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photo by Gary Bridgman*

Here is my account of this canoe trip, published in Oxford Town and the the Wolf River Conservancy's newsletter in the summer of 1998.



A River Creeps Through It

by Gary Bridgman

OT editor's note: On May 1, 1998, Ole Miss graduate student, William "Fitz" FitzGerald, became the first person in recorded history to travel the entire length of the Wolf River. WRC board member and Oxford, MS, resident, Gary Bridgman, became the second person to do this...about three seconds later (he was in the back of the canoe), as the two completed the "Wolf River Survey." Gary and Fitz hiked and paddled from Baker's Pond to the foot of Union Avenue to help raise awareness about the river as a whole. Sponsors included the Wolf River Conservancy, Outdoors Inc., Ghost River Canoe Rentals, and BellSouth Mobility. What follows is Gary's rather unscientific, non-chronological account of the trip.

There's a distinction between being drunk on a river and being drunk with a river. One does not need alcohol or drugs to have mind altering (or life changing) experiences in a canoe. Fast moving streams like the Nantahala and the Ocoee are what I call "adrenaline rivers," while the Wolf is an "endorphin river." It offers canoeists a priceless glimpse of what all other rivers' headwaters in this region looked like before the Corps of Engineers channelized them.

William Faulkner described such swampy, untamed rivers as "the thick, slow, black, unsunned streams almost without current, which once each year ceased to flow at all and then reversed, spreading, drowning the rich land and subsiding again, leaving it still richer." They are intoxicating, to say the least.

The Wolf River is teeming with wildlife and wetland vegetation, but my favorite part about our recent "expedition" was not its biodiversity, but its psychodiversity: all the interesting people I met in the process --- interesting people like the two cops who almost busted us for vagrancy.

"Good Cop/Bad Cop"
Memphis, May 1, 8 miles from the Mississippi River: "Hey! Get up! MPD!" shouts a Memphis police officer.

William FitzGerald ("Fitz") and I are stumbling out of the tent into the glare of their Mag-Lites, my left leg is still tangled in my sleeping bag.

"What are you doing here?" the other officer calmly asks.

It's 3 a.m. We are camped illegally in a city park located on the Wolf, having built an equally illegal campfire. I've explained that we aren't vagrants and that there is a canoe hidden in the tall grass over there and that we're paddling the entire length of this river on behalf of the Wolf River Conservancy.

Now the policemen are more relaxed. They're even giving me pointers on how to delay being raped or murdered in case some of the local toughs come by. (It didn't look like a rough neighborhood from the river.)

We had been at it for six days by the time the police woke us up in Kennedy Park: hiking and paddling (and wading) some 90 miles by that point. Just a few more miles to go to reach the Mississippi River . . . .

"Thirteen Weeks Earlier"

Moscow, Tenn., January 24: The whole thing started when my friend Chris Stahl, who runs a canoe rental service on the Wolf River, asked me how he could attract more people to the river. "Canoe the whole thing in one lick, man," I said, not very helpfully.

Chris was asking me for ideas about popular day trips for families and church groups, not about some kind of pilgrimage out of the heart of darkness into the middle of industrial North Memphis. There were remote sections of that river no one had navigated in decades --- too shallow, too narrow, too overgrown, too full of fallen trees. We could count on crawling out of the canoe to lift it over logs several hundred times in the process.

Chris liked my thinking anyhow, but business commitments and common sense kept him on the shore for most of the trip. So I enlisted Fitz to make the trip with me instead. From January onward, one or both of us spent nearly every weekend scouting different sections of the river and meeting peculiar people.

Walnut, Miss., February 8: "You can put this in the Bible if you want to, but I like snakes more than I like most people," said one man we met while scouting a swamp. "You can trust a cottonmouth; all you have to do is know how his mind works." He viewed our "People's Republic of Oxford" Lafayette County license tags with suspicion, wondering if we were more "dope smoking a__holes" trespassing on his land, but we've since developed an interesting friendship.

"Gary, so far I think you're a decent person, but if you ever cross me, I can give away one of my motorcycles to someone in Memphis who'll do anything to you that I ask!" Great. I gave up being a Republican for this?

"The Trip Begins"

Baker's Pond, Holly Springs National

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