January 3-5 (2008)
Brinkhaven to Mohawk Dam
Perrysville to Mohican Wilderness
The contractor was delivering a load of lumber, so I had to go out to the barn and move my canoe out of the way.
It was a crisp morning, with a few inches of snow on the ground and sunlight glistening on the plants in the pasture.
As I dragged my canoe out of the barn, one of the guys asked, “Goin’ canoeing?”
I hadn’t planned on it, but he talked me into it.
I strapped my canoe to top of the car and called the newspaper to tell them I wouldn’t be in that day. Or the next.
I explained to my editor that a window of opportunity had opened and I needed to go canoeing right away. The weather forecast called for a few more days of cold weather before a winter thaw with 40-degree temperatures and rain.
My window of opportunity narrowed considerably by Friday morning. I camped across the river from Brinkhaven Thursday night. Temperatures dropped into the single digits, but I slept comfortably – curled up in a ball at the foot of my sleeping bag.
I got up before daylight and made breakfast. It was still dark as I walked along the bank drinking my coffee. When I came to the spot where I planned to put in, I noticed the reflection of the lights from the village across the river stopped abruptly about 15 feet from the bank in front of me. Which meant one of two things: The river had gone down tremendously overnight, or an ice shelf had formed.
I had hoped to paddle from Brinkhaven to Mohawk Dam. Not a likely scenario when ice shelves are forming that far upstream. There are too many long, lazy stretches between there and the dam where ice floes congregate and gang up on unsuspecting paddlers. Even if you had an inkling of what you were about to get into, it wouldn’t do you any good. You’d just have to sit in your canoe till the river froze over completely and walk out.
That would mean leaving your canoe behind. And, after the ice around it got done expanding and contracting for a three or four weeks, you’d probably end up with what looked like a 17-foot origami banana made out of aluminum foil.
With that in mind, I decided to go upstream and canoe a stretch of the Black Fork that rarely freezes. No one seems to know why this is. My guess would be there’s so much automotive runoff in the water that it’s 40 percent antifreeze.
I put in just outside of Perrysville, which was named in honor of Oliver Hazard Perry’s heroic naval victory on Lake Erie in 1812. It must have made quite an impression on the locals at the time because Perrysville is about 90 miles inland from Lake Erie. But then the capital of Ohio is named after a guy whose ship landed so far away that the distance might as well be measured in light years.
I paddled through Loudonville and set up camp just outside the village on land that belongs to some people I know. Moxie Augustine, the guy whose family owns it, died last year. I set up a shrine to him when I camped there in May, spelling his name in river stones at the base of a tree.
I camped there again in October with my buddy Joe and found the shrine had been obliterated by ATVs. Whoever had been there left a shrine of their own — tire ruts.
As I was gathering firewood about 50 yards downstream of the campsite, I stumbled upon something horrific. Apparently, about a dozen deer, a few geese and a possum had committed mass suicide. Worse yet, the deer had eviscerated themselves. That or the geese and possum attacked them, ate their guts and died of indigestion on the spot. We may never know what happened. I doubt that even CSI could have sorted this one out.
Fortunately, the carnage was frozen and downwind of my campsite.
That night, I lit a candle for Peggy Edwards, who died last year.
She and her husband John owned Nardini’s, a little eatery in downtown Ashland. John usually cooked breakfast. His specialty was hard-boiled insults with extra crispy bacon. If you complained about the bacon, you got a second helping of insults at no extra charge.
Peggy came in at lunchtime. She would serve cheeseburgers, out-of-this-world chili and John’s cookies. (If there were only a few left, John claimed them for himself. Sometimes, Peggy would snatch one from the kitchen, hide it inside a folded napkin and leave it at my table.)
In Peggy’s honor, I left the eggshells from my breakfast at the base of a pine tree and sent her a message: “In the next life, I’ll serve you lunch.”
It had warmed up overnight and a few raindrops fell as I was getting breakfast. I broke camp in the rain and headed downstream.
It drizzled the rest of the morning and into the afternoon but not enough to soak through my rain jacket. It didn’t start to rain in earnest until after I pulled out at Mohican Wilderness.
It was a short, but enjoyable trip. Along the way I saw a half dozen bald eagles, a flock of sand hill cranes and plenty of deer. Even a few live ones.
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