Waterwalk by Steven Faulkner

Author:Steven Faulkner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Charybdis

The morning was bright and calm. We were moving up a side canal, not the main river, so the current was no problem. But the portages were. We portaged over the Upper and Lower Combined Locks, over the Little Chute Lock and Guard Lock and the day was not yet old.

Once we stopped to have a close look at one of the spillways. We left Natty Bumpo in the side canal and walked over to the river. The spillway ran straight across, interrupted by concrete abutments. Several feet above our heads, the current ran smoothly, powerfully over a curved mossy surface, then plunged several feet below us like thick sheets of hard glass into thundering madness. Bright spray exploded, chaotic waves leapt and snapped back like a pack of mad wolves then shattered into the forward rush that churned under, swept around, boiled up, and smashed into contrary currents, erupting suddenly from the depths in geysers slapped down by the thundering weight of the charging current. Then it all hurried hysterically away.

“Remember Odysseus’s first sighting of Charybdis?” I asked. Justin looked at me and nodded. We had read the tale of the roaring sea that had wrecked his ship and drowned his men. We watched the waters, fascinated. No man or canoe could live through that, we decided.

We came to the Cedars Lock and portaged around it.

The map said three miles to the next lock, a relief from portaging, but we were back in the main river now and the current was giving us trouble. We passed under a high bridge where the current near a pier swirled us half around; the sorcerer was waving a lethal wand. Private docks along shore had huge posts set like tripods on the upcurrent side to protect the walkways from drifting logs.

The river was swift, the sun was high and hot when we struggled past a great white ball of a building near the shore, as if an architect had decided his love for golf balls should find expression in building design. The current here was all but impossible. Justin took the prow rope ashore, stepping from rock to rock, pulling when he could, while I tried to keep the canoe from slamming into the shore-side rocks. It didn’t work, and Justin climbed back in.

What we didn’t know was that the Army Corp of Engineers had issued warnings that boaters needed to use extreme caution on the Lower Fox River because they were releasing a maximum amount of water out of Lake Winnebago due to recent rains that had caused flooding across large sections of Wisconsin. We cut for the opposite shore, where we used half-submerged tree limbs and fallen logs to break the current. We passed Peabody Park on our right, a pleasant stretch of grass and trees backed by apartment buildings.

Portage again. This was the Lower Appleton Lock. Men were mowing grass along the lock as we carried our heavy packs up the embankment, along the lock, and down to the water again.

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