some 15 miles up stream. In order for me to reach my camping destination the water had to be high enough for travel. More importantly the water had to be slow enough for my little three and a half to motor upstream. I figured, who better to ask than the creel questioner himself. He must hear lots of info from both ends of both rivers.

Nope. Wrongo. He told me right quick he does not speak to people coming off the Buffalo. They don’t have creel numbers for his trout survey. Now I knew why he hadn’t spoken to me. I was in a canoe. Motor or not he took one look at me and decided I was not one of his people even though I was motoring in from the White River and coming from upstream while the Buffalo was down stream. Man. That was too bad. He was in a heck of a position to have a world of real-time knowledge about conditions on both rivers. He could have been ‘the man’ but he chose to be a bureaucrat. Too bad.

I noticed a couple taking their new Supreme jon boat out of the water. Luckily for me they pulled the boat, truck and trailer over in the shade near where I was hanging out eating my lunch of Nabs and Jerky washed down by cold water.

For those of you who may not have had the privilege of knowing Laddie Hutcherson or his more than lovely wife Nancy Wright Hutcherson of “Gin Head” fame, they coined the term Nabs many years ago when road trips meant gas station food and Nabisco packages of Cheeze and Orange Crackers or peanut butter and crackers from a machine. Most of the time, we would have a Coca Cola with them and then it was “Nabs and Coke.” That was lunch on the road with those two. There may have been other adult cold beverages involved but I can’t remember for sure as it’s been awhile since those Tiger High days in Memphis.

I still enjoy my “Nabs” lunches, but I have to think healthy now so I have added a couple of Oberto’s jerky sticks to the package and I know I am getting a truly balanced meal. Yes sir, all the food groups worth eating can, and do, come to you from a machine.

The couple allowed me to look over their new boat. It was just like the one the fellows from Ardmore had purchased the day before. It looked as if Dave’s Boats was doing a good business. They explained the attributes of their boat and I was impressed. Indeed the Supreme probably was the perfect White River fishing machine. I asked them about the motor. I thought it looked a little underpowered since the ones I had seen on this size boat had all been twenty horses or more. Yet, here these folks were with a Mercury ten horse. Herein lies a little hillbilly wisdom. When dealing with the feds, give the appearance of what they want and they will go away. It seems the government had decided there should be a limit on the size motors they would allow on the Buffalo River. The Park Service now rules the river since it was designated the nation’s first Wild and Scenic River. These hill people had been traveling the Buffalo in boats since before there were outboard motors. They knew more about the river than the government folks who were sent to dictate behavior on “their” river.

The hillbillies knew the river and its temperament. The Buffalo is one of the most dangerous rivers in the world due to its propensity to flash flood whenever there are heavy rains. The solitude and beauty of the river lulls you into complacency. The Buffalo is sneaky. It will wait for you to go to sleep on what you consider dry land, and then it will rise out of its banks and try to sweep you away. You may not even know about a rainstorm that is happening some fifty or sixty miles upstream yet the water will rise more than a foot per hour where you are camped. If you have not allowed for a camp exit plan, you may be in dire straits without Mark Knopfler.

Part of your exit plan may include your boat. In the case of a 20-foot long jon boat, you will need sufficient power to guide you through what has changed from a benign stream to a raging torrent. If your boat is loaded with gear and people, the dictated ten-horse motor might not be enough power. If your escape route involves motoring upstream, you could be in big trouble. The government looked on the Buffalo as a utopian canoeist and kayaker river. It looked good to the eco heads when they drew up the rules in far away Washington. As we all know, reality rarely touches Washington thought, so here the locals were left to deal with another of the bureaucrats’ unintended consequences.

Hillbilly engineering will conquer all. It seems you can take the carb off of the ten-horse and replace it with a fifteen-horse carburetor and whammo, you have a fifteen in ten’s clothing. Now you stand a better chance in cases of emergency. Thanks to the couple for letting me know how to do it. I want everyone to know this little engineering secret so they at least have a choice of rectifying a very scary rule. My rule in cars and trucks is to always have more engine than you think you will need. Period. I am quickly realizing the same reasoning should hold true with outboard motors and little boats.

The folks with the Supreme had just come from small mouth bass fishing up the Buffalo. Now I had someone with up-to- the-minute river information. These rivers are living, changing beasts. If you don’t keep up with the news of what they are doing real time, you can get yourself stranded or hurt. Chatting with other boaters about your plans is a good idea anywhere along the river. In talking to these folks I learned enough to completely change my action plan.

It seemed they had just come out of the mouth of the Buffalo. The water was down in the White, and the normal level of the Buffalo this time of year was typically low. The couple told me over the past few years the Buffalo had been filling in a gravel bar at the point where it emptied into the White. This created a problem when the dams were not letting out any water. The water level could actually go down so far that the gravel became a minor dam across the mouth of the Buffalo. This would keep normal boat traffic backed up until the dams released enough water to raise the White high enough to flood back into the Buffalo.

The fellow with the Supreme advised me not to go up the Buffalo that night if I intended to come right back out the next day. He was afraid I would go up the river and camp for the night and then be on the wrong side of the gravel bar with the water still falling. That was not a catastrophe in itself, but I would have a hell of a time carrying my boat and all the camping gear over quite some distance of gravel bar. He suggested I rearrange my route and do the lower Buffalo another day.

And that, my friends, is why we needed our little creel man to be attentive to everyone not just his charges. What we needed was a town crier as well as a fish counter. I did change my tactics and decided to travel on down the White and sleep on the access area at Norfork.

Sleeping on the gravel beach at Norfork proved to be a little more difficult than I imagined. But that story will come a little later.

The folks with the ten-horse on the big, good looking, Supreme left. I was still sitting in the shade on my little campstool, Nabs finished, but munching on a pear from my backyard tree in Texas. I liked sitting in the shade next to a cold river on a hot day. It made sense of the world.