The Last of the Continental Rivers
November 5, 2023
The southern stretch of the Tenn-Tom Waterway is the Tombigbee River system. From Pickwick Lake, the Corp constructed a 40 km canal that connects the north-flowing Tennessee River to the Tombigbee River and another set of dams, locks, and reservoirs that merge several rivers into the Mobile River at the sea. It is 750 river km to Mobile, AL and just 150 m of elevation change, so it’s a bendy waterway. That canal required a massive earth displacement purportedly more than the building of the Panama Canal. Completed in the 1980s, it also concluded a long, storied history of this waterway beginning with the Louisiana Purchase. It exists primarily for barge transportation providing an alternative north-south passage to the Mississippi River. I haven’t figured out why it is useful because it is narrow, shallow, and bendy which restricts the number of barges moved in assemblages. I did not enjoy meeting barges along this waterway.
Nonetheless, it is a beautiful environment and the headwaters were mostly uninhabited. There are many big birds like the other rivers: egrets, herons, eagles, ospreys, vultures, kingfishers, a flock of Snow geese (that sullied WW – another math/probability problem for me to ponder), and the ubiquitous Canada goose. I’m also traveling with butterflies, mostly the Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae) and some of the well-known Monarchs (Danaus plexippus). They are bearing south and west, often flying across WW’s path as I move east or west. Their migration stories are well known, but I am still fascinated and in awe of a waif of a creature buffeted by winds and weather that flies such long distances.
My first southbound stop was Midway Marina in Fulton, AL. It is a stump-filled place, but the food at Guy’s Place on the Water was the best catfish and gumbo so far on my journey. I seek out the local eateries and when there are four ladies in the kitchen cooking, the probability is high the food will be excellent, and I was correct. However, I was uneasy when a man with a holstered gun on his hip came in with his family. He dined while sporting his gun plus a bottle-drinking baby on the other hip. I was sitting beside a lively table of young, high school kids. When my beer arrived, they held hands and started to pray (to the Christian god). I wasn’t sure if I was being shamed for my beer drinking or was about to get a sermon. I decided I better take my food to go.
My next stop was an overnight and fuel-up at Columbus Marina in Columbus, AL, and then on to Demopolis, AL and the Kingfisher Marina. I wasn’t prepared for the amazing White Cliffs of Eps just upstream of Demopolis. Perhaps only exciting for rock nerds like me, but still a beautiful geological feature. The river cuts through a chalk formation like the well-known White Cliffs of Dover. It is the accumulation of exoskeletons or coccoliths of tiny plankton that filled a shallow sea during the Cretaceous period. These ‘shells’ are mere microns in size, the smallest object you can see without a microscope. Imagine how many it took to create the 300 m thick formations, and the awe-inspiring environment that existed to build these formations. And yes, I tried to do that math one stormy night on WW. I searched the cliffs, but I didn’t see any Mosasaurus or Appalachiosaurus that occur in these deposits.
My plan was to hang out with Dr. Sandra Brasfield-Newell of the US Army Corp of Engineers (the Corp). Sandy’s PhD supervisor was Kelly Munkittrick, my mate from previous WW legs, and I hadn’t seen her since she left New Brunswick to take up with the US Army. She is another excellent example of our young scientists developing exciting and varied career paths, proving that a PhD degree isn’t a sentence to academia. I had amassed many Corp-related questions for her. Unfortunately, her daughter was ill and we didn’t meet this time.
I used the extra day at the dock to catch up on paperwork, emails, and writing. This is where I started asking local people about alligators. I was told they are rare this far up the river, except for some found around Huntsville, AL because “the government introduced them to address a beaver problem…”. That may be more folklore than real. There isn’t much more written about the northern alligators except for references to an official introduction to create a ‘refuge population’ in case of a natural disaster impacting southern populations, which is also rather folklorish to this biologist.
I left early on a foggy morning with another Looper boat Making Memories crewed by Jim, Becky, and their dog Beau, and we met up later at Bobby’s Fish Camp. The camp is now just a single dock with a fuel pump and space for four boats. It is the only place in a long stretch of river which was reflected in the price for fuel and docking. Fueling was like most places in the USA, the boater does the task unlike in Canada with our stricter environmental laws. This time my instructions came by phone with the pump turned on at the store and former restaurant up the hill. The Way Off The Clock from Guntersville, Al was also at the dock. They were heading north and home. Their plan had been to travel to Florida, but they were turned back by heavy seas. Waves and water over the boat can be strong medicine for avoiding big waters. They were at the dock to catch the Cowboys on Monday Night Football. It was good news for me because I was invited to join them and eat delicious gumbo.
Up at the store, I was told that Bobby’s was once a booming eatery and hangout, feeding catfish to 100+ people in a sitting. Apparently, that business was ruined by a recent President and I didn’t ask if that meant Biden or Obama because it didn’t appear to Trump. I did hear a familiar story told by Elders, about being a boy when tall oak trees lined the river and blocked the sun. These forests are now gone, harvested and replaced by plantations of pine, and this transition was blamed for many of the river’s issues – poor water quality, flooding, lost fisheries. I mentioned the extensive forestry along the rivers previously, and Alabama is a leader in the US timber harvesting industry. Timberland is a local term for forests which make up about 70% of the state which is the 3rd most forested land by State in the country. It leads the USA in pulp production and is 3rd in paper production. And as the local people pointed out, >30% of that forest is plantation.
Bad forestry practices are indeed very bad for the environment. I have spent much of my career working with this industry and their regulators to overcome bad practices. I hope I was impactful; applying best practices appears to be a priority for Alabama. Forestry is a natural resource industry that is important for us, who doesn’t want toilet paper. It does suffer the plague of industry creep away from original ideals about environmental stewardship and protection of social and community values. This is the same story everywhere; lobbying by industry followed by politicians and their bureaucrats convincing people that jobs and tax income supersede everything. It is that creep that severs our connectivity within natural environments and ultimately, generates negative impacts on our lives. A Canadian company’s mine in Panama is, in my opinion, an example of our need to evolve the simplistic, short-sighted ‘good for business, good for community’ model of natural resources development because it repeatedly fails our communities and society in the longer term.
Back on the river, the last lock and dam on the continental rivers portion of my journey was at Coffeeville, AL. I haven’t mentioned that locks have wildlife. There are fish that get trapped when doors open and close, plus there are ‘lock’ herons and egrets. They perch on the rails peering into the lock and dive down to grab fish on the surface including landing on the water which I have never seen before. The birds also prowl the lock doors that have trays of water that are revealed as water levels drop. These trays or cells drain, and fish appear to be trapped for easy picking. I exited this final lock and thanked the lockmaster for the 25+ lock passages by WW since August back in Chicago.
The last of my continental river runs was in alligator country. It included an anchor-out overnight at the Tensaw River along with Making Memories. Small dogs on boats are common I’m learning, but their dog Beau is a big white Newfie. The breed may be popular in the USA because Seaman was a Newfoundland dog that traveled with the famous explorers, Lewis and Clark. When Jim and Becky anchor out, they launch their dingy and take the dog to shore. This dog wouldn’t use onboard ‘facilities’, like the back swim deck, as the ‘lap dogs’ learn, so this is their daily routine, finding a shoreline with space for big dog walking. Our anchorage had mostly mucky shores and that is where the big white dog had to go while on the lookout for alligators.
It was a quiet night on the bayou. The fog was heavy in the morning which meant we waited. A towboat with barges came by heading downriver and we decided to tuck in behind it with the bigger Making Memories in front of me because it would better catch the radar of upbound towboats. On the next bend, the fog thickened and socked us. The towboat captain was on the radio asking other boats for information and I lost Making Memories entirely coming to a near standstill as I edged towards the shoreline and its prevalent, fallen trees using instruments only – sonar, charts, and radar. I didn’t get a visual on my boat buddies until we were 25m apart. I was very glad the towboat was moving away from us. The fog didn’t last much longer thankfully. The towboat captain was very friendly and helpful. I think he was a bit lonely because he wanted to chat on the radio about our adventures. All commercial and most bigger recreational boats are equipped with VHF radios (Very High Frequency). Channel 16 (156.8 MHz) is the international distress frequency and you are required to always monitor the channel. This means that the Coast Guard is always listening and thus a part of my boating safety net. I’ll tell you a story about an early adventure with the Coast Guard later. As we rounded a bend and lost transmission signals, we wished the captain a safe journey and headed for the sea.
Sadly, I didn’t see any alligators on the bayou, but they came out later that day and Jim shared some pictures with me. The river opened into the industrial harbour of Mobil, AL. It is intimidating navigating these heavy traffic waters, especially when you get hailed by a big tugboat publicly admonishing you about your boat wake in a no-wake harbour. I slowed down and tucked in behind him as we made our way through the harbour and onto Mobile Bay.
Mobile Bay is big. This day it was dead calm, and the sunny and bright conditions on the glassy surface made visibility very difficult for my river-tuned eyes. The marker buoys were far apart and extremely difficult to detect by sight, yet the dredged channel was quite narrow with shallows <10’ deep just outside the markers. This situation was scarier than the harbour and I was glad to remain tucked behind the tugboat. He may have wondered why this pleasure craft was slowly chugging along behind him. Navionics, my electronic navigation chart, was also crazily indicating a preferred route across the too shallow waters (more on that quirk of electronic navigation in a future story). I eventually called Turner Marina for directions into their docks on Dog River. To top off my day, my assigned boat slip looked to be an impossible insertion for WW. This was my first narrow width and short finger dock slip, which is common in these parts, but just one more new thing this day. The dock hands and a boat captain ensured me it would be fine, so with all fenders down, I backed WW into a space with mere centimeters of clearance. These slips require tying your bow to pilings (posts in the water) plus figuring out dock lines for tides and big storms. I was a wreck by the time I sorted it all out, and my evening beverages were welcomed a bit early as was my bedtime.
This was quite an introduction to the Gulf of Mexico. It rattled my nerves. I chatted with Jim and Becky who docked after me and they were similarly shaken-up by this experience. They had decided to put their boat up on the dry (out of the water on blocks) for a few months while they went home to reconnoiter the situation. I was also heading home to accept my NSERC Synergy Award in Ottawa, and I welcomed the break too. WW was also scheduled for a sea-makeover of sorts while I was away. She needed new hull paint to keep the barnacles at bay, polishing the underwater brass (propeller and rudder), a check of her sacrificial anodes (the extra metal bits boats carry underwater to protect from the persistent galvanic corrosion), and a fix of the drive shaft’s, stuffing box coupler which I’d been putting off since I left the Great Lakes.
Until next time and the start of my sea adventures,
Allen
Dog River, AL
