In the Good River

I put in at the town of Avon onto the Farmington River, having found my way, or at least the last 20 miles, by trial and error, a skill that I am raising to an art form due to Connecticut's trait of providing a sign pointing you towards your destination and then leaving you on your own to guess at the next 15 possible turns that you can make.  "If you have to ask, you're not from here."

Recent rains have raised the river, not to a flood stage, but it is high water.  There is a deep and steady "two to one current"...2 hours up, one hour back.

It is a good river.  It runs 60 yards wide and I don't know how deep it is, but it feels deep and I never strike a paddle tip on the bottom.  There are no sandbars on the insides of bends to slow the current.  The banks are lined with full growth trees - maple, oak, horse chestnut, sycamore and tulip poplar.  Ferns and a fine crop of poison ivy are common in the underbrush.  The river doesn't meander.  Instead, it makes a slight bend to one direction and then the other, and then the other... 

At one of those bends, six belted kingfishers leave there perches, one at a time, on the inside of the curve. But, this river's strength is in its sameness.  Small details appear, and there is a house here or there (I can count the total on my fingers) but the overall view rounding each bend is the same as the one before.  That is the goodness of it...the confirmation that nature has no written guarantee to entertain us with constantly changing dramatic landscapes.  It shows us that something else is the boss, that the game is not what we often believe it to be.  It gives the mind, the heart, and the soul time to not focus.  It is the closest that I get to meditation, and it probably qualifies in full at that.

At a bit over two hours, I press on to round the bend up ahead, if only to prove to myself that there is yet another bend ahead and that the current doesn't suddenly change direction.  I turn.  The return trip is less diligent, but it still works out to an hour.  As I prepare to portage the canoe, I slip off the bank.  I put my feet down and they go down and down until I am bobbing in my life vest between shore and the canoe without finding bottom...  an interesting design for the town's canoe launch.

Summer Rain, Summer Wind

There is almost no wind at the house, but at the water, just 200 yards away, I find a fresh southwest wind.  It comes unobstructed across 15 miles of water bringing with it moderate waves.  North and northwest winds come over land and in the same amount of wind I will find calm near the shore.  East and southeast winds pile up and stagnate against the shore causing waves, but lessening the wind.  Today, I get the wind and the waves and as I claw my way down the shoreline, my plan and the necessary timing for the Indian River looks unlikely.

Two good rolling three foot waves bid me farewell as I round Pond Point and enter a calmer bay at Calf Pen Creek.  With my plans in flux, I take the detour into the wetland, passing under the low bridge and into a broad wetland with an egret or two and some geese here and there.  The predominate animal life are thousands of the tiny crabs with the single oversized claw.  Apparently, they have good sight and drop back into the finger sized holes in the mud banks when I am 20 or 30 feet away, but not before telling me what builds those finger sized holes that I have seen so often.

Calf Pen Creek

I hoped to take time to write my thoughts having earlier been too busy with the waves and wind.  But, the first biting insects of the summer greet me and I decide to keep moving.  Rounding a bend, the sight of a dying bird strips those thoughts from where I can reach them.  The bird is unrecognizable...could be a duck a gosling, or even a young heron.  It sits in a couple inches of water, the feathers no longer repelling water and filled with silt - it is grey.  Every so often it lifts its head for a few moments before collapsing again.  I thought about putting it down, a humane gesture, but I don't, taking instead the view that something more complicated than what I understand is occurring.  Nature will take its course.  In time, the thousands of tiny big clawed crabs will feast.

It is not time to return, yet.  I push on, the waves and wind either lessening or being reduced by the geography.  I paddle against an ebbing tide to get into Gulf Pond.  High tide was not much more than an hour ago, so the current is not too difficult.  I might even make it into the Indian River.  It begins to rain for real when I am half way up the first half of the pond.  Then, the sky opens up, doubling its effort, as I get to the bridge at the half way point.  But, the rain is pleasant...the temperature near 70 degrees and its only real bother is that it is far too wet to use my camera.  I find the Indian River draining, but manage to buck the current and pass the railroad bridge.  I figure ten minutes more and I would not have been able to pass.

Gulf Pond

As I make the first meander, I spot a yellow-crowned night heron near where I saw one on my last trip.  Then, I spot another and soon, two more.  They are out in the grass away from the waters edge.  When they see me, they duck low and wait for me to move off.  I stop to bail the canoe...it takes about a mile for an inch of water to collect at my knees (I kneel most of the time in the canoe).  Just short of the next bridge the first lightning flash goes off.

I return to the top of the pond where I take out, looking forward to the walk home from there.

Chasing Fish

The winds of the recent weather front have left and it is as calm as ever.  The visibility is good, but the clouds in the sky join the horizon with no definition and the distant great island remains hidden.  An egret passes, and then, a flock of cormorants all stretched out in a line flying just inches above the water.  I watched them come from some quite distance, so visible in their blackness.  Low tide is less than a hour past and the exposed green decked boulder groins stretch finger like into the sea.  The canoe cuts swiftly and with ease through such calm water and I keep an eye out for submerged rocks, the usual telltale ripples being absent with such a smooth surface.

I'm thinking that all of the bachelor loons have finally left and gone north to inland lakes.  The nearest silhouettes to them are the cormorants, who while being similarly low floating birds, identify themselves by holding their chins high. And then, I spot a loon at distance out in the bay where Calf Pen Creek empties.

As I leave Pond Point, I spy a disturbance in the water ahead.  It looks like the ripples that signal a shallow spot, but I remember no shallow in that location.  The ripples move slowly, turning an arc that is as wide as my canoe is long.  Then, the two of us approach a meeting spot.  It passes under the bow, a blunt headed rough bodied shape, at least as long as the canoe.  My mind says, "whale", for just a moment.  Two dozen fins break the surface as a dense school of fish goes deep.  I ran into one of these last fall, unaware of what it was until I felt and heard the drumming of them on the bottom of the canoe.  I still don't know what type of fish they are.

I paddle out to Charles Island.  It is an egret nesting site, and as I get closer the square law of point sources holds - the number of flying egrets that I see increases by the inverse square of the distance.  The great egrets are easy to spot in the trees, but the darker black crowned herons are only seen when they fly.  The trees have leafed out and the cover for them is vastly improved.

When I get back to Pond Point, I find that school of fish still swimming about.  I try to follow them for a few minutes before thinking that I have something better to do.

A well-loaded oyster boat returning to Milford Harbor

Indian River

You follow these things, the open channels in the marsh, to the end.  You do it because you can and because there just might be something around the next meander or at the point where you can no longer continue.

I put in below the house as the tide nears full and so, I could follow the shore closely without worrying about chipping my paddle on a submerged boulder.

the very small least tern

The tide was still flooding, although just barely, when I got to the rusty bridge.  I ducked low and slid into Gulf Pond on the current.  The pond at high tide is less interesting although more easily paddled.  The more interesting bird life that comes here comes when the tide recedes leaving the critters that those birds feed on exposed on the mud flats.

I make it to the railroad bridge, the "gate" to the secret garden (the Indian River) beyond.  Passing the railroad bridge is an act of timing, or wading if you can't get the timing correct.  Two snowy egrets wait on the far side.  A couple mallards scatter, and as I sit, something pipes at me.  It is a willet.  There are three.  They show brilliant black and white patterns on the wing when they fly off.

willet

Instead of forging upriver like I usually do, I turn south into the first long meandering channel.  I don't go far, only one or two bends, before I start finding wren nests.  They are low, just 2 feet above the water and built in the woody hedges that grow on the shore.  They aren't marsh wren nests, which I am familiar with, but they are wren nests.  I here them in the brush, but never get a clear enough view to figure out what they are. 

The point of no continuance is where the channel works its way into the forest.  The channel continues, but it is too narrow for the canoe.  As I turn, I notice that there is a current flowing out.  High tide has peaked on the Indian River.  At the bend ahead, a doe whitetail deer walks into view, pauses to look at me, and disappears into the marsh.

The wind comes up sudden and cool.  This is a good place to ride out one of the possible thunderstorms that were predicted for the day.  I tuck my gear away and continue while watching the clouds more closely than I had been. 

Back at the main channel, a bird flying in the bobbing style of the green backed heron comes my way.  It nears and is clearly too large.  It passes, a yellow crowned night heron, and it lands not far away.

yellow crowned night heron

I paddle back down Gulf Pond but, as I near the sea, the wind gusts are just beginning to make it difficult to control the canoe.  The ocean doesn't look too bad, no whitecaps...but that wind had come up fast and sudden and there is no reason that it couldn't continue the trend.  Paddling alone as often as I do, you fill your pockets with chicken shit, and I question whether I could keep the canoe off of the rocks on the stretch out to Merwin Point.  I load up and do the long portage home.

Playing the game

It's a start into a thick fog on a warm day with calm seas.  A clam boat works its allotment out beyond the visibility.  I can follow it through its steady thrum of the motor and the occasional rattling when a dredge full of oysters and clams is dumped. 

The conditions are near white-out and I stay far enough from shore to keep it a vague, far enough so that I am not noticed and far enough so that what is over there doesn't matter.  I pass gazebo point and then, flag pole rock.  This is an imagination trip, deep and featureless fogs lead the experience with the mind on a long tether.  Land is just a shadow and shadows are land, or not.  The sparkles arrive and float aimlessly - with nothing to focus on, the eyes find something to do.  You just have to play along, and I like the game, to a point, but I am not an easy mark.  I don't follow the bird call to see what it is, because it will just lead me away.  And while I don't need my compass, I know where it is, and in all likelihood I have three of them somewhere amongst my gear.  I've long been in the habit of tying cheap compasses into my various packs and just leaving them there.  Being lost is interesting, but only if you know how to find yourself.

Three brants fly straight at me out of the murk, low and unyielding.  They can't quite make out what I am in this haze until they are on top of me.

Oyster River bay is thicker yet and it is the only place that is disorienting.  It seems so much bigger than it was and I wait for land to appear.  The bridge appears not many degrees off of the bow and I ride the very end of the flood tide.  A workman on the bridge asks if I have seen any stripers (striped bass), and I laugh back, "I didn't see anything out there", which is not true, but I don't have time to explain the sparkles.


The Oyster river is fog free.  I've only been here once before back in the winter and it is, so green.

Least Sandpipers

A cardinal greets me as I enter, I spot a little blue heron, a couple snowy egrets and lots of Canada geese scattered about.  I follow the wide meanders, photograph the fake deer standing rock solid still with its flag held high, spot a muskrat swimming nesting material somewhere, see a huge turtle, and when I get as far as one can paddle, I find a bunch of tiny least sandpipers, and notice that the tide has just begun to turn.  So, I turn.

Playing the game

The finest of days

S and I portage down the hill to the sea, but turn back, the onshore wind and steady sprinkling rain less than inviting for a canoe trip on open water.  Instead, we load up and head over to the West River.  S has not been there, yet.  In fact, she has spent far too little time in the canoe since we arrived here.

It is not long past the turn of low tide when we set the canoe into the river.  Another foot of bank is exposed since I was here yesterday.  I know we won't go too far knowing that the portion upstream of the downed tree will have little canoeable water.  But, the reason to return here is to show S the birds, which don't disappoint.  As soon as we get started, an osprey flushes from a nearby tree. Canada geese complain about our presence, but the others - the red-wing blackbirds, the little yellow birds and the unseen possessors of songs that I don't know, could care less.  A green backed heron flies overhead giving me the shortest instance to identify it.

We turn a bend and find two mute swans.  One of the pair watches us carefully and puts out its odd call - a wheezy whistle fart.  It occasionally raises its wings...the first bluff...making itself look big.  But, we just follow slowly, backed up in traffic and letting them move along at their pace.  Another osprey flies off with a fish in its talons and a blackbird in pursuit.

 

S spots three deer in the brush on the bank.  I take a poor photo - hand held, in a canoe, on a dark and drizzly day, but the velvet stubs of the antlers, antlers just beginning to grow - is worth hanging onto the image.

A short trip and a damp and chilly one at that.  This is not what most people would call the finest of days, but most people don't have S in the canoe with them.

What you are doing is beautiful

Its a warm and cloudy day when I put in just upstream of the tide gates on the West River.  The last time I was here, it had just rained the day before and the river was running faster than I expected.  Today, the current is sluggish and it takes less than half as long for me to paddle up to the big tree that lays across the river just below the first bridge.

I push through the branches, snapping off enough of them to leave a path for me to use later. 

I know that the drainage runs quite a ways from looking at maps, but small rivers like this don't necessarily have enough water to canoe.  Much of this one looks like a dark blurred streak on the satellite photographs with little open water to be seen.  I expected a wetland that might be explorable, but instead I find a creek sized river that passes through tunnels of trees and several more bridges.  A man walking his dog next to the river greets me saying, "What you are doing is beautiful."

One at a time, I spot four black crowned night herons, all flying...perhaps the most beautiful of the herons.  Also, one great blue heron, five osprey, a pair of male wood ducks, and a green backed heron...a dinosaur bird for sure, when on the wing.

green-backed heron

I find a plastic garbage can, so I fill it.  It is impressive how almost all litter is plastic.  I even find a motorcycle helmet.  Fortunately, it is empty.

I turn around when I run out of enough water to float the canoe while wading.  On the return, I can see that the river has dropped with the tide.  Apparently, the tide gates stop salt water from coming upstream such that the river backs up some.  While not has critical as some of the small tidal rivers, coming here at high tide might add an extra mile of upstream travel.