Buffalo River trip, Day 3, April 22, 2015

Outside the tent at 5 a.m. and as I crawled back in my bladder was much relieved and the stars were everywhere overhead and shining bright. By 7 a.m., I was back out snatching drying clothes off a tree branch to keep them from getting drenched in the downpour.  The inside of Jerry’s tent took on water so that packing up today consisted of folding up wet tents, rain flies and clothing, camp chairs.

A pleasant tree-lined passage.

We stopped at Ozark campground to get enough water to get us through to Woolum if we rationed it properly. Otherwise getting a drink would mean standing outside with our tongues out trying to catch raindrops. Met a woman from Pasadena, CA, who was scouting the river and making a decision on whether to take a guided tour the next day. She took our pictures (posted earlier), and we took hers with the bluff across the river as backdrop.

Not as many rapids today but still good flow. About two hours into our day’s float, it started to rain hard. I pulled over to the side of the river, stood waist deep in water and tried to dig out my trusty wool shirt and rain jacket. Mostly got more things wet than if I had kept paddling.

Jerry paddling away from the Ozark campsite

Not long after that, Jerry suggested we pull over again and make some hot coffee to take away the chills. He later identified this as the low point of the float for him. Not because he was standing on the side of a river in a pouring rain and shivering. The low point was when he unwrapped his ceramic coffee cup, a longtime companion on camping trips, and found it shattered. We gave it a proper burial, and Jerry began using his instant-coffee jar (filled with Starbucks Via) as his make-do mug.

The hot coffee stopped the chills and shivering, and soon we were back on the river. We made a hasty stop at the Hasty boat landing to use the restroom and continued on past the Carver campsite where a party of bearded men, a couple of women and one child were waiting for a shuttle to come take them back to . . .  where? Their polygamous compound? Their white power base of operations? This was my only instance of “Deliverance” fear hangover on the trip, and I never even heard the banjo. Or maybe they were headed to homes that would seem as normal to my middle-class self as my returning to 1225 NE 168^th Street would. It's not like they were dressed in bib overalls and asked me to squeal like a pig, but they seemed a sullen lot for having apparently just finished a trip down the river. Maybe they were just sad that the trip was ending. No need for a crossbow this trip.

The drying trees.

We camped on a sandbar less than a mile past Carver, the sun came out and soon the bushes became our drying racks. We got everything dry while sitting around snacking and reading (Conrad's “Heart of Darkness” for me; a Tom Robbins book for Jerry). Later, we walked back to the Carver campsite for more water (the Beard Party had gone home to watch "Jeopardy").

We had started on the river at 9:30 a.m. and set up our drying camp around 3:30 p.m. We are going just under 10 miles a day in six to eight hours of paddling.

In the past two days we have seen hundreds of turtles sunning themselves on the rocks or tree snags in the river. We only saw one today. Tough to sun yourself when there is no sun. But a great moon early in the evening.