The Cumberland River to Nashville
October 20, 2023
Lake Barkley was created when the Cumberland River was dammed in 1966. The Corp also dug a short canal to Kentucky Lake (created in the 1940s) to make one of the largest reservoirs in the USA. The lake is a busy recreational area with plenty of boaters and summer homes. Green Turtle Bay Marina was a good place for WW to rest because the marina has a service shop, a restaurant and yacht club restaurant/pub, a ship and retail store on-site, and the town of Grand River, KY is <2 kilometers down the road. Funnily, the first large mammals I encountered on my journey were Whitetail deer eating someone’s flowers in the village.
Lake Barkley is shallow outside of the old riverbed (typically 10m deep), and those shallows are littered with old tree stumps and remains of various human structures left after the valley was flooded, some of which are visible on the navigation charts. My team back at UNB generated very detailed bathymetry maps of our Mactaquac Lake/reservoir which was also flooded in the 1960s and the visualization of the human structures underwater always amazes local people with memories of these lands. Lake Barkley boaters were running at high speeds through the shallows, but I preferred to stick with the old river channel which made a parade of barges and WW weaving through the lake. The head of the reservoir gets very shallow creating an expansive and impressive wetland. It produced my best bird count, and it included flamingos, which were verified, and probably makes me the envy of serious Kentucky birders. These unlucky flamingos were blown north by the recent Hurricane Idalia.
About halfway to Nashville, I overnighted in Clarksville, TN. I walked downtown to the farmer’s market to grab my highly sought-after, rare fresh veggies. My marina friends looked at me strangely when I said I was walking, especially for vegetables, and insisted they should drive me. I declined; it was just a couple of kilometers. We should walk and bike more and do less car riding, but that is a story for another day. Fresh veggies in hand, my next stop was downtown Music City - Nashville, TN.
And I mean downtown. I docked directly under the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge next to Nissan Stadium, the home of the Tennessee Titans professional football team. Football is an interesting study in societal priorities and economics. This team’s 69,000-seat stadium plus its food services and parking exists for about 10 football games a year. Financial analyses for this and other professional sports teams don’t seem to compute. This team is valued at $5B and generates about $500M in revenues annually, and there is a new stadium in the works worth $2B of which $1B will be courtesy of the taxpayers of Nashville. I’m a sportaholic and I love to play and watch all kinds of sporting events, but I believe we could probably spend $1B tax dollars plus all the team revenues on a few more important things in our communities, and especially in the USA where health care and education for the poorest people needs serious and committed investments. A slight diversion onto a soapbox for a lecture; sorry not sorry. I will still be watching these sports.
Downtown Nashville is a carnival. On Saturday night Broadway Street is closed to traffic and filled with people. These were mostly white, younger women and alcohol consumption was a major theme. Every bar was jam-packed, and a few are 4-floors tall, each with a stage and band creating an overall cacophony of music best described as, well, just noise. I kept to the streets to avoid these certain covid caves. The whole scene was quite bizarre. The many young, under-dressed (as in scantily) women in cowboy boots and hats were crazily dancing to bands composed of mostly older men playing to them. Shania probably never envisioned 40-year-old men singing to 20-year-old girls filled with ‘Jack and Coke’, “I feel like a woman” – yikes! I did find good music eventually. I got lucky at the Country Music Hall of Fame where Caroline Jones performed a singer-songwriter show. She is an excellent artist, plus she had fun stories about her mentor Jimmy Buffet. I stumbled upon the Listening Room Cafe and heard four very talented musicians of the ‘Song Suffragettes’. I also found some good food off Broadway and a $50 Nashville haircut.
At the dock, I met Mike and Cathy who boat up and down the Tennessee River on their holidays. We shared some stories including them telling me to watch for ants. Sure enough, the next day I was boarded by an army of little black ants (maybe Monomorium minimum). I fought them off in hand-to-hand combat and with bug repellent on all the lines to the dock from where they streamed onboard. They just kept coming and sadly, I had to borrow a high-power insecticide from Mike to get them under control (which answered my question why he had no spiders onboard). The ants continued to appear for the next 3 days of cruising and then disappeared. I hope there isn’t a new colony buried deep in the bowels of WW waiting to counterattack one night.
My brother-in-law Rob flew to Nashville to crew my next leg over to Chattanooga, TN. We walked Broadway his one night in the city and were going to head home when we stumbled into the Bootleggers Inn, a small joint with an excellent street wrangler/bouncer. There was a young woman and her band playing a breadth of music from Allanis to Queen, and a cut above the music at other joints. In Nashville there is no cover charge at the bars, instead, the band comes around with a tip bucket. Rob and I were sitting towards the back of the joint, two clean-cut, older gentlemen. The drummer got his tip and asked if we had any requests to which I replied in my Professor Curry speaking to his students voice, “Let’s hear the most difficult song in your repertoire.”. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said he would think about it. At the beginning of the next set, the lead singer says, “We got the strangest request to play the most difficult song we know, so here it is.”. The guitar players did tuning changes and then they belted out “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac, which they took to another level covering the great guitarist Lindsay Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks. They got an extra tip as we walked out. We interpreted their following looks as my professorial request playing out like this: “Those older, business-looking dudes asked to hear the toughest song in our repertoire. I think they’re music executives. Let’s nail this and we could get a call to their studio tomorrow.”. OK, maybe not exactly what they were talking about, but it’s a good story because every musician in Nashville is looking for their big break!
Next, it’s back up the Cumberland River and down the Tennessee River to Chattanooga, TN.
Until next time, from somewhere far down the crazy river,
Allen
Columbus, AL
