Paddler News Feed

 

•	Features
•	Hotline
•	Innuendos

< July/Aug 2005
	Innuendos
Chanson Chemung river song Ruth Ann Dandrea

The Chemung was my childhood river. It was always there, just beyond my back yard, across the ball field parking lot, beyond the double dike walls. Flowing, meandering, trickling, raging. The river was my boundary and my comfort, a sinewy, watery arm wrapped around my childhood like a hug. But when I was small, it was a forbidden place, dangerous and wild.

We knew the river. We crossed it on walks to buy our first mascara at Woolworths. We slid down its steep banks, using slick-bottomed cardboard boxes on summer grasses, and silver saucer sleds on snow.

The river came to me before I ever came to it. I walked with my father to peer into its blackness the night before it rose out of its banks and into our house, ruining my baby pictures, soaking the song out of my neighbor's piano, leaving memories of mud.

My childhood was saturated with Chemung water, so naturally my uncle's e-mail invitation sent a shiver of electricity through my inner child: "Y'know, you and your husband can bring those kayaks you're so fond of up to my house. You can put in and float on down to your parent's house."

Soon after, the Star-Gazette ran an article describing the trip, which my mother promptly mailed to me. Putting in at Bottcher's Landing, we’d course the river to Dunn Field, an 11-mile jaunt to fill a sunny Saturday.

Just as I'd always suspected, the river was magic. As soon as my dad backed the car up the boat launch and we slipped out of sight, we entered another world, a parallel universe I'd wondered about my whole life. On the river nothing exists but the water and the primitive banks, looking much the same as they must have when the first Americans paddled here in birchbark canoes. Hillsides roll down to the water. Trees overhang it. The paddler shares her day with birds and an occasional fly fisherman. The river provides a new kind of silence, a sanctified solitude.

The wooded, winding bends of water carried us along, our paddles plummeting and pushing into the remarkably clear river.

Just below Minier's Field we spotted the first sign of someone else's presence, a floating donut. This was soon followed by a tethered canoe. The river widened and deepened, becoming a green pool under greener hillsides. Four fishermen were casting delicate lines in a web-like criss-cross and smoothly, evenly, reeling in their flies. "Is our boat still up there?" they queried. Yes. "Did you eat our donuts?"

Just before our encounter with the anglers we met our river guides. A great blue heron stood still and stilt-like in the swift-flowing shallows. Trailing her stick-straight legs behind, she called a raucous screech and flew off downstream. Her mate soon joined her. They vanished and reappeared at reliable intervals all day, always soaring east, just ahead of our kayaks. We never learned whether a single bonded pair conducted us under bridges, over rocky ledges, around bends, or if a great heron flock served us in some sort of tag team relay. The only certainty under the blue August sky and the hot summer sun was that we would never be without the herons’ ghostly guidance.

Paddling the river was very different from paddling the Adirondack lakes to which we were accustomed. The river changed moment by moment, demanding constant cursory vigilance. We had to learn to anticipate its moods. I became mildly resentful of its vagaries. If the water was deep, it ran slowly and the wind blew into my face and against my raised paddles. When the water quickened it raced down little riverbed hills, swirling about half-submerged rocks, moving with the measured thrill of a carnival ride, grounding our kayaks without warning or ceremony. We pushed off and the river flowed on, every twist and turn offering vistas of pristine beauty. We could not believe the quiet.

We could not believe the gunshots, either. "I wonder what they're shooting at?" I mused aloud. "I hope not kayakers," my husband responded. The firing continued with alarming frequency, displacing our plans to stop along this stretch for lunch. A gaggle of huge geese noisily claimed the next lunch spot. We left them the beach and finally alit on a rocky outcropping, mercifully shaded, where we stretched our legs and indulged in a leisurely lunch. A noon whistle blew somewhere in civilization. Our heron guides appeared, whispered by. We knew it was time to slide back inside our quiet boats and reenter the silent, silver river.

Before drifting into downtown Elmira, we met an expanse of water. This, I understood, was a river. The water turned battleship gray. A strong wind blew into our faces. We had to paddle continuously or risk being borne backward. Waves emerged, white caps even, breaking over the bows of our small boats.

At last we neared Walnut Street Bridge. From here and through the stretched lattice-work tunnel of bridges spanning the Chemung the city loomed on both banks. The backs of the buildings looked oddly old-fashioned from our watery vantage point, as if we had drifted into a Tom Sawyer town.

When we emerged beyond the fifth and final bridge the river spread wider, and I paddled between the twin islands. Gulls rose in a fluttering white cloud as I passed. Ahead we spied the herons, beckoning. The baseball stadium at Dunn Field peeked into view long before revealing its full bulk. The riverbed turned once more, swallowed the view, meandered on, before bringing us to the landing. We beached the boats, stretching out of them with satisfied fatigue moments after the herons, slender-bodied, blue gray streaks in the summer sky, etched a goodbye of flapping wings and wound westward for the first time all day. My husband climbed the second dike and waved to my parents in our backyard. My dad drove the block or so to fetch us. The Chemung River flowed onward to the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay, carrying a little of our soul-blood with it to the Atlantic Ocean. I had come to my river, at last.