Making a night paddle (or hike) work depends on the
cooperation of the moon, which in turn depends on your knowledge of its phases.
A new moon is low and setting in the west when night comes. So, you’ll only see
a new moon in the sky for the first hour of the night. As the week progresses
and the moon approaches its first half-moon phase, it gets higher and higher in
the sky each night at sunset. When the moon is at exactly its first half-moon
point (one week before a full
moon), it will be directly overhead when the sun sets and night comes. So this “first
half-moon” will light the night sky from sunset to midnight, sinking over the
western horizon around midnight. My paddle tonight is under this first
half-moon, so when I stepped into my kayak soon after sunset, the moon was
already high in the sky.
After an hour of drifting, I decided it was time to
go back to the mouth of Forney Creek, so I turned around and began paddling
into the wind. The night sounds changed from insects, frogs, and owls to the
hum of wind in my ear. All I could now hear was the blowing of the breeze, the
“kurrl” of my paddles dipping alternately into the water, and the “plink,
plink” of the ripples against the hull of the kayak. I pulled my hat down
tighter on my head so it wouldn’t blow off. My favorite headlamp is clipped to it,
and I’d hate to lose them both in the water. If my hat blew off, I could
probably paddle back and pick it up as it lingered on the surface, but it’s an
experiment that I’d rather not try, especially at night.
As I paddled back over 65+ years of mud and
sediment that have been accumulating below me, I began to hear the sound of the
moving water again. I think about the many, many years that this erosion from
mountains to seas has been going on. I ponder how our civilization has changed
this process. Fontana Dam has created a lake where none previously existed. How
many years will it take for the muddy entrances to all these feeder rivers to
expand to fill in these channels? This mud should be in the Gulf of Mexico by
now, but instead it’s under and around me.
But I can’t be too critical of modern civilization.
In small doses, it can be comfortable, even beneficial. It’s modern
civilization that has given me not only this lake, but a plastic kayak to
explore it with. It’s given me the roads and the truck to turn a week-long trip
from Knoxville to Bryson City into a two hour drive. It’s the glitz and glitter
of modern life that attracts people to malls, movies, and TVs, keeping them off
Fontana Lake so I can be alone tonight. Civilization has created many of the
environmental problems that we face today, but it has also given us the
equipment and opportunities to enjoy those parts of our world that we haven’t
yet despoiled. It’s even allowed us to get beyond the day to day battle to feed
ourselves and to elevate our thoughts to pursue things like education, health,
and love of the outdoors – the very outdoors that we almost eradicated. I hate
irony. How ironic that life should have so much of it.
After my night paddle, I walked back across the mud
flats and toward the opening in the woods where the trail to the campsite
begins. When the lake is full in July, that opening would be at the water’s
edge, and this mud flat would be under water, but on this October night I have
to walk about a hundred yards to get there. Stepping out of the moonlight and
onto the trail in the trees is like stepping into a dark tunnel. I turn on the
headlamp on the brim of my hat and walk about ten minutes back to the campsite.
The only sounds I hear are the crunching of leaves
under my feet and the relentless roar of the river a few yards to my right.
They are the same sounds that a mountaineer would have heard 100 years ago, or
the Cherokee 300 years ago. I feel the weight of nature and history surround me.
It’s good to be alone in the mountains and to sleep
by a river that flows into dark water.
