On a pleasant spring Thursday, I took a 10-mile canoe trip down the Buffalo National River with my wife and daughter, two brothers-in-law, and a sister in law. We rented three canoes. The outfitter took us down 20 miles of increasingly rustic roads — at one point, we had to stop and open a gate that had been erected by a crotchety old man who resented that the county road crossed his farm.
The river was harmless, with just the occasional ripple. We started off quickly, but then saw the outfitter putting some other canoers in the river further along. He told us we were making “incredible time.” After that we slowed down and let the current take us. We saw three other canoes and a few people along the shore, but otherwise, we were alone with the birds and the turtles. There were a lot of turtles.
Around noon, we decided to stop for lunch. Our first choice, a nice, shady sandbar, turned out to be ankle-deep mud. Our second choice, a rock shelf at the base of the cliff, was too hard to reach because the current was too fast. We finally settled on a gravel bar in the middle of the river, right underneath the Highway 65 bridge — the only sign of civilization we’d seen. It wasn’t even a nice gravel bar —it was fully exposed to the sun, and there was nowhere to sit.
We brought no sun protection, and we paid. When we reached the pull-out, we wandered up the road to an old-fashioned general store and called the outfitter to come get us. We bought ice cream and walked back down to the canoes to wait. It was a good time, and we were sorry when it ended.
