Читать книгу Coastal Missouri: Driving On the Edge of Wild - John Drake Robinson - Страница 8

I drove down to Akers Ferry, which connects the wilderness north of the Current River to the wilderness on the south. It’s an area where the bullfrogs sound like banjo strings. That’s not a crude reference to the movie Deliverance or a slam at Ozark hill people. The bullfrogs really do sound like banjo strings.

The ferry is operated by Gene and Eleanor Maggard. Gene’s family has been in the canoe rental business since shortly after the birth of Julius Caesar. As Gene and Eleanor prepare for retirement, their son Marcus will take over operations. It’s no small business. Two million people float Missouri’s Ozark streams every year. The Current and its major tributary, the Jacks Fork River, are part of the oldest national scenic riverway in America.

Ever since the National Park Service secured these rivers, the feds have licensed the canoe outfitters. Hard feelings persist among folks who, forty years ago, lost their livelihoods when they found themselves without one of the coveted canoe rental concessions.

Such a protected scenic riverway could never happen today. Not with the anti-government conspiracy theorists, who believe it’s their God-given right to employ nature to fit personal purposes, environment be damned. Most people respect these waters. But it’s stunning how fast a few idiots armed with trash and tractors can destroy the land and foul the streams.

The Maggards know the importance of keeping these rivers clean. They’re good at what they do. Gene just got a new pair of knees to support his gentle-giant frame, so he’s regained the ability to singlehandedly hoist canoes atop the big five-high canoe trailers. That’s something I’ve never been able to do, even with good knees.

His son Marcus could hoist two canoes at the same time to the highest rung. He’s that big. I have a special respect for good-natured giants, and it’s comforting to know they’re on your side in a land where the bullfrogs sound like banjo strings. Marcus and his dad can keep drunken yahoos in line, if necessary.

Hey, since history began, folks have gathered to get polluted. And on any warm weather weekend along the Current, a natural progression plays out in a bumper-to-bumper regatta, as revelers drink and bake and drink and become victims of their own excess.

Lucky for me I had timed my visit on Wednesday, the best day to float the Current River because it’s the furthest day from the weekend, furthest from the rowdy drunken bumper boaters who show up to bong beers and snort Jell-O shots and fall out of their shorts.

Despite all that shiny aluminum traffic and all that beer piss and vomit, the river runs clear, thanks to the hundreds of springs that pour their liquid benefit into the mix. The springs are cold, and when the air temperature pushes 100 degrees, nothing’s better than planting your ass in sixty-degree water.

We floated from Cedar Grove back down to the ferry, a distance of eight miles, a four-hour trip. Halfway down the river, we stopped at Maggard’s cabin, a favorite hideout for the James Gang as they were terrorizing the railroads and banks in Missouri. This was the spot where the gang holed up after the Gads Hill train robbery fifty miles from here. The hideout has been restored, and the legend preserved.

We hit Welch Spring, home to the concrete shell of a spooky old abandoned country hospital, a sanitarium established by a doctor who built the monstrosity into a bluff over a cave, hoping to lure sick lungs to gasp for clean, cool, cave air. Long since abandoned by humans, the cave is now home to bats.

Drunken canoeists whine and bitch that the bats shouldn’t be the only mammals allowed in the cave. But ecologists prevail, the delicate bat nurseries thrive, and the bats show their gratitude by eating their weight in bugs every night. Go bats!

Welch Spring explodes onto the river with the force of a hundred hydrants, and the water is bag-shriveling frigid. So when the air temperature and humidity are right, the cold water emerging from underground hits the warming water in the river, and causes a pea soup fog as thick as anything off Nantucket. The phenomenon lasts a good half mile downstream, during which surprised canoeists can’t see beyond their own canoes, and they can only drift, listen to those banjo bullfrogs, and shit their swimsuits.

The cold water of Welch Spring and its wall of fog energized my useful senses as I felt and listened my way downriver to Akers and its real live ferry that keeps Route K continuous. We emerged from the fog and arrived at the ferry crossing in late afternoon, where we emptied our canoes and our trunks and our bladders.

The end of the float brought the same satisfaction that millions of visitors feel each year. The float is not whitewater; novices can complete the journey relatively unscathed. Still, it’s an exhilarating escape from the normal daily grind, escape from TV and texters and tweets.

The ferry is nothing much to look at, a flat barge that can hold three cars, maybe four, although there rarely are more than one or two vehicles waiting on the riverbank at one time, even during rush hour. The barge propels itself using an overhead motor that clutches two cables, one from either side of the river, and reels one cable in as it lets the other out. Erifnus has floated the barge a half dozen times, but she wouldn’t today. She was waiting patiently for me under the shade of a sycamore tree on the fringe of the Akers Ferry campground. And she was ready for the next leg of our wilderness plunge.

Even as I stepped out of my canoe, Branson was calling, for a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed business breakfast early next morning. But the late afternoon sun still allowed enough time to check out another geologic wonder named after Satan.

Devil’s Well is a big stomach, says one of the area’s preeminent geologist-explorers. It’s Mother Nature’s idea of an indoor pool, except that it’s cold and dark and underground and scary as hell, hence the name. It is the world’s most dramatic peek into an underground river, a hundred feet straight down through a hole no wider than a backyard trampoline.

Before the Devil relinquished this well to the National Park Service, visitors could descend into the stomach, er, sinkhole in a bosun’s chair. It was a ride much like the worm experiences when dangled from a fish hook, although the conclusion is less digestive.

On that hot afternoon, I saved a couple of friends. Three of us—Cheryl, Dean and I—walked the steep winding trail down into the sinkhole that drains into Devil’s Well. The sinkhole’s dimensions are such that it would make a perfect sheath for a small tornado, if Satan wanted to store one here. The hole narrows to the size of an inverted forest tower, descending to a platform where we peered over a ledge through a hole that could easily become plugged by an elephant if it fell from the sky into this tiny vortex. A few dozen feet below the hole is the water. The cavern is damn near the size and circumference of the Astrodome, best I can tell. So this hole is the world’s first domed sports facility.

Thanks to well-hung electric lights, we saw the cavern and its pool, which would be the eighth wonder of the world except that it already has a higher ranking as the seventh wonder of Shannon County.

We ascended the staircase out of the hole with the realization that the surrounding terra was not that firma. That was our first unsettling revelation.

Our second unsettling revelation came when Cheryl tried to start her car. Dead battery. Middle of nowhere. No cell phone service, and a gravel road that switchbacked up a steep hill for two miles to the nearest country blacktop. So I started running up the gravel road to find help.

Up the hill, closer to the fringes of the outer beginnings of the path to the edge of civilization, I met a van carrying a vacationing family from Wisconsin, descending into the valley that contains the hole that leads to the Seventh Wonder of Shannon County. Friendly and willing, they provided the jumper cables and the juice to start Cheryl’s car and get us out of the vortex of the Devil.

That evening over homestyle fried chicken at a country cafe called Jason’s Place, among friends whose jobs it is to set tourism lures, we relayed the story of surprise and despair and the kindness of strangers, all within the clutches of the Devil and his well.