Dispatches from Friends and Readers

It was just over a week ago that the river rose up over its banks, but then the snow came and I forgot about the swirling waters and the flooded fields. I haven’t been down to the river this week. In fact I haven’t ventured far at all from my iced-in city street. But I’ve heard from friends and readers who live along the river about the aftermath of the flood.

“I would guess our floodplain was under water for about 24 hours. This one rose fast and fell fast,” Matt Perry, of East Bend, wrote. “I went down Wednesday and there was 4-5 inches of very soft mud on everything. The water ripple marks that are left behind after the floodwaters recede are always fun to look at. I always imagine them as fossils a million years from now.

“Yesterday our dog and I walked several miles upstream and the amount and height of the debris left in the trees is amazing. We saw lots of deer tracks, raccoon tracks, and the tracks of an otter coming out of a stream, over a small hill and its slide down into the Yadkin.”

Mary Blackwell-Chapman lives in Lewisville on a bluff overlooking a section of rapids. She wrote me last week about the rising water: “The river was out of its banks and the surrounding fields in Yadkin County and Forsyth were underwater all the way to the hills. The flood washed part of our river trail away and almost came up to my garden and shed and then went down so quickly yesterday.”

And this week she sent me this update: “It was remarkable how quickly the flood receded last week. The Yadkin was back in its banks in 24 hours! But sections of our river walk had fallen in and we will have to reconfigure the trail. The snow is beautiful, in the fields and hills, along the banks of the river.”

Janet Fox, a writer who works for The Bloom Agency, wrote me last week about her flooded land near the Shallow Ford: “The flooding was dramatic at our place at the Shallow Ford. Our backyard (about an acre) turned into a rushing river that kept rising until about 5 p.m. Our next door neighbor, who has lived there since 1984, said the Yadkin has never been this high in all those years. The water has been slow to subside; we still have great pools and I imagine the land will be squishy for months.

I asked her for an update: “The water had pretty much receded by Friday, of course the ground was very wet,” she wrote. “I think we got 9 inches or more of snow; it’s all snow covered now.”

Thank you to Matt, Mary and Janet. I love reading your intimate portraits of your river life and sharing them with readers and I invite others to share their experiences. You may leave a comment here on the blog or send me an email.

Phoebe

A River Floods

looking downstream from donnaha bridge. Christine Rucker Photos

I heard it raining Sunday night here in Winston-Salem, a sweet, soothing sound as I fell asleep with no thought of the river. But overnight the river flooded its banks and those of you who live on the river woke up to a watery landscape. Matthew Perry emailed Christine and me from his home by the river in East Bend. “I hope you are both out looking at the flooded river,” he wrote. “The levels are higher than they were during hurricanes Jean & Ivan in 2004.” He sent photos, too, of his flooded yard and of outbuildings half submerged in muddy water. I’ve heard stories of the river rising up and washing out bridges and entire tobacco crops, of swirling water carrying away sheds and cars. I made it out to Donnaha Park by noon Monday and had a hard time figuring out where the riverbank I knew had been. People kept pulling up to stare at the muddy water. Wendell Bennett was there with his wife and 6-year-old son who was too scared to get out of the car. “You see that line of trees,” Bennett said, pointing to a stand of trees at least 100 yards away across open water. “That’s where the bank is.

donnaha park underwater. Yadkin river rose 8 ft. flooding picnic shelter and rising half way up this basketball goal.

” The picnic shelter, the road, the path leading down to the riverbank, they were all flooded. Ahead was the river – eight feet above its normal level and mightier than ever.

flooded muddy river; reminds me of that chocolate drink "yohoo"

I had my stepson, Jackson, and his buddy Joe with me, and kept them close. I knew if they started playing around and got caught up in the current there was no way I could reach them. I saw later that two fools had jumped from the N.C. 67 bridge for the thrill. Both were rescued, one a quarter of a mile down river hanging to a tree, swept there by that sweet, soothing rain from Sunday night.

Phoebe

view from bridge looking south. overlooking flooded Donnaha Park.

A River Speaks

Christine and I took the dogs — her Daisy and Duke and my Max — for a walk yesterday morning through the woods beside her house. We followed trails she and her husband cut for riding mountain bikes, which connect to old deer trails and finally to the riverside trails at Yadkin Islands state park, which most of us river lovers know as the canoe access in East Bend. There were still patches of snow on the ground. The river itself was clear of ice, but a pond formed in a low, swampy piece of bottomland was still covered in ice. The dogs ran wild. We passed a series of caves on her neighbor’s land. Spooked, we kept our distance. We saw a tree felled by beavers and another, at least three feet across, that the beavers had started in on. And when we remembered to be still we heard the river speak. The water sounds louder in the cold. And clearer. “This would be a good place to record river sounds,” Christine told me. “The sound is better here than at my house.” I wouldn’t have noticed, but then I am only a visitor here, and Christine a resident. The closer we got to the islands, the rockier the river became and water over rocks speaks a language like no other. Not the roar of a waterfall, or the rush of rapids, but a tender, timeless sound.
Phoebe

Goodbye to a River

A friend of mine who has been following this blog recommended a memoir by John Graves called Goodbye to a River about his journey down a portion of the Brazos River in north-central Texas, made just before the river was dammed and changed forever. Written in the 1950s long before environmentalism became a popular movement in this country, Goodbye to a River is a lament to a way of life lost to growth and development. But it’s also a story about childhood and the ways in which a river runs through one man’s life. The Brazos gave Graves memories — of fishing, swimming and teenage adventure – which stayed with him so that as a young man he was able return to his youth with visits to these wild and treacherous waters. As Graves writes of his river: “But it was there still, touchable in a way that other things of childhood were not.”
Our river, our Yadkin, serves the same purpose for so many of the people Christine and I have met these last months. Lawrence Haynes grew up near West Bend and when he retired from the construction business he built a house in East Bend with the river of his youth nearby. “As a child it was my life,” he told me last summer. “We didn’t have any kind of entertainment except what we made ourselves.” So he and his brother fished for catfish. They swam, skinny-dipping, as they had no money for bathing suits. And when it was time for Haynes to make his profession of faith, he was baptized in the Yadkin.
“You didn’t go in the river when it was turbulent, when it was up and muddy. We only went in when it was clear,” he told me. “You knew the depth and you didn’t go in where it was deep.” His wife, Wilma, knows these stories well, and brings a literary twist to their telling. “In other words,” she reminded him. “The river had a language and you knew the language.”
Graves would understand that. The Brazos spoke to him in a language he knew just as the Yadkin speaks to those who know its language, a language Christine and I are learning as we go.
Phoebe

A River Snow

photo taken today. 12.19.2009

I walk our one mile trail in about 15 minutes usually. Today, it took me about an hour to trudge through foot deep snow with the dogs. Granted, I was carrying all my camera gear and stopping about every 5 minutes looking for something new I had not photographed before. The crisp air did not carry the usual sounds this morning. The river was quiet. I guess the usual river life was hunkered down a little later than my little walk. Here are a couple images from today, and I’ll share some others from a previous snow later.

Christine Rucker Photo 2009

Christine

Public Access

In my last post I told you about Jack Dobson and the ring of keys he carries with him that give him access to some of the most isolated stretches of river all through Yadkin County. He enjoys these privileges because landowners along the river have come to trust him. There are others, a fortunate few, who live right on the river, with the sounds of water tumbling over rocks in their back yard. And the rest of us, well, we can be thankful for a handful of public access points and the river portion of Pilot Mountain State Park.
I dragged my husband, his brother and his brother’s girlfriend there the day after Thanksgiving. From Winston-Salem, we took  52 north to the Pinnacle exit and turned left, following the signs to the Horne Creek Living History Museum. The road into the park crosses swollen creeks and ends at a turnaround at the trailhead for the canal trail. We parked about a mile before the turnaround, by a picnic area, and walked the rest of the way in.
It was a crisp November day, clear and cool. The trail down to the river crosses the railroad tracks and turns right, following the river. The water here is clear and fast — a wild river, like the wild mountain in the distance. In the 1820s two local men, Hiram Jennings and John Hixon, won a contract with the state to build a canal here, bypassing the shoals just up river so that ships could navigate all the way to Wilkesboro. According to the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, they estimated that a three-mile canal could be built for $30,200, but after they had spent more than $27,000 on the retaining wall alone, they gave up.
Their retaining wall, made of rocks stacked upon rocks with moss growing in the crevices, is still standing. After the canal project failed, the railroad came, with a line to North Wilkesboro. The Yadkin Valley Railroad still runs a freight train along the banks of the river, hauling chicken feed, wood and other freight. I love the roar of a freight train, but the tracks were silent Friday afternoon by the fast waters of the Yadkin. And for that, in this season of thanks, we were thankful.
Phoebe

Jack Dobson

jack dobson on the Yadkin River

Deer hunting season opened this weekend. That doesn’t mean a whole lot to me here in Winston-Salem, but I know how much that means to Jack Dobson, who lives in Yadkin County and devotes much of his life to the Yadkin River. That is when he’s not out hunting. I called him several times to find out how he was, and also to schedule a time to record an interview. The last time we talked the engine sounds from his boat drowned out all his stories about life on the river. He tells a good story, some too good to repeat, so I imagine he’ll be glad there’s no record of some of those tall tales.

I should have known better than to think I’d catch Dobson at home any time this month. He did call me back, just in from rabbit hunting. He was on his way back out, to the deer stand he built on a ridge overlooking an apple orchard where the deer like to feed. Christine and I learned about Dobson last summer from his website about Yadkin River Coonhounds. He raised a strain of hounds first bred down river from here, but recently sent them all to live in Kentucky where there’s more open land for coon hunting. These day’s he raises beagles for rabbit hunting, apples for the deer and a vegetable garden for everyone else. “All I got to do is buy gas, dog food and some shotgun shells and I’m good,” he told us.

Dobson and his wife live about a half a mile from the water, but he knows just about every landowner on the river and has built up enough trust over the years that he has keys to countless gates through countless pastures that all lead down to the water. We drove through one of those pastures one late afternoon in July hauling Dobson’s flat-bottomed boat with us and ended up at a spot down river from the mouth of the Fisher. We saw wild turkeys and later learned about the yellow river catfish once so plentiful in these waters until the flat-head channels and blues were introduced. Dobson’s boat has a small outboard engine that he’s rigged up with an old pitchfork to protect the blades from rocks in the shallow waters. We motored upstream to the mouth of the Fisher, cut the engine and sat in silence. “I just like to get away from the rest of the world like this,” is how Dobson describes the quiet that falls over the river on a summer’s afternoon.

a summer paddle with Jack

Dobson once had a place on the river, across the way from Rockford, but the house burned down and Dobson moved on. We know the man who lives there now, but that’s for another post. In Dobson’s world the river belongs to all of us — or should. “Some of the old farmers that lived here when I moved here, they were some of the best people in the world,” Dobson told us. “They’d let you use their land as long as you were responsible and didn’t mess it up.” But he says that there are new landowners in the region who don’t see things the way he does. They’ve posted their land and mean it.

Phoebe

A song

I spent the afternoon today listening to the audio of some of the interviews I’ve done this year about the river. Christine and I have also recorded the sounds of the river, of children playing in the water at Donnaha Park, of the sand dredger across the river from Junior Matthews’ farm in East Bend, and of the congregation of Poplar Spring Baptist Church singing hymns at its river baptism in September. I am still learning the technology and haven’t figured out yet how to post an audio clip to the blog. Which is too bad, as I want you to hear how the congregation celebrated each baptism with song.
Poplar Springs Baptist Church has access to the river through a farm road in Siloam. We met there one Sunday about four in the afternoon. Volunteers set up folding chairs for evening service  in the sandy soil on a bluff overlooking the river. Rev. Curtis Ponder preached and when it was time for the baptisms, he led the way down the hill to the water. Seven members of the congregation were baptized that afternoon, with the youngest a girl of eleven and the oldest her grandfather, who claimed to be “older than Pilot Mountain.” Ponder and two other men stood waist deep in the fast water. The rest of the congregation watched from the bluff. There was a lot of splashing and joy and with every baptism the congregation took up this beautiful hymn:
“Yes, we’ll gather at the river
The beautiful, the beautiful river.
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows from the throne of God.”

Listen to the water splashing. Imagine the voices up on the bluff. Maybe you can hear the guitar picking up the harmony and the rich baritone of the congregation’s song master. I can, but then, I was there. I know there were cicadas humming in the woods with the wisp of a breeze. I wish you could hear it too, but that’s the best I can do until we figure out how to post the sound for you to hear it all with your own ears.

Phoebe  

Film!!

The digital world swallowed me also. With all the weddings, editorial work and advertising gigs I shoot, digital makes sense .I always reserve a few rolls of 120 film in my camera bag though. I shoot with a nearly all manual Mamiya 645 and I have to say it’s my favorite camera. This is why…. Christine

more from the helicopter trip earlier this month

More from the helicopter trip earlier this month

more from the helicopter series

November full moon, paddle was incredible!

High Water

Christine and I had planned on an early morning paddle today. She wanted me to experience the fog that settles over the water on cold mornings, the same mysterious fog she photographed last month. But Wednesday night, after two days of rain, Christine called to cancel. The water was too high, she said. The trip would be dangerous. Christine is a mountain biker and thinks nothing of barreling down rocky trails the rest of us wouldn’t dare to walk on, so when Christine cries danger, I listen.
I missed the paddling but at least got in a walk earlier this week along a gorgeous stretch of river in Lewisville. Mary Beth Blackwell-Chapman, a sculptor, invited me to see her place on the river after reading our blog. The house sits up high on a bluff, but not so high that you can’t see and hear the river rushing by. Mary Beth grew up spending summers in Scotland County near the Lumbee River, which joins the Yadkin to form the Pee Dee, so she feels nourished by rivers and water.
The river is not as wide at her house as it is in East Bend. Across the way is a small stand of trees and a vast stretch of bottomland. The house looks out over some rapids, as wild looking as the rapids up towards the Shoals. Mary Beth told me that the rocks once served as a large fishing net, or weir, built by the Native Americans who lived here many thousands of years ago. Mary Beth listens to the water rushing over those rocks and every day gives thanks for living in such a place. “It is so beautiful that every single day I say it,” she told me.

Phoebe