Читать книгу Suwannee River Guidebook - Kevin M. McCarthy - Страница 10
Оглавлениеby water from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to Big Shoals
The Okefenokee Swamp is where the Suwannee begins. According to Allen Morris’s Florida Place Names the word “Okefenokee” goes back to Hitchiti oki “water” and Creek fenoke “trembling” or, together, “trembling water,” referring to the movement of the spongy bogs, which seem to undulate when walked on. The Creek Indians also referred to the swamp as ekan “land” and fenoke “trembling” or, together, “trembling land.”
The Okefenokee Swamp is the beginning of the Suwannee River. Florida State Archives
The huge swamp, which covers 438,000 acres in southern Georgia and northern Florida, is in large part protected by being part of the 402,000-acre Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and the Okefenokee Wilderness. The swamp, considered by many to be one of the seven natural wonders of Georgia, formed in the last seven millennia by the growth of peat in the relatively shallow basin. Only Florida’s Everglades is a larger freshwater swamp in the South. Just how vulnerable such huge uninhabited, inaccessible areas can be became apparent in 2007, when a wildfire—begun with a lightning strike near its center—merged with another fire and burned more than 600,000 acres of southern Georgia, an area nearly the size of Rhode Island.
Readers of Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” strip know the Okefenokee as the place where Pogo Possum and his friends make their home. Kelly might have chosen the swamp as his locale because of the land’s inaccessibility, mystique, and distance from civilization. The cypress trees in and near the water—with their broad bases and tapered tops—and the Spanish moss draped over many of the trees all add an otherworldliness to the swamp and river. If boaters venture out early enough in the day, before the sun has a chance to heat up the air, they may see an eerie mist rise from the warm river into the chilly air, lending a ghostly vista to the scene.
An eerie mist arises from the river in the early hours.
How that swamp was formed is still not clear. Theories range from its being a lagoon near the Atlantic Ocean or a depression in the Carolina Bay to its being the result of a meteor shower or even the scouring of the land by millions of fish when the area was part of the ocean bottom. Scientists estimate that the swamp formed more than seven thousand years ago, at a time when Native Americans were living in the southeastern part of the present United States.
The Suwannee River begins in the Okefenokee as small channels and creeks (with names like Alligator, Bay, Cane, Jones) slowly join one another and steadily flow south. A major creek, Suwannoochee, enters the river just below Fargo and increases its flow perceptibly. The St. Marys River, which forms the border between Georgia and Florida, drains about five to ten percent of the swamp, while the Suwannee drains ninety percent of the swamp’s watershed. In the late nineteenth century workers dug the Suwa(n)nee Canal across the swamp in an unsuccessful attempt to drain it. When the digging company went bankrupt, the Hebard family of Philadelphia bought most of the land and ran large cypress logging operations from 1909 to 1927. The train tracks of that company and other logging companies into the 1940s can still be seen throughout the area.
Public entrances or landings into the Okefenokee include the Suwannee Canal Recreation Area in Folkston, Georgia; Kingfisher Landing in Race Pond, Georgia; Stephen C. Foster State Park in Fargo, Georgia; and Suwannee River Sill Recreation Area in Fargo, Georgia. A private facility, Okefenokee Swamp Park, provides access near Waycross, Georgia. The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge welcomes several hundred thousand visitors each year, including many foreigners, and thus provides an important economic resource to southeast Georgia and northeast Florida as visitors arrive to take advantage of the chance to see wildlife, canoe or kayak on the streams, and take guided tours.
The river slowly begins to widen.
Only about thirty miles of the Suwannee River are in Georgia. The other 200+ miles are in Florida. The Suwannee, then, is in Georgia and Florida, not Alabama, despite the first words to a 1922 song entitled “Swanee River Blues”: “Dear old Alabama where the Swanee River flows.” As it flows from the Okefenokee and heads for the Gulf, it winds and meanders due to fluctuations in the topography for the last thousand years or so. The river averages about four miles per hour, but that average increases in those spots where the river narrows.
The decaying vegetation of the Georgia swamp injects tannic acid into the river and darkens it, whereas the dozens of clear-water springs in the lower third of the river lighten it to some degree.
The dark hue of tannic water does not appeal to everyone. According to Cynthia Barnett’s recent excellent treatise about water issues in Florida, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., Walt Disney hated the dark, tannic waters of his theme park near Orlando and insisted that engineers drain the wetlands and transform Mickey’s habitat into one of clear blue waters.
The first easily identifiable beginnings of the river are at the Stephen C. Foster State Park in the Okefenokee Swamp in Charlton County, Georgia. The park’s eighty-acre facility on the banks of the Suwannee, reachable by car or truck via Highway 177, enables visitors to explore the river and surrounding ecosystem with the help of rangers on guided boat trips. The U.S. Congress established the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1936, and today the swamp, which extends thirty-eight miles north to south and twenty-five miles east to west, is one of the oldest and best-preserved freshwater areas in the United States. It has an immense quantity of water, which becomes the main source of water for the upper part of the Suwannee, especially as the swamp drains into the river after any kind of rain.
That part of the river is the quietest in terms of human activity and boat traffic. The vastness and relative impermeability of the Okefenokee, which still has a mystique about it, will continue to generate legends of swamp creatures and renegades from the law taking refuge there and hermits making moonshine. But the swamp’s natural beauty, at least along the river, makes it an anomaly in this ever–changing, busy world. In times past, the Seminoles used it as a refuge from both the Creek Indians, from whom the Seminoles split off (the word “Seminole” means “runaway”), and from the whites who wanted to enslave them. Many of those Indians left the safety of the swamp and headed south in the eighteenth century to take up residence in the sparsely settled Florida peninsula.
A 1938 book originally published in the Rivers of America series, Cecile Matschat’s Suwannee River: Strange Green Land, describes some of the people who lived back in the swamp. Because most of the Okefenokee is now part of a federal park, the swamp is mostly uninhabited, but boaters who venture on and off the main tributaries of the Suwannee in Georgia can perhaps picture what a wild, isolated life those people must have lived. Matschat’s book, despite its title, is almost exclusively about the people of the Okefenokee and does not address much about the rest of the river’s domain.
In 1997 the DuPont Corporation planned to start a fifty-year titanium mining operation in southern Georgia, but protests by environmentalists and opposition by government agencies forced the company to abandon the project three years later and give up their mineral rights forever. In 2003, DuPont donated the sixteen thousand acres it had bought for mining to The Conservation Fund. Two years later, officials then gave almost seven thousand acres of the donated land to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
A small, shallow-draft boat is necessary for the upper river.
The shallowness of the upper river allows only canoes, kayaks, or other shallow-draft boats to maneuver. Rumrunners during Prohibition may have used that part of the river, but today it is relatively quiet, especially on weekdays. The narrowness of the waterway in the upper third of its course can be reassuring to the beginning boater, but that narrowness can funnel the spring rains into a turbulent power rushing down to towns below. The overflowing of the swollen river onto its banks after heavy rains has caused much damage to houses along the way and led to stricter rules about how high new structures must be in order to meet code. My guide Cary Crutchfield and I saw poles along the way—for example in some of Florida’s state parks—that marked the different flood levels. Water fluctuations in much of the river depend a lot on the amount of rain, of course, and the watermarks on the cypresses along the banks can be as much as thirty or forty feet above those of the flow during droughts.
Those boating south from the park or even from Fargo may not see anyone for many miles, but that enables boaters to see wildlife, including deer and gators, seldom seen in more congested areas. The upper part of the river flows through some of Florida’s least-populated counties, which is very conducive to seeing wildlife. Because of the difficulty in determining where in the Okefenokee Refuge the Suwannee actually begins—that is, in separating the start of the river from the surrounding swamp—many boaters begin their trek to the Gulf of Mexico by starting in Fargo, which is over two hundred miles from the Gulf and over twenty miles south of the Okefenokee Refuge.
The railroad bridge near Fargo is the first of about a dozen bridges over the river.
My guide and I did this, putting in at Fargo and heading north, upstream, to the entrance of the Okefenokee Refuge, where rangers do not allow any boat with a motor above ten horsepower. Right at Fargo, a railroad bridge still operates. In fact, we heard a train using the bridge at the beginning of that day’s trip and at the end, although we never actually saw it. Hearing the train whistle conjured images of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when trains were so vital to remote areas like north Florida and south Georgia. It took five to six hours of steady travel for us to reach the entrance of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, where the information on the welcome sign in the river was for the most part expected: No firearms, no camping, no fires, fishing by poles and reels only, and all visitors must leave by sunset.
I learned from my guide that the many cypress trees we saw in that upper part, that section in Georgia, have to begin their growth on dry land and cannot be under water for long stretches of time without dying. He also pointed out that the air bubbles floating downstream, while usually coming from obstructions like fallen limbs farther up, can indicate a gator lying on the bottom, especially if the bubbles rise in relatively undisturbed parts of the river, such as near the banks.
Most of the land along each side is owned by timber companies, which cut the trees out when they are tall. The land would be very difficult to develop, i.e., to build houses on, because it is too wet and has very limited access by cars. The few houses on the high limestone bluffs are relatively safe from the periodic flooding. The steep banks and also the large sand banks in the upper part of the river surprised me. I realized how long the river has been flowing down from Georgia, if it has been able to erode such a deep channel, up to thirty feet, into the limestone formation.
We saw almost no trash in the water or along the banks in Georgia, despite boaters, fishermen, and swimmers, but we did encounter fallen trees across the river at different times. This prompted my guide to advise me (and others) to bring along a portable chainsaw to remove fallen branches and small trees that prevent easy movement up and down the waterway.
Small hills of white sand are present along the river.
We saw kayakers from time to time, boaters who were going to boat much if not all of the Suwannee. One boater, Charles Wilson, kayaked the whole river alone in 1975, making the 230-mile trip without any help from people along the way in a record fifty-seven hours. My guide told me that each year several intrepid boaters canoe the entire river, from the Okefenokee Swamp to the Gulf of Mexico, camping out along the way. If they average about ten miles a day, it will take them 23 to 24 days. Doing so when the river is not affected by a periodic drought makes it much easier, of course. Another account of a boat trip from Fargo to Suwannee is William Logan’s Canoeing and Camping the 213 Miles of the Beautiful Suwannee River.
***
On our second cruise, we put in at Turner Bridge Road ramp just north of C.R. 6 in Florida and headed north to Fargo. Because we were boating on a weekday, we saw absolutely no one on that day’s trip. We did see an occasional weekend cottage and boat ramps for the launching of canoes, but the river was undisturbed. What pleased us the most was the almost total lack of trash in that part of the waterway. My guide, who lives on the river south of Branford, collected a few pieces (a raincoat, a deflated rubber raft, a torn piece of Styrofoam) and put them in his boat for later disposal, but in general we were very happy with the cleanliness of the river. The seventeen-mile trip took seven hours upstream and then only three hours downstream with the current. Despite the fact that we were not within sight of any towns, our cell phones could pick up signals much of the way.
The small sign at the Georgia border is easily missed.
The border between Georgia and Florida is marked by a green sign (“GA. STATE LINE”) on a tree on the west bank. Almost all the land on the west bank (and some on the east) in northeastern Hamilton County, from the Georgia line down to C.R. 6, is land managed by the Suwannee River Water Management District. Some maps will list the land tracts as Roline, Hopewell (on the east bank), Turner Bridge, Levings (on the east bank), and Cypress Creek South. Woodpecker Road/Route (C.R. 135 or N.E. 180th Boulevard) runs just to the west of the land tracts on the west bank. Two dirt roads (N.E. 25th Way and N.E. 38th Trail) cut off from Woodpecker Road/Route and lead to boat ramps on the river. The tracts of land contain different types of trees and ecosystems, such as mixed hardwood and bottomland, floodplain, basin, and swamps. The animals that can be seen include alligators, squirrels, gopher tortoises, raccoons, wading birds, and wild hogs. One can also encounter mosquitoes and horseflies, as well as black widow spiders and moccasins. Caution is the word, especially when sleeping in a tent or outside along the river.
The first section of the river, down for about one hundred miles, is relatively unknown to most people, as many seem to prefer the wider, faster current below Fanning Springs. In open stretches along the hundred-mile first section, the blazing sun, especially from around 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., can be difficult to handle. Keeping a radio in the boat can be very helpful, especially with a station tuned to weather reports.
The farms along the river, even if they cannot be seen, have an effect on its health since animal and human waste and fertilizers can creep into the groundwater, increase levels of nitrates in the water, and endanger the region’s drinking water. Large masses of algae in the river are a telltale sign of deteriorating conditions. For the past decade the State of Florida has used a voluntary partnership with farmers that encourages them to reduce groundwater pollution. In recent years, however, officials have taken a more direct approach, requiring large dairies to secure permits that regulate the use of manure on the land. Since 2004, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has required all dairies with more than seven hundred cows to have permits that regulate the use of cow manure on fields. The next step is to require even smaller farms to have similar permits.
Just how fast the river’s levels can fall as a result of a lack of rain in the Okefenokee Swamp became clear on our third trek, when we put in at Turner Bridge boat ramp just north of C.R. 6, south of the Georgia border. We actually violated one of the cardinal rules of boaters on such rivers: boat upstream so that, in case of a mechanical breakdown, you can simply float downstream to where you put in. After launching our boat at that boat ramp and going downstream around several bends, we very suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a very shallow part of the river, full of rocks and threatening white water. When our boat got stuck on some of the rocks and would not budge, we had to take everything out of our pants pockets, jump into the waist-deep water, and pull the boat off the rocks into a side channel.
I remember asking my guide at one point in that task, “Do I need to be worried about gators and moccasins since I cannot see below the surface of the dark water?” “No,” he reassured me, “but you do need to be worried about Deliverance-type people,” referring to the movie about canoers who encounter some very bad people on just such a river in Georgia. I assumed my guide was joking, but I did look up onto the high banks from time to time. Because boaters may have to jump into the water at unexpected times, wearing boots or old tennis shoes is recommended. You don’t want to bloody up your feet with the sharp rocks on the bottom.
Cary got into the water to pull the boat off the rocks.
Something that surprised me in the Upper Suwannee, which extends down to Ellaville, was the fact that the water coming out of the small springs along the river was not as clear as we had expected, but rather quite dark. Megan Wetherington, water resources engineer for the Suwannee River Water Management District (SRWMD), explained to me that the darkness of the water was due to the river’s entering, then exiting the spring. When groundwater levels along the river are at record low levels, any sudden rains can cause minor flooding, which in turn causes the springs to backflow. For example, at White Springs the river has been known to flow back into the springs for several months at a time. Because the tannic river water is the last into the springs, it is the first out, thus the darker look to it.
Different entities own the land on both sides of the river down to the Gulf. The SRWMD owns some of the land, manages other parts, and also leases some. Owning it, of course, is the best way to preserve its condition, and the SRWMD hopes to continue its purchasing projects since even when private owners agree to certain rules for using their land, their heirs may not agree to such terms. Florida officials began buying land throughout the state in the 1920s, and then in the 1960s used a five-percent tax on recreational items to buy even more. When Reubin Askew was governor (1971–1979), voters approved a $240 million bond issue that established the Land Conservation Act. In 1999 the Florida Forever program became the largest land-acquisition program in the world. The purchase of hundreds of thousands of acres throughout the state and the intention of keeping that land undeveloped forever, which will greatly benefit our shrinking water resources, sharply contrast to the nineteenth-century practice of selling off immense parts of the state to developers, some of whom could buy it for as little as twenty-five cents an acre. When legislators realized that the Florida Forever program was set to expire in 2010, they voted to extend it through 2020, thus setting the stage for the state purchase of thousands of more acres in the ensuing decade, subject of course to financial crises in the state.
We noticed that the water along the way was warm enough for people to float down the river in inner tubes, but the threat of alligators clearly deterred them from trying it out. They probably knew that, while alligators usually eat fish, they have been known to attack animals and humans. The gators will often lie still on the bottom of a lake or river and therefore cannot always be easily seen, although a skilled guide can point out the telltale bubbles over a submerged reptile. Because a gator can resemble a log, a fish seeking cover will stay by that “log” until the gator catches the fish in its powerful jaws. The gators we saw on that upper part of the river were relatively small, with none of them above eight feet in length, indicating that fish were not as abundant as in downriver spots, where much bigger gators lurk.
The signs for “Still Hunt” along the river indicated to hunters that they were not to use dogs in their hunt for game. Dogs make such hunts much easier, as they track down the animals or herd them to where the hunters are waiting. Hunt clubs along the lower part of the Suwannee are private enclosures where hunters pay fees for the right to kill animals—sometimes very exotic, foreign ones exported from overseas in order to give hunters the chance to kill animals not usually seen in Florida.
Old measuring poles, some made of metal and quite tall, can be seen at various strategic points. Today the newer measuring poles have radio transmitters that can send signals back to the headquarters via satellite. The river has about ten to twelve measuring places where scientists can determine its depth and the volume of its flow. They measure the depth in feet above mean sea level; when the depth reaches seventy-seven feet, that is considered flood level, and inexperienced canoers need to be careful. The level of the river depends on rainfall, which can vary dramatically from section to section. Because the Okefenokee Swamp supplies most of the water in the upper river, rain there can dramatically alter the depth, and, of course, the water in the Upper Suwannee will flow down to the lower levels and therefore affect the whole length of the river. When the water depth is high, the current will run much more quickly; during low-water times, canoers may have to portage over low, rocky areas.
We would see different kinds of measuring poles along the way.
Even if Florida experiences a drought, as happened in the early 2000s, the Suwannee can still flood up and down its length if Georgia receives an abundance of rain. If Georgia gets a sustained drenching for even just a few days, knowledgeable residents along the river expect it to rise significantly. The waterway experienced major flooding in 1948, 1973, and 1998. My guide told me that a major flood on the river can be expected every twenty-five years, a medium flood every five to ten years, and a minor flood every two years.
What I did not expect at any point on the river—but which pose a real problem for the unwary—were fire ants, especially balls of fire ants floating along on the water. The ball, with the queen in the middle, is constantly rotating, preventing the ants from drowning. If a boat plows into such a ball, the ants can quickly rush over the sides and into the boat, causing much anguish (or worse if the victim is allergic to the venom) as they attack humans and crawl into everything in the boat.
The Florida section of the Upper Suwannee, which extends down to Ellaville, while relatively isolated and infrequently visited by most boaters, was the subject of a major dispute. First, some background is needed. Different organizations in the past three decades or so have been formed to preserve the Suwannee from the kind of development that has irreparably harmed other rivers. For example, in 1977 concerned citizens led by a tireless leader, Helen Hood, formed the Suwannee River Coalition to act as a “watchdog” and advocate for the river. One of the results of that group’s lobbying was the designation two years later by the Florida Legislature of the Suwannee as an Outstanding Florida Water (OFW). To be named such an entity, a body of water had to have “exceptional recreational or ecological significance and [officials had to determine] that the environmental, social, and economic benefits of the action outweigh the environmental, social, and economic costs,” according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection website. From then on the river was to incur no “significant depredation.” Authorities also prohibited wastewater discharges, storm water runoff, and dredge-and-fill operations if those actions caused serious harm to the waterway.
The OFW designation was to expire for a fifty-mile stretch from Highway 6 to Suwannee Springs in the early 1980s. The force behind the suggested expiration was Occidental Chemical Company (Oxy), which has operated a large phosphate mining company at White Springs. If that part of the river were allowed to lose its OFW designation, Oxy could discharge far more pollutants into the river than would be allowed at other parts of the Suwannee. When environmentalists mobilized many Floridians, including newspaper editors, to oppose the efforts of Oxy, the company relented and dropped its challenge to the OFW status, which the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation then extended to the whole river. Around that time, Governor Bob Graham established a Suwannee River Resource Planning and Management Committee to study the problems of the river basin and to suggest solutions to those problems.
After boating or canoeing in relatively unspoiled territory for several hours, we began to hear a growing roar, so loud that it could startle the unsuspecting. We realized we had come upon Big or White Shoals on the Upper Suwannee, the only such white-water rapids in all of Florida and a distinct challenge to boaters. Those in aluminum canoes will usually fare better than those in wooden canoes, which can be battered and torn in half in a collision with a submerged rock. If the river is high from heavy rains or a hurricane, i.e. between fifty-nine and sixty-one feet above mean sea level, boaters can glide over the Class–III rapids and barely be aware of what lurks beneath the surface. If the river is low during drought or at certain times of the year, the sharp rocks cannot be crossed by most boats. Boaters should never attempt the rapids in the evening or in the dark because of the difficulties and dangers they can encounter.
Because water flows from the Okefenokee Swamp and from the springs and rivers that join the Suwannee along its length, it never completely dries up. Song composer Jack Mahoney may have been thinking of that when he wrote the following words in his 1919 composition, “Till the Swanee River Runs Dry”: “I will love you, love you till the Swanee River runs dry.”
Big Shoals are part of a conservation area consisting of over three thousand acres, five miles up from White Springs. The area has three miles of river frontage and more than thirty miles of multi-use trails that follow the river and wind among some very pristine parts of the area. The tall limestone bluffs along this part of the Suwannee may surprise visitors who think of Florida as a very flat peninsula.
The impassable nature of Big Shoals is one reason nineteenth-century steamboats did not open up the Suwannee River and Valley to settlers the way that the unobstructed St. Johns River on the east coast of the state opened up central Florida to thousands of settlers, many of whom were invalids escaping the cold of the North for the warmth of the Sunshine State. As their health improved and their families grew in number, settlements sprouted up along the St. Johns, something that did not happen along the Suwannee, and thus even today the Suwannee is relatively unsettled compared to the St. Johns. Still, not all are deterred by the difficulties associated with crossing Big Shoals or settling in the area; even when the area becomes dif-ficult for boaters to navigate, well-prepared hikers can actually walk across the river from exposed rock to exposed rock.
Running the rapids of Big Shoals is dangerous. Florida State Archives
We knew we were passing through and near parts of Florida that have seen settlers, both Indians and whites, for thousands of years. Modern archaeologists call the Native Americans who lived in this area at the time of Hernando de Soto’s 1539 expedition the northern Utina, who were a branch of the Timucuan Indians. Separate villages dotted the area, and their chiefs seemed to have alliances with each other. The Indians lived there because of the good agricultural lands on which they were able to cultivate corn and other plants. Although the Indians had basically lived in peace with each other, the coming of the Spaniards changed their lives irrevocably. The Spanish soldiers killed many of the Indians, including their chiefs, as the Europeans passed through the area on their way to Tallahassee. The Spaniards were dogged by frequent Indian attacks and much bad luck as they marched north. For example, when they were fording the Suwannee, its swift current swept one of them away along with his horse, and both drowned. The Spaniards retrieved the horse, butchered it, and ate it.
Not all Spaniards brought trouble for the Indians. Missionaries, for example, established missions in northern Florida—including along the Suwannee, and one at the mouth of the Suwannee—and oftentimes helped the Indians at these missions. At least two rivers in the area, the Santa Fe and the Aucilla, take their names from nearby Spanish missions.
Pamela Jekel’s fictional work River Without End: A Novel of the Suwannee is about Native Americans who lived along the Suwannee in the nineteenth century and how they interacted and intermarried with runaway slaves. Osceola, the great Seminole leader, played an important part in the novel.
In an excellent documentary, “Seven Ways to Kill the Suwannee,” Stephen Robitaille, a professor of English at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, noted that the first way to kill/damage the river is to dam the headwaters. Although such a dam would raise the water level in the Okefenokee Swamp and aid in fire protection, it would change the nature of the river just as it was forming. Fortunately, the Suwannee does not have any dams on it today, though there were some in the past in the Okefenokee. Vigilance is necessary, however, since occasionally people suggest dams to help the fishing.
Other ways to “kill” the river include mining the wetlands for phosphate and cutting down the forests on each side; destroying the tradition that surrounds the river; dumping wastes, even legally approved detritus, into the water along its length; building extensively in the floodplain; and siphoning the water and sending it to the parched southerly part of Florida. As we passed from the headwaters of the river and boated its Florida length, we would see ill-fated attempts by newcomers to damage the waterway, if not intentionally, then at least by their shortsighted works.
