Tonight when Joe asked for a show of hands for who had seen a gator today, a good couple or few dozen hands went up: further proof, if any was needed, that we have descended into the vast bottomland swamps on the Oconee below Milledgeville.
Today was a long one – more than 20 miles – but our entire navy was valiant, and all made good time. Most got back to camp wet – as
Thank goodness, sunny skies at today's launch gave way to clouds and cooling showers in the afternoon.
much from rain as from the river – and all were smiling. The rain, after all, was a cool blessing on the day’s paddle. Joe and others kept talking this evening about how beautiful it was to be on the water with a light rain upsetting the river’s surface. (Yes, more than a light rain fell on the latter part of the paddling pack, but no one seemed to mind.) As Joe put it simply, “Rain is a good thing.”
Also a good thing: supper from Satterfield’s each night on Paddle Georgia. The teriyaki may have been the entrée tonight, but the macaroni stole the show. Fajita night was a standout this year, and the barbecue probably spoiled us by coming as early in the week as it did.
“I wish we had this kind of food at home!” I heard a young kid say to his friend tonight as they went back to the buffet for banana pudding and more macaroni. (What I was doing back at the buffet… is my business, okay?) My compliments to the caterers.
The same goes for the host committee here in Dublin, where they’ve rolled out the red carpet for us once again. The highlight of our royal treatment as guests in the community: the staff of the Courier-Herald newspaper shared with us a 7-minute movie about the great Oconee River Raft Race of the 1970s. Seeing and hearing the music and the hairdos – er, the river scenes at what was a phenomenal event for years on end – was literally boatloads of fun.
Other than gators and beautiful scenery, the river brought more Mississippi Kites soaring overhead in great numbers today, as well as a few large and majestic Wood Storks. And still we travel a landscape rich in human history. Ball’s Ferry, the day’s take-out, was the site of a ferry from the early decades of the 19th century on into the mid-20th.
In the first half of the day, we paddled under the railroad trestle that carries the Central of Georgia railroad (on a pre-Civil War route) across the swamps of the Oconee. In the center of the trestle was a huge, cylindrical brick-laid piling for what was once a pivot drawbridge that allowed steamboats to pass, loaded with cotton and other farm goods. At the evening’s talent show, we learned that paddler Dorinda Dallmeyer’s grandfather had been a brickmason for the Central of Georgia. He didn’t work on that bridge, Dorinda said, but her story reminded us all of our own connections to the country’s history and the ways that it is written in our rivers.
Tomorrow is another 20-miler and then some. But we’ll paddle hard for one more day, because more fun and good hospitality await us at the River’s End Celebration and fish fry at Buckeye Park in East Dublin. Onward and downstream to the finish!
-Ben Emanuel
