White River #26 A night on a rocky beach

The speculation among the wade fishermen I talked to had been that Bull Shoals had been letting out water each afternoon after two p.m. They also felt Norfork would continue to let out water until about ten p.m. and then shut one gate. The net effect of this theory would be to bring one half as much water down the Norfork and about five times or more the water down the White. All should happen, according to rumor control, somewhere around two a.m.

The net, net effect would mean to me that I should see my little boat rise and float around on its tether, but my cot should stay above the water line. The key word here is should.

I went back to the canoe to bring the sleeping bag out and place it on the cot. I began to look for my gear that would be needed during the night or early in the morning. I wanted my rain jacket so I wouldn’t freeze when I was making coffee at dawn the next morning. I had placed it in a bag along with some other gear. When I reached down, I could feel something wet where it should have been dry. Apparently, when I put the fishing rod back in the boat I hit the spigot on the one-gallon water jug. It opened and spilled its contents on the floor of the canoe. Anything on the floor became a sponge.

Luckily the jacket was an REI Gore-Tex and water would run off of it by morning. There were a couple of towels in the bag, but they were destined to become the sponges that would clean the water out of the floor any way. I took care of the problem and then pulled the coffee and breakfast kit out from under the seat. I had installed fanny packs under each seat and each now had a specific job and carried only certain items. That way I was beginning to organize the load and at least have a modicum of an idea as to where everything traveled.

I hit the sack sometime around ten p.m. The last of the river checkers were still cruising, but there were fewer and fewer as each hour passed. My boat was pulled up near the bushes and my cot was almost in the high weeds. I was visible, but you had to be looking right at me. It was cooling off but still too hot to get into the sleeping bag so I sort of lay in and on it without zipping it up.

There is a trout dock with rooms for rent up the North Fork about a hundred yards. I think it’s called Rose’s. Well, they had guests booked that night and those guests were busy tying on a serious yee-haw drunk. I don’t know what kind of booze they were drinking, but I do know it was the kind that makes you go out on the porch and hoot and holler about every fifteen minutes. That deal went on until somewhere after two a.m.

I am fairly certain these were not indigenous drunks. The yee-haws and the lack of hog calling meant they were from out of state and probably Texans. As a matter of fact I would lean toward Texans due to frequency and volume of the yee-haws.

Finally it seemed to come down to one old hoarse-throat drunk and his yee-haws were beginning to sound more like gargling than hollers. Soon, even he shut up. The frogs and other night critters came back out when the drunks finally went in. I could hear the whippoorwills sing their songs and all was good, except the hour had grown late. I kept listening for the sound of the water to increase. That was my alarm clock. If all of a sudden the water was gurgling and murmuring that meant it was coming up and the current was singing through the stones on the shore.
Editorial note: I stopped writing this journal in order to read the long awaited mail order version of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s book “Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks”. This is possibly the best, if not the only, written documentation left to us from early white Anglo-European history of the White River section of the Ozarks. Mr. Schoolcraft and his traveling partner, Levi Pettibone, were a couple of young Yankee fellows who made a walking tour through North Central and North Eastern Arkansas as well as Southern Missouri. The season was winter and the year was 1819. That would have been a very few years after Lewis and Clark. They were there for mineral prospecting of sorts mainly, but as with so many, well educated, young men of his day, Mr. Schoolcraft was a naturalist and could not help but take samples and keep a journal of his scientific observations. That would be the opposite of my journal.

One special similarity of the two journeys some two hundred years apart was that we were both kept awake most of the night by drunks near the mouth of the North Fork. He at Matney’s cabin and I near Rose’s dock. How’s that for irony?

The other similarities were that we were cheechakos and neither of us with a clue about what we were getting ourselves into, nor did we have the experience on how to handle it. I would add to this list that we both underestimated the river and the hills. The final similarity would be that we both came out the better person because of our experience with the White River region.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program….

The other alarm clock would be the canoe rope I had tied to the leg of the cot. Every once in a while I would reach down and check the rope to see if it was tight or slack. It was staying the same. I was expecting it to start pulling away from me at any time. When that happened I would need to get up and pull the boat back up the bank. I would rise up on one elbow and look at my boat. It was still in the same place. It was dark without much help from the moon. I could see the canoe but couldn’t tell much about the river level.

It seemed I had just dozed off when I heard a galloping coming down the rocky beach. The sound scared me awake. At first I didn’t recognize the gait, I just heard the clatter of the stones. When I pulled myself up to one elbow in order to look in the direction of the sound, I came face to face with the largest German Shepard I think I have ever seen. When I say face to face, I am talking ten feet. Of course it could have been a midget version but to a guy laying on a camping cot, the whole world looks large, especially if you’re looking at the world sideways and back over your shoulder like I was. When the dog saw me come up from my prone position, it must have scared him as much as he did me. He put his all fours into a screeching skid. Rocks went flying in front of him in every direction. There was quite the clatter coming from his direction. I saw him about the time he saw me. I reached for a river rock of my own. Before the rocks had quit rolling underfoot he was woofing at me. I know what he was saying. I speak a fair bit of dog. He was saying, “Who the hell are you? What are you? And what are you doing on my jogging path?” I yelled back at him to go on leave me alone. With that he barked back, but never gave me a growl or threatening voice. I pitched a river stone in his direction and he trotted off. I had not scared him after he realized what I was. I think when he ran up on me, he thought he was seeing a new version of the rise of the Mummies or something. I don’t blame him for being startled, I sure was.

He was actually pretty neat when he trotted off. He just ran down the gravel bar a little way and jumped into the water. It was as if I was not going to spoil his nightly romp and ritual. He waded around in the cold water for about five minutes. I couldn’t see him very well, but it looked as if he was jumping around, sort of doing the porpoise thing. The big fellow was just having a good time. I think he must have been fairly young the way he was playing in the water. When he walked back up onto the beach he shook like there was no tomorrow. He took one look back in my direction then trotted off toward some houses or guest cottages up on the hill above the ramp. That was the last I saw of my late night visitor.

It had unnerved me to some extent. I was feeling a little vulnerable because of my proximity to the public road and the cruising of the pickups during the earlier parts of the evening. I was reminded more than once that I had run off and forgotten Mr. ACP. My constant security blanket was still in the car and of no help in case of an emergency. Oh well, at least I could throw rocks at the bad guys if needed. I just didn’t like going to sleep in a place so accessible to the general public. Critters were not a concern unless you counted the two-legged kind. It wouldn’t be long till daylight so I told myself to just go to sleep and forget it. I did.