And Tyler too . . . Ictiobus is where the search has taken me, for now. It is not an ugly gargoyle but rather the Latin, scientific term for the buffalo fish, a North American sucker fish that reaches four feet in length. The buffalo fish is what the Miami-Illinois Indians used to call “Tippecanoe.” This then is where we get the Tippecanoe river from, an estuary that flows from Big Lake in Indiana, down to the Wabash River. This the river where Indiana governor William Henry Harrison defeated the Shawnee Indian leader Tecumseh, and where the former made his name that was later popularized by the Whig party in their successful campaign to elect Harrison and his running mate John Tyler. Tippecanoe and Tyler Too an American History artifact from high school text books that somehow still resonates. I flipped a canoe today and it came to mind.
The three-hour-cruise started out well enough. It ended up well enough too. But in the middle of a paddle down the Wallkill River that was so quiet and serene on Friday morning, I spied what I thought was an eagle a two hundred yards ahead. When we got closer I heard a loud call and substantial ruffling of feathers in one of the hundreds of giant silver maples that droop out over the riverbanks. Gazing up I saw what I believe was an eagle, seemingly three times the size of any hawk walking and flapping its way, in fits, up towards a formidable nest. “Look, dad, up to the left.” I said with excitement. “An eagle.” He turned his head, adjusted his frame, couldn’t see a thing. He continued to turn, casting ever more of his body weight over the side of our vessel and in the blink of an eye the canoe turned beyond the point that I could stabilize it and we flopped over into the river.
The basics first. He was floating with his preserver. He hadn’t been clocked in the head by the gunwale. Neither had I. Generational perhaps he later confessed that his immediate thought thereafter was for his wallet. Me, for my phones. One on them new. Apparently water proof. The other? “Your phone.” I mentioned and he got his up out of the water as well. I hadn’t known beforehand but clearly the middle of the Wallkill River is far deeper than six feet deep. We gathered up the modest number of items we had on board and the paddles and swam our way to the muddy bank where we sat befuddled for a while as to how to tip this canoe back over while standing on 75-degree angle of slippery clay muck.
It was then that I noticed a spider that could have passed for a tarantula’s younger cousin. A hairy spider nearly two inches in length was also trying to reckon with the flipped canoe. We later reckoned that he’d probably been on board the whole time and was only now considering disembarkation. We managed to get the frightful creature ashore without having to squash him and eventually we flipped the boat over. It still had a ton of muck inside. The iPhone had been playing Spotify’s “Chuck Berry Radio” and the time under water didn’t interrupt anything. The other phone seemed OK. My dad had lost a sweatshirt and a cap, but all things considered we got off pretty easy. And, as it was a sunny day, we now had no difficulty absorbing the sun’s rays and we continued along our way, without seeing another soul on the river, save a lone guy fishing, going the other direction. I asked him what he could catch and he said there were catfish and small mouth bass and sometimes large mouth bass. “Ever any sturgeon?” I asked. The signs for rivers around here all have depictions of them. “No.” he replied. Presumably there are no buffalo fish either.
Friday 6/18/21
No comments:
Post a Comment