Mile 32.5 - LBD Cross Bayou Point (Owl Hoot)

32.5 LBD Cross Bayou Point (Owl Hoot)

A series of dunes accumulates at the bottom end of Cross Bayou Point in low and medium water levels, but disappear in high water. Possible forest camping in higher water levels with good all around protection, but used for grazing cattle. From Rivergator Expedition journals Wed March 18, 2015: Roosters, dogs and highway sounds on the opposite side of the river; owls, spring peepers, crickets and cows on ours. The “lived-in wilderness,” it reminds me of the Chihuahua/Sinaloa, where the Tarahumara live in harmony with the deep canyons of the Sierra Madre. Like the Appalachicola we have fog every morning, and have been pushing off several hours after sunrise, around 10am. Low layers of fog still lingering in treed harbors, the air so calm and the temperature gradient so keenly defined. Long undulating lines of fog reaching everywhere, turning our campsites into special places on the edges of two rivers, one in the water, one in the sky.

Even here, in this relatively noisy location, paddlers will feel connected to the river, and everything connected to the river: Six deltaic lobes the Mississippi has created in the last 7,000 years in this interglacial age of the Holocene. Now the Atchafalaya flows strong as the most ready to capture the whole, a 1000-year process now extended by the gates of the control structures. 25% of the Mississippi and 30% of the combined Red/Mississippi. I dip the big coffeepot (our central water heater) over the edge of the canoe into the river and pull out a potfull of reddish/orangish fluid, the blood of the Comanche Country Great Plains/Ozarks/Ouchitas and furthest reaches high plains of New Mexico where the Cimarron meanders in a tightly looping line like the plate fissures of the skull. More red earth country, the blood of the Red mixed with the black/green blood of the rest of the drainage, the whole being bubbled in my big pot (bought from the Army Navy store on the banks of the Mizzou in Wolf Point Montana) and then made to brew chicory coffee, ginger tea, river, spaghetti noodles, and then to rinse our faces, cleanse our hands, wash our dishes, and then be tossed to the side to drain into the leaves and disappear into the soil, where it filters through the fine sediment enriched with bacteria and microbes and a fine mixture of minerals, and then re-emerges lower down the bank refreshed and ready to caress our paddle strokes.