PLAID PURSUITS: How to create an old-fashioned wilderness experience on a National Scenic Riverway

By Randy Parker

We each have our own idea of the ideal wilderness experience. I got mine from a wall calendar I had last year, which featured vintage illustrations from 1940’s outdoor magazines. Each month, there was a different idyllic or humorous view of outdoor life. Rugged men in canoes on afternoon glass, thirst-inducing whitewater roaring past a camp, a fat guy hooking himself with his fly rod–each illustration made me want to be there, to be that guy with the rolled up red plaid sleeves, to live the low-tech life of aluminum bait buckets, wooden paddles, and trout in the frying pan.

These images are the stuff of old magazine illustrations. But they are also a part of our collective imagination and our dreams as outdoorsmen and women. They are what I hope for every time I plan an adventure.

My favorite image in the whole calendar is of three guys at their riverside campsite. This is not the campground so many of us settle for, teeming with people, loud with somebody’s stereo blaring over and over “you got to kiss an angel good morning and love her like the devil when you get back home.” This is a wilderness camp. Yet it is luxurious. It has everything: a fine tent (you can just see the cots inside!), a big pot hanging from stout sticks over a fire, a canoe on the edge of a fast river, and of course three hearty men dressed smartly in khaki and plaid. One is carrying firewood while the other is getting the pan ready for the fire. The third is coming up the bank from the river with a huge trout, just in time for dinner. This is it, I thought. This is what I want to create.

And so I did on the Current River in Southern Missouri with the help of two kindred spirits, my friends Tim and Ben. Here’s what I learned and how you, too, can have an experience right out of a 1948 cover of Outdoor Life.

Tip #1: You can’t have a wilderness experience if you aren’t really in the wild.

Forget the family campground. Similar to the Buffalo in Arkansas, the Current is a National Scenic Riverway, which means almost all the shoreline is parkland, yours to explore and camp on. You can launch your boats on the upper Current, as we did, on a Friday afternoon, knowing that when you are ready to stop and make camp, there will be a wonderful bar or beach waiting for you with nobody else around. There are very few places like that left in the world.

Tip #2: Rednecks are not considered wildlife.

I know there are plenty of folks that live near the Ozark rivers who are resepectful of nature and the other people who are trying to enjoy it. But be warned. You can’t have a wilderness experience on the Current or the Buffalo (or the Spring or any other Ozark river) on a weekend in the summer due to the number of locals who float gunwale to gunwale, guzzling beer and Jell-o shooters and playing their favorite classics from .38 Special and Foghat. You might have a fleeting attraction for the drunken young women who bare their breasts. That is a sort of wildness, I guess. But, no, it’s not a wilderness experience or anything you’d want to bring the family to. And it’s not the sort of calendar picture I was thinking of. Come in the spring or on a weekday or in October, as we did and you’ll fine the solace you are looking for.

Tip #3: Camp out of your boat.

Who knows, those guys in my ideal scene may have had a couple of woodie station wagons just out of frame. But the idea is to keep it real. Once you are on the river, you stay there. No roads, no houses, no civilization, no base camp to get back to. Camping as you float gives you a lot of flexibility and you only have to shuttle once the whole trip. Best of all, you get the feeling that the entirety of the wilderness is your home, your shelter. And if the weather is as perfect as ours was, you begin to question the need for “civilization” at all.

Tip #4: If you are a kayaker, adopt a canoer.

Tim and I, both kayakers, wanted Ben to come along, with or without his canoe. Right after college, he hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. Who wouldn’t want to camp with him? Now in his forties (like the rest of us), even Ben was content with our weekend plans, and we were proud to share them with him. The fact that he had a great 17-foot Wenonah had nothing to do with it. Really. But it sure was nice having a supply barge for an ice chest, a big iron Dutch oven, most anything we wanted, except maybe those cots.

Tip #5: If your camping buddy is using the same tent he carried on the AT 23 years ago, be sure you pitch yours upwind.

Ben’s antique Kelty stunk. We couldn’t believe he could crawl into it and sleep. It was like crawling into the bowels of a cow. In fact, we called it the House of Cheese. There’s something hardcore about an old, vomit-inducing tent, but in my calendar scene, everything smells like pine.

Tim and I both carried cheap “3-man” tents that were small enough to stow on our boats, yet roomy enough for our blow-up mattresses and any gear we didn’t want to get wet with dew. They were closeout priced at only $19.99 each. Tim had used his a few times before and the zipper broke on this excursion. Mine was brand new. So, after two nights, my “lodging” cost was $10 a night. If the tent lasts me three weekends, that’s just $2.50 per night. No doubt, my zipper will break or a pole will snap soon. But that’s fine because I’ll get a fresh, new tent. The moral of this story is, cheap tents never stink.

Tip #6: Spare the rod.

On our trip, the beauty was breathtaking. Trees of red and gold reflected in clear water that raced past sheer cliffs. I could look down in the deep parts and see fish as if I were looking into an aquarium. Tempting to this fisherman, for sure. However, I quickly realized that fishing on a running river is frustrating at best. Two casts and my buddies (who weren’t fishing) had left me behind. Two casts and the current had me in the brush. And if I left my rod in the rod holder, it got hung up in overhanging tree branches. I really didn’t want to be the guy in the calendar who hooked himself. So my advice is to save the fishing for campside. Try to camp near a deep hole with plenty of brush or logs. That’s where the smallmouth are.

Tip #7: Don’t take firewood for granted.

Stinky tent aside, far aside, we were able to set up a camp just as I had envisioned, a real Calendar Camp where we could see the fading light on the water, where Ben caught crawfish from under rocks and fished with them in the rapids, where we were totally by ourselves. It was a calendar moment, minus the big trout. Fortunately, we brought dinner with us. And we found enough wood for a fire. Not always an easy task on such a well used river.
If you don’t like traipsing deep into the woods to find dead and down, bring a folding saw. It’s very hard to find small sticks after a season of heavy camping. We were glad to have Tim’s saw because most of the deadwood we found was ten feet long. Another less calendarific option, if you have a canoe, is to bring some firewood or at least some kindling with you.

Tip #8: There’s plenty of time for sleep in the grave.

Lying in my tent beside the rushing stream in the dark, I couldn’t see much of anything, and my hearing became acute. For the first time, I heard a whole family of coyotes come out of their warm den and into the frosty night, whooping it up, laughing and howling like, well, like summertime locals, at the prospect of another romp in the wind-rustled woods. I heard a bard owl, with a cry not unlike a howling wolf, so loud it sounded as if it were perched right on my tent. I heard the scurrying of a raccoon rummaging through our stuff. I could hear Tim snoring as if he were in the tent with me and not 10 yards away in his own tent. Talk about wild. I wondered how he could go to sleep so fast with all the racket going on. And although I envied him at first, I realized this was exactly what I had come for.

Tip #9: Too many miles spoil the smiles.

Obviously, when you can camp anywhere, your day’s paddle is flexible. At the end of your journey, however, you need to be where you left your shuttle car. The worst thing is to have to hurry. On Friday afternoon, we put in at Cedargrove at about river mile 8. We finished up on Sunday at Round Spring, mile 34.2. That’s just over 26 miles total. This gave us time to stop and see the sights, enjoy lunch and talk to folks we ran into.

On Saturday, for example, we passed a young woman wading in the cold river. I waved. Tim waved. She looked at us with a strange longing. I thought it was because I looked so rugged in my kayak loaded with drybags. Tim and I rounded a bend and looked behind us. No Ben. We waited for a while and still no Ben. Finally, here comes his green canoe with the young lady in the bow! I immediately took a picture so I could show his wife. Turns out she was an a pare from Germany who had walked up the path from the old hospital ruins at Welsh Spring and wanted a ride back down to meet up with her host family, and that was why she was looking so hopefully at me, trying to determine if there was any way of catching a ride.

We explored the ruins of the Welsh Hospital. We paddled straight into Cave Spring where the water looked like the Baths of Virgin Gorda, blue-green and so clear. We hiked back to Pulltite Spring and found an old abandoned cabin awaiting restoration by the park service, and we imagined what it was like to live in such a beautiful place with your own endless supply of clean water.

Saturday night, we camped where someone had camped the night before. There was still some smoldering firewood, which we restarted, imagining that this was a fire from the beginning of time, the eternal flame kept burning night after night, eon after eon, by fire sentinels like ourselves. Even forty-somethings think silly stuff like that out here. That night, I slept like a rock. The next morning, of course, we made sure our fire was out completely. After we loaded the boats, I poured water over it and clouds of white smoke rose up in the cold air, dream-like wisps that we followed downstream.

Tip #10: Don’t give up.

All too often, we imagine what a paddling adventure might be like and we go for it only to be met with two inches of rain, thick clouds of mosquitoes, or even sickness or injury. My last tip, however, is don’t give up. Go to a National Scenic River in the fall, when the weather tends to be dry, the bugs gone, the leaves chromatic, and the river free from crowds, and you’ll increase your chances of having not just a perfect day, but enough calendar moments to last you all year.

Randy Parker is a sailor, kayakfisherman, paddler, poet, and wearer of classic plaid shirts. He works as an advertising writer in Memphis.