Wild Rice - Salmon River

I end up in that little brook on the westerly side, but it is all new to me.  On earlier trips, it started as a broad marsh with a wide patch of water in front of it and then tapered to a narrow creek bounded by forested hills.  Today, the creek is narrow right from where it meets the river, and the narrow path of open water is bounded by a dense crop of six to eight foot high wild rice plants.

Although I know little about wild rice, it appears that it is almost ready to be harvested...maybe a week or so to go.  Most of the kernels are still green, but some have begun to turn red-brown and they hold together as one when picked and rolled between the fingers.

Anyway, this trip the narrow path runs through the wild rice all the way back to the forested creek where, as I round the final bend, I flush the bluest of great blue herons.  And when the water runs too shallow for the canoe, I take a moment and find myself surrounded by cattails, wild rice, pickerelweed, cardinal flowers, and arrow arum.

Wattle and Daub

S sleeps in very late.  S had called me from a trip out of town the other day and told me that all she wanted was to go canoeing.  When she wakes up, she asks if it is too late to go canoeing.  I tell her that we still have daylight until seven o'clock...we have plenty of time.  She says, "let's go now."

I take her to a river that she has not ever seen, and we start from a place that I've never put in at, although I'd been there on a previous trip.  This put-in was known by the tavern that stood here, but the tavern owner died several years ago and the tavern was torn down.  Still, all of the maps for this site tell one to look for the tavern and I'm not sure why, but I like that.


Here, the Mattabasset is a well forested slow moving river crawling between banks that are so root bound that they appear to almost be wattle and daub.  One time, S points to the bank and suggests that it is a beaver dam...it isn't although it almost looks like one.

The forested river runs into a flood plain with the "dry" land a level shelf a foot or two above the water...a place to camp, sometimes, but not a place to build. 

And then it gives out into marsh with extensive stands of wild rice and pickerelweed...and that one concentrated plot of cardinal flower.

 

We see some osprey, a family three swans, a great blue heron, and an unidentified hawk...but it is the number of song birds, especially red wing blackbirds that is most noticable.  They are already feeding on the wild rice, even though the kernels haven't yet fully formed.

And when S's prescription for canoeing has been fulfilled, we return, winding our way through the snags and deadfalls and under and through the gaps in the low branches, hugging the bank and admiring the woven tangle of roots that the fallen trees present to us.

Mattabasset

It's a cool and mostly cloudy day with a breeze out of the north or the west, an end of summer day whose purpose is to let us know that there will be an end of summer. 

I set off up the big river, a twenty minute paddle to the mouth of the smaller river, a left turn under three closely arranged bridges...and it changes, just like that.

 

...a forest lined river...or is it swamp with those wet footed trees.   A river like this always has an old feeling about it.  Maybe its the silver snags standing for a few more years, or maybe its the trees that have tipped to the water, bowed to gravity and weather.  It's a place that goes out of its way to make it hard for people to get to.

I've been here before, but never liked it as much as I do today... it is the wind.  The usual traffic noise that bears down on the marsh and forest is being blown away by the wind.  Today, this is a wild place disconnected from development.

The river goes from tree lined swamp forest to an expansive fresh water tidal marsh, then it returns to swamp forest.

I notice that the water is high and the current nonexistent, especially since this is close to low tide.  I suppose the recent rains have added water to the big river, and the small river has no place to go.  I pass my previous high point and keep going in the still and deep waters.  The river keeps going, I keep paddling.  I thought the current would start fighting me by this point.  I thought that I would've turned back by now.  But, I have time and I keep going.

I paddle under two bridges and up to an old railroad bridge where the river shallows and the current is fast.  I could wade past into the pool above, but my start was not early enough for the longer trip.  I turn back from where someone parked their car.  I'm out six miles and I've seen three people...two fishermen and a guy sitting in a chair reading.  I've nodded to each, no words have been spoken.

Bird Show

We put in at the top of the Hamden cornfield, a huge marsh that has been taken over by invasive phragmites.  I tell S that the canoe guidebooks send people down river from here, into the cornfield, and how it is a sticky hot lifeless paddle.  Just like canoeing in a cornfield.  We go upriver under a low overcast that will burn off with the sun.

The tide is just coming in, but not so much that there is an upriver current, yet.  The mud banks of the Quinnipiac are exposed, showing decades of abuse.  I suppose they would show a couple centuries of abuse, but the artifacts of the pre-industrial age tend to dissolve, and are less numerous for sure.  At the first broadening where the river opens up and is bordered by modern highways and landfills, I point out the shell middens left behind by muskrats and other asian clam eaters.

This is one of those rivers that penetrates the wilds of civilization.  Bricks from a brick factory line the bank for a distance, car parts for another, a patch of roofing slate, and left behind railroad materials.  But, for all of that, its inaccessibility to people returns it to a wild place.  And, in return for our meager efforts, we are rewarded with a fine bird show...not so much in numbers as much as in variety...night herons, egrets, swans, osprey and hawks, a female red breasted merganser, a cardinal, several kingfishers, a great blue heron, and a duck I didn't recognize in its off-breeding colors, but it sure could swim underwater.  And, a woodchuck runs away off of a low overhanging tree and back to the safety of the bank.

We turned back earlier than usual because of a new deadfall tree that has crossed the river since this spring.  The choice of a high drag over it or a messy portage on a greasy mud bank didn't appeal...and I know that there is more of that upstream.

So, we turned back and talked about art and poked into an inlet that I'd never bothered with that turned out to be a decent sized bay, and S worked on the stationary draw stroke that I had just taught her.

Places Unknown

S and I set out from a silty sand beach on the edge of a medium sized river for a trip to a place that S has never yet seen.


It is an easy paddle on a slow moving river with just enough shade along one bank for some relief from the sun.  I point out the old railroad trestle foundations where several people died in the 1870's when their train went into the frozen river on a January night.  The water level is low enough that we can see that the foundations are not just piles of rock, but engineered shapes designed to shed currents and ice.

 But, it is the O cove that I am guiding us to.  And when we get to the big bend in the river I turn us to the outside bank and up to a low disheveled beaver dam.  S gets out onto the dam, then I get out and slide the canoe over.  The O cove at this time of the summer is a primordial oozing swamp...beautiful and seldom visited as most people can't see the wonder of it.  I steer us to the right and we push through a narrow gap of broad leaf swamp plants with purple tassles of flowers with dozens of very happy bees.  As we get farther up the cove, the water becomes decked in bright green, a surreal smooth surface of liquid meadow.

And, we take time to rest in the shade and see what might happen next.

Leveling in the East

S drops me off at the East River put-in and leaves to do errands.  I set out on the most perfect of summer days - low 80's, no humidity, a light breeze and sun.  Perfect days lack pizazz.  Give me something wilder.  But, I need the leveling of a canoe trip, perfect weather or not.

 

The put-in was occupied by people drawn to the perfect day, futzing with their seldom used boats, struggling with preperations that should be routine, but aren't.   It reminds me of why I don't belong to a canoeing club.  I unload and paddle off in less than five minutes, and I head up the less visited Neck River because I doubt that any of them knows about the high tide sneak across the spartina back into the East.  And, I'm pretty much on my own from then on.

 

Yellow Legs sitting back a ways from the river.

Wren nest in phragmites

Wren nest

When I return, a person from the state is safety checking each and every boater as they come to the launch site, checking for PFDs, whistles (a state law), licenses for motorcraft.  I pack my gear and take the canoe out and wait for fifteen minutes for S to arrive.  The safety monitor never says one word to me.  I take it as a compliment.

Pirate Ships

It is a wide and slow moving river in a broad flood plain, so broad that no hills rise away in the distance, and the nearest trees form a wall that hides what goes on back there.  It could be any one of many of America's big rivers.

And, it is quiet....still is a better word.  There are no outside noises, there is only two fishermen in a tub with a puttering motor, and they are a mile upstream. 

I paddle the east shoreline, the shady shoreline at this time of the morning, the mud bank shoreline with dense tangles of tree roots from which the earth has been washed.  It is a troll forest.

Two men and two boys wander out to the bank and I find a boat ramp that I knew nothing about.  One man is a canoe enthusiast and we talk a bit about trips and canoes.  And then they retreat and I continue my exploration.

I find the mouth of the Scantic a bit over 2 hours upstream of the put-in.  It is easily recognized not being hidden behind a bar or island.  It just comes straight out to the big river and the shade of the narrower water is inviting.  But, as I figured might be the case, I come to a log jam of half a dozen deadfall trees within a couple hundred yards.  Not today...maybe later.  There are almost 30 miles of difficult to reach river between here and the area upstream where I have paddled.  I turn back.

I cross the river to see what lies on the other side of some islands that are over there.  I find the mouth of the Farmington River.  I find Pirate ship masts and spars sticking up out of the water with remnants of sails and rigging dangling from them.  Huck's abandoned raft is half buried in the silt bottom, only the corner visible above the water.
It is just that kind of river.

Nothing Better

We set out from near the bridge over the Lieutenant River.  S had not been here before. 
It was near low tide and where the back channel that we were paddling (behind the island from the main Connecticut River) opens up into a broad pond, we found a very large and low mudflat island teaming with small shore birds picking at exposed critters.

But something more interesting crossed our path and settled in a tree on a small and nearby rocky island.

Egrets, great blue herons and more osprey than one could bother to count were birds d'jour.  Most of the young osprey seemed to have left the nest. Swallows were beginning to gather in flocks and cloud-swirl in the distance...preparation for a new coming season.

The overcast damped down the visitors.  So, we paddled all the way to the sea and walked the sandy beach on the farthest island.

snowy egret

 And then we returned, repeating what we had done on the way out, only facing the other direction.

Landmark

I thought about how there is nothing better than paddling with S.

Racing the Rain

I wake up to rain and, when I crawl out of bed, it is still raining.  It is raining while I make my coffee, and it is raining when I load the canoe on the car.  I skip breakfast because it is raining.  I am racing the rain and if I don't hurry, it might stop.  It is still raining when I finally push off from Pilgrim Landing.

I planned on heading upriver into Lord Cove, but the wind is stronger than I expected and it seems that I might be in for a beating as I return to the put-in.  I turn around after a couple hundred yards and head downstream onto a mile of river that I've not seen before.  After that I can finish exploring the Lieutenant River.

fog making sculpture at the Florence Griswold Museum

I am ditching the funhog*.  In the west, at least a third of my days in the canoe were in the rain, and one quickly learns the advantages.  I almost always had the water to myself.  Rain cancels funhog plans, and it also cancels the sounds of civilization and softens the intrusion of distant structures.  Being a funhog isn't the worst thing in the world - I was once one myself.  At least they are out in nature, and sometimes funhogs develop into something more layered.  A friend of mine looked at me one day and told me that I was a deep ecologist**.  I had to look that up, but the description fit pretty close.  I had come some distance while not paying attention.

I leave the big river where the Lieutenant River comes in.  It doesn't take long for it to narrow into something comprehensible, and this is where the egrets also begin to show up.  Only a few shoreline fishermen share the day with me and the birds.  Numerous osprey whistle and perch in riverside trees while an egret steps slowly, slowly, slowly, making no waves and no ripples... as it moves in on prey.  A great blue heron flies off before I am anything that I would call near.  Where the river widens into a marsh edged pond, I paddle off to the east until it shallows, a few inches deep with large widely spaced boulders...a typical waterscape for many of the tidal rivers that I explore.  I turn back and try the west channel, which turns out to go a distance....it is a place that the satellite photos do not show, and the river goes further than I had thought, until it shrinks to a canoe width in the round terminal marsh that is bounded by forested hills.

And, it is still raining when I lift my canoe from the water.


*Definition: Funhog
1. One who uses nature as a playground without seeing the deeper meaning and purpose of nature.  Identifiable by hooting and hollering and a garage full of mostly unused outdoor equipment.  Rarely knows where they are or what they are looking at.
2. Bear food

**Definition: Deep ecologist
One who believes that everything in nature has worth and is to be respected, whether or not you understand its purpose and whether or not it has some utilitarian value to man.  Or, as I like to say - there is value in knowing that if you hike in bear country, you might get eaten by a bear, and if you hike off trail in wilderness, there is value in knowing that you may be lost and never found...and this is the way things should be.