I woke up at six this morning and crawled out of bed to check the river level. Bridge, a little higher. I checked the weather. 16 degrees Fahrenheit. Could be as high as 23 by early afternoon they said. I called Nathan to bail on the boating plans I’d made with him the night before. No way I said, I was cold just sitting at my computer. But the wheels were already in motion. He’d made his mind up and informed me he was going, regardless of my company. That did it.
I rounded up every insulative article of paddling gear I or the club owned and put together an emergency dry bag with towel, wool trousers, fleece top, space blanket, lighter, and butane cook stove. I didn’t swim once on the Saint last year, but a record like that can have a funny way of catching up with you. A full-on swim, rescue, and gear recovery today could be quite dangerous in the minutes to follow. I met Nathan at 7. We talked paddling and rivers and ate biscotti. It didn’t take long for me to quit begrudging his persistence, and soon I grew quite thankful for it. Today would be a spectacular day of boating, we both knew it.
Anomalous. That’s the word for this place. I think it every time I make the last part of the drive into the St. Francois Mountains. Geologically, they’re unique even for the Ozarks. It was a hunch wikipedia confirmed: Precambrian Igneous, some of the oldest around. Pines replace hickories in the oak forests and they line the sides of the riverbed so that your eyes can follow the evergreen patches easily through the hills. We spot a bald eagle above, and a pileated woodpecker nearly runs into the van as we cruise by. Even the air feels different here.
These mountains are big enough to support just one major watershed – the Saint. It’s something like 200 miles long and most of it looks just like any other Midwest river - wide, slow, and green. But by some fluke, all the elements of a whitewater stream come together in 4 miles of river between Roselle and Silvermines: a rocky river bed, a steep-sided miniature gorge, enormous granite boulders strewn about into shutins, and a gradient of over 50 feet/mile throughout the steepest parts. A few times a year, following heavy rains, the river responds in a storm of ferocity. Saturday night it rose 10 feet in a few hours. At the peak of the flash flood, the flow reached an estimated 15,000 cubic feet/s. Those are nearly Grand Canyon numbers, just with more rocks. I can’t help but marvel at the sheer unlikeliness of it.
We pull in in the wake of all this. The river has receded back to bridge level, “mercifully” as I see it. It’s left a trail of debris half way across the parking lot, the high water mark. It’s funny how little regard the river has for the arbitrary designations we like to make; how easily parking lot becomes river again, even if only for a day. We run into a couple of hearty climbers at D bridge and it turns out one of them is Larry Rapp’s brother, Dan. I should have guessed by how far he was into a six pack we'd seen him buy moments earlier in Fredericktown. I like him immediately. He offers a shuttle, so we unapologetically haul him all the way up to Roselle with us, trusting the van to whatever fate has kept his brother alive down here all these years.
After a bit of flatwater paddling in the pools above Entrance Rapid, we realize (with great relief) that we’re both adequately dressed. Warm even, save for our feet. We drift through the first few waves as they gradually pick up steam. In the thick of it, there are 2-3 foot waves everywhere, almost every other one offering a quick front surf to ease the nerves and start finding a groove. It’s nonthreatening. And Fun. We’re all smiles at the bottom.
I catch a nice green wave in Kitten’s Crossing. It’s wide enough to carve back and forth on, but I get spooked when I’m on the side closest to the trees now partially submerged. Pinning on rock is inconvenient and scary. Pinning in the trees could be worse. I don’t stay long. A little below the rapid is a sizable surf hole I’ve never noticed before. It looks good but I let it pass. We do try out the regular hole on river left. Nathan first. He eases in, upstream edge up, just as it should be. All of a sudden his boat is pushed under the water, wedged down by the oncoming water on the upper decks. He rolls up immediately, wide-eyed. Moments later he reports his neoprene is even warmer for it. I’m not entirely convinced.
I’ve been talking up Land of Oz, the last rapid. We get to it and find two stellar green surf waves, one right after the other. I take the first, Nathan the second. This is the biggest, steepest, and fastest wave I’ve been on yet. It feels great. I carve back and forth, just enough to keep my bow from getting pushed too deep, not enough to keep it entirely clear. Water rushes over the front decks and spray skirt and somehow finds its way straight through all of my layers to pool in my wetsuit between my legs. I surf there until the incoming water noticeably changes the behavior of the boat. I empty well over a gallon when we get to Millstream. I don’t think we were wearing the same kind of neoprene.
The Tiemann Shutins are the heart and soul of this place. Though just half a mile long, they include the only four named rapids (III-IV today) of the lower stretch. There are good wave trains before Big Drop and the steeper gradient is immediately noticeable. There’s one wave below a ledge up there that gives me butterflies. We eddy out to surf. I ferry across to it. It’s so steep you can hardly avoid catching it. I nervously carve a few turns, trying to keep the bow up, then right back to my eddy and safety. Nathan goes in, is knocked sideways, and catches the wave with a desperate brace on the foam at the top. It works and after recovering, he quickly shoots off of it, looking pleased. We go down the left side of Big Drop and agree we like it better.
At bridge level, Cat’s Paw takes the cake. Our favorite, hands down. When we were here earlier this fall, I showed Nathan my favorite move in the rapid. He even improved on it. Today we both nailed it. It starts to the river right as you drift past the enormous Shark’s fin boulder. If you aim for the eddy immediately behind it, you drop down about a foot into the uneasy stillness of the eddy there, snapping the bow of your boat upstream – an expert, technical eddy catch. It’s great fun.
Once you’re there, it’s spooky. Where you sit is perfectly still while a foot to your left the entire river rushes by, choked down to half its usual width (twice its speed) and all directed upon a massive rock it wells up on before dropping, threateningly, over the horizon line on the right. The second part of the move is to eddy out in that jet of current, make sure you get far enough out to avoid the rock, then line yourself up for the drop you cannot yet see over. When I left the eddy, it turned my boat downstream just as quickly as it had when steering in. I lined up and with a fortunately timed boof stroke, sailed almost all 11 feet of boat out horizontally over the drop – landing with that satisfying “boooooffff” of displaced water. Once you land, you’re hit by waves in every direction at once – white out. I closed my eyes and grimaced, emerging just fine a split second later. Nathan followed cleanly, exact same line. We played for some time on the fast waves below the rapid.
Besides Nathan almost getting back-endered in the pour-over, not much happened at Double Drop. I enjoyed watching it from the top. Rickety Rack was great. We knew to expect the monster breaking wave at the bottom, but my heart still jumped when I saw it. I like that this river can still do that to me. We both punched through. I felt its weight knock into my chest, its cold in my face. It tasted just like an icicle tastes.
After the Tiemann Shutins the river relaxes. It only seemed right that we should too. I spotted another bald eagle, or maybe the same one again. Before turkey creek there’s a long stretch of haystack waves, 2-3 feet high. At the top of each wave I’d take a boof stroke and lurch the boat forward with my hips. The bow would slap half way up the next wave and I’d do it again and again, until the waves ran out - stupidly fun. We drifted through the willow gardens and Nathan got a couple good surfs. I missed the wave and sorely regretted it. He looked like he was having fun up there.
When we got to the dam, Nathan ran the breach first. He went right through the guts of it. I cheated and snuck past the worst, but sort of got spun on the eddy line. Though I didn’t see it, he said he did too. It was awfully swirly.
Today was the best day I’ve had since the last time I went to the river. That’s often the case. There’s something terrifically special about it. The way you get to engage the elemental. Hiking, biking, and just about every other outdoor activity does that. Boating lets you communicate with it though, dance even. You actively engage the energy of those forces, and that’s very unique. If you want to get around the river on a day like today, you have to read the water and know it intimately. And then, you have to use what you know: surf the wave faces to make your ferries, anticipate the lateral shove of diagonal waves, distinguish good water for a brace from bad. You boat on its terms: know that there are some places you just can’t go, certain moves you shouldn’t try, things you can’t get away with. When you know your partner, then you can dance. Surfing those big green waves, or peeling out into those torrents in Cat’s Paw, embracing it, loving it. The river telling you what you can and cannot do, leading the dance. Slapping you around when you don't listen. Rewarding you with its aproval when you do. You become almost as much a part of it as the rocks and pines. That kind of impersonal dialogue is special to me. That's why I boat on a day that's scarcely 20 degrees.
Sorry for all the psycho-physio-spiritual zen stuff. I'm reading a book steeped in it and I suppose some of it is getting under my skin. Nathan BR put together this sweet edit. Accurately named.
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