Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [29]
Rigged with a stern-to-bow towline, the second canoe tracked behind, slipping serpentine across the water. Knotted and twisting, ancient live oaks rose up on either side and reached out across the water forming a canopy that spoke of Pat Smith’s forgotten land and maybe the ghost of Osceola. Cypress stumps spiked up through the river’s surface, while deadwood fell across, forming raccoon bridges and fishing-line snags. At this early point in the river’s life, where she was less than fifteen feet across, portage was a necessity. At her deepest the river was a foot and her shallowest an inch, so every few minutes, I’d step out, pull both canoes across a log or sand bar, then hop back in and shove off only to hop out once again and start all over. During one three-hour stretch, I fashioned a makeshift harness and sloshed ankle-deep along the bank and river bottom.
Unlike rivers out west that cut canyons down into and through rock walls, the edges of the St. Marys ebbed and flowed depending upon rainfall—making it difficult to establish a state line within a few feet. One day the river might be ten feet wide at a given point, but throw some rain in that equation and that can widen to thirty or forty feet in a day, only to recede back to ten or expand to fifty before the next day’s end. In the last few decades, home buyers and builders made sure they bought or built above the hundred-year flood line.
Once out of the swamp, the river travels through Moniac at Highway 94, then according to the map, some thirteen miles to State Road 121, but that’s a lie. Whoever made the map was smoking crack. Probably more like twenty-five. Riding her is brutal, tough work and yet a beautiful, mysterious, even somewhat prehistoric passage. To miss it is to miss some of the heart of the river. Abbie knew this. That’s why she’d said, “All the way from Moniac.” Taking a helicopter’s view north of Glen St. Mary, the river turns hard left, or due east, and runs across the northern tip of Macclenny. From there she bends north, where the winding river makes a crooked run up to Folkston—meandering some two miles for every crow mile. At Folkston, she bears hard right, and zigzags east by southeast to the coast. Crow distance from swamp to ocean is a little more than sixty miles. Total river distance is nearer 129 miles, give or take. Usually, more give than take.
But if you trace her lines, things are different. While the headwaters bubble only sixty crow miles from the ocean, she is in no hurry to get there. And while she may run under one name, she is, in actuality, four rivers. The first runs from Moniac, under Highway 121 to Stokes Bridge—maybe thirty-one miles. Think drainage ditch inside a bridge tunnel. It’s narrow, overhung with trees that interlock like fingers, crisscrossed by elevated railroad trestles, crawling with frogs, hanging with Spanish moss, slithering with snakes and given the nearly impenetrable maze of pickup-stick trees that have fallen across her, nearly impossible to paddle for very long. You can swim it, pull through it, push over it, walk around it or cut through it, but she will regulate your speed and it will not be fast. She has her own rhythm. Chances are, unless you’ve spent much time around here, hers is a good bit slower than yours—physically and emotionally. Her flow is unregulated, so while some corners are fast, others—given the topography—are slower. Maybe the water pools up, maybe her banks widen, maybe she has cut through the bed to the limestone and sped up, or maybe she U-turns and whips you around like a water-skier. Whatever the case, there is little consistency other than that she is moving toward the ocean. Whether you live or die matters not, but don’t think her impersonal and don’t doubt her. She is far more in tune with you than you are. Having cut all the way to the limestone, some of her banks are bluffs some forty feet high,