Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River

The Seventh Day

The Seventh Day We leave the sandbar beach near Lower Sansavilla Bluff at 8:55 a.m., early for us, because we want to hit the tide. High tide will be at 9:30 a.m. in Darien. We paddle for an hour against the tide, then through the calm turgidity of high tide, until the waters turn and bear us coastward. The paddling is effortless. We arrive at Everett City about noon. Everett City is a small encampment of trailers and campsites centered on a store and a landing. At the pay phone I leave messages for Silas. Raven and I share a pint of butter pecan ice cream. At the landing we happen into two friends, Christi Lambert and Alison McGee of The Nature Conservancy. Christi, of course, very capably directs the Bioreserve Project, and Alison, tall and willowy, an ecologist by training, heads up conservation. They are conducting a tour of the river for a Georgia leadership group, and have stopped for lunch under a pavilion, in a cloud of bug repellent they hope will spook the yellow flies, horse flies, sand fleas, and mosquitoes. The leadership group is made of people who hold public office in the state. They are dressed more officiously than we. They are cleaner. Christi asks our group to come over and speak a few words to her group, and we oblige. Dr. Presley explains to them what we are doing. Someone wants our autographs on a scrap of cardboard. The public world, with its offices and air conditioners, its white shirts and heels, its books and telephones, is a world away from this riverbank, out of which grow alligator flag, marsh grass, and cattails. We’re out of beer, and the fish camp doesn’t sell it. Charlie is determined to acquire some. He finds a sympathetic guy who’ll drive him three miles out to a store. When he gets there, the store doesn’t accept credit cards, so he has to borrow thirty-three dollars from the man 81 the seventh day who gave him a lift. When Charlie gets back, we round up the money to pay the man. This is what the old rafthands would have done. If they camped near a settlement, they would have sent someone up the hill to trade for fresh food or liquor. They would have passed the hat among the crew. We set out again and soon turn left and paddle through the beautifully surreal, new-green-of-cypress, wonderfully named Alligator Congress. The whimsicality of black willows is behind us. I love all the river, but my favorite part, despite the bugs, is the delta, which we are entering. At first a paddler encounters upland live oak and Sabal palm wonderlands interspersed with tidewater swamps where red bay and swamp palm become understories of cypress, sweet gum, tupelo, and swamp black gum. The trees lean out over the water. Swamp mallow, clematis, and wild potato bloom streamside. Tides along the Georgia coast rise as much as seven to nine feet at times, and their influence extends forty miles inland. This territory is a herpetologist’s dream world: mud snakes, rainbow snakes, red-bellied water snakes, yellow-bellied turtles, Florida cooters, alligators, cottonmouths. Grey squirrels dash among the branches; deer, feral pigs, and raccoons leave evidence of their presence in black mud. All afternoon we face a strong headwind. Paddling is rough, and I wish for a more streamlined boat and a feathered paddle. Often we hug the black-mud bank, which is veined with muddy roots exposed by outgoing tide. Armies of fiddler crabs retreat like fearful waves across mudflats. “Oh, no, the humans are coming!” Raven squeaks, giving voice to the crabs in Gary Larson fashion. Patches of giant cutgrass, mixed with wild rice, pickerel weed, and arum, begin to occur, then extensive saltmarsh flats of spartina and needlerush, parting for sea ox-eye and sea lavender. Seaside sparrows , clapper rails, and marsh wrens sing from the rushes. In the delta the river divides into many braids, all leading to the coast—the Darien, Butler, Champney, and Altamaha rivers—weaving through an archipelago. These islands are jungly high ground 82 total immersion amid tidewater delta and floodplain, not the typical beach-and-surf islands. We have a small debate among ourselves—should we take Rifle Cut? This is a mile-long ditch that shoots through the floodplain...