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85 David Webster and I launch our johnboat at the Wildlife ramp at Old Route 87, just to make sure we will have a continuous trip and cover all of the river. I don’t know why this is so important to me, but there is a kind of implicit integrity in covering every yard of the downstream flow. We have arranged to borrow the sixteen-foot johnboat Sea Whip from the UNC Wilmington Center for Marine Science Research. We were to have a center-console bateau with a steering wheel, much more comfortable for the long haul; but at the last minute it blew an engine, and so we are assigned an olive-drab aluminum skiff with a thirty-horse four-stroke engine that can make it fly, steered by its tiller arm. It’s a functional boat, wide and with a large bow platform for working. The seat is a flat piece of aluminum, so we always sit on soft boat cushions. Even then, your hand tends to go numb after a period of steering the tiller, which is also the throttle arm, and which requires a certain amount of steady exertion to keep up to speed. We get a later start than planned today.We’re due at Lock #3 at 10:00 or so, at the next lock around noon, and at Lock #1by 3:00 p.m. But these are loose times (time on the river always seems so) that should allow us ample leeway to loiter along the way to observe anything of interest. So I back the truck and trailer down the long ramp, and David shoves off aboard Sea Whip and promptly disappears around the tree-lined bend. Motor trouble. He drifts about, the engine starting and stalling. He beaches the boat at the ramp, and I climb aboard to help diagnose the problem. Eventually we discover that the cooling port (“pee-hole”) is clogged and manage to unclog it, and from that moment on the motor hums us along effi ciently and, for all our speed, quietly. The litter from Fayetteville begins to lessen and finally disappears from the river. The only access now seems to be from private fish camps, occasional home-built ramps, some quite elaborate, and walking paths which culminate usually in a clearing with a lawn chair or two and maybe a fishing rod holder. Sometimes there’s a fire ring, a cooler for bait and beer, or a more elaborate rack for holding multiple rods.This 6 86 The Lowe r R e ache s is evidence of local access for people who probably know the river well, or at least their little stretch of it, though none of them is fishing today. A mile downriver we pass under the I-­ 95 bridge. This is a landmark, in the sense that the interstate more or less defines the boundary between the coastal plain and the Piedmont. From now on, the landscape and the watercourses will change in dramatic ways. For starters, the white water is gone. The unbroken current is mostly an artificial effect caused by the creation of the dams downstream. From here on the river is no longer a completely natural watershed defined by gravity.You could argue that the entire river is a bit unnatural, given Jordan Dam’s position at the headwaters, and Buckhorn Dam just below Mermaid Point. But sixty-­ odd miles of distance have given gravity the edge after all, and so as we discovered, there is plenty of white water between Buckhorn and the pooling channel at Fayetteville. From now on, though, the river will run wide and fairly deep, dredged and channeled, the severest oxbows long since straightened out by the Army Corps of Engineers, though many are still navigable in small boats. Seen from the air, the brown meanders and oxbows create a lovely recursive pattern of loops and whorls. From Fayetteville on down, the river is backed up behind William O. Huske Lock and Dam #3, the first of three sets of locks and dams on the river as we head downstream. I’ve called ahead and spoken to Phil Edge, who has arranged for lockmasters to be on hand to lock us through as we pass on down the river. The Huske lock was built in 1935 to finish the navigation channel from Navassa to Fayetteville, 111 river miles apart. The channel is 8 feet deep, but in summer drought it can be lower.The...

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