River of Return

A canoe trip down the remote Choctawhatchee River offers a glimpse of Florida seldom seen.

by Geoffrey Norman
photography by Allen Rokach

SweetTea Journal (Spring/Summer 2008) – Viewed from the state road 2 bridge, the river did not look especially inviting. Wide, shallow, and sluggish, with the water stained rusty by all the red clay it had run through to get this far. From this vantage point, I thought, it would never occur to anyone to call the river “majestic.”

But, in fact, I was looking at a small piece of one of the longest undammed rivers in this part of the world. One hundred and seventy miles from its upstream origins in Alabama down to the saltwater bay at its mouth in Florida. The river’s watershed takes in more than five thousand square miles of some of the most remote and wild country left in this part of the world. Deep, mature hardwoods along with wide stretches of tall, austere cypress grow in the shallow water of the oxbow lakes on the river’s flanks. Rare and endangered species—both plant and animal—still survive in this watershed. This piece of the Florida Panhandle, I thought, looks like what all the low country along the Gulf Coast once looked like.

It was early August and hot. Too hot to be standing around in the sun. At least when we got out on the river there would be some air moving around.

So we drove on down to the landing. Pulled the canoe from the bed of the pickup, carried it across a sandbar, and loaded it with several dry bags, a cooler, paddles, and cushions. I looked at my map one last time, and we pushed off into the current.

“Tell me something,” my wife, Marsha, said.
“Okay.”
“Where does the name Choctawhatchee come from?”
“Indian name,” I said.
“I sort of guessed that. What does it mean?”
“I read, somewhere, that hatchee is the Choctaw word for river. So it means ‘river of the Choctaws.’ ”
“Okay. That works for me.”

It was a new river for me even though I had grown up in this part of Florida, and I knew many of its little rivers. I’d paddled the Perdido, the Ochlocknee, the Econfina, and the Sopchoppy. I had been to the far eastern part of the Panhandle, had traversed the Okefenokee Swamp, and then had paddled on down the Suwannee River.      

This river was bigger than anything I’d paddled in Florida. It is an alluvial stream, meaning most of its water comes from runoff, and because it was summer and dry it was shallow with sandbars where we actually could get stuck and would have to get out and drag the canoe. In winter and early spring, the water level would be higher—much higher—overflowing its banks and flooding the dense stands of hardwoods that flank the river.

For now, those banks were high and dry, and it was a relief when the current would push us up close to them and we would find ourselves paddling in the shade of large sycamore, oak, and gum trees. These were some of the largest, most stately trees I’d ever seen in this part of the world, and they made us feel the way you do when you first step into a large and very old church. Small and insignificant.

For the first thirty minutes or so after leaving the landing, we could hear the sound of traffic. Only the occasional truck, though. Traffic was sparse on State Road 2, which the map also identified as Hog and Hominy Road.

We were in Florida, but it surely was not the Florida of Walt Disney or of Coral Gables. This was the old, unchanged, rural Florida—country that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings would still recognize. Fecund, wild, and marvelous in a quiet sort of way, this country seduces some of us like a haunting, melancholy gospel tune that we cannot get out of our minds. No part of Florida still looks so much like it once did back before ... well, before Florida became Florida.

Eventually, we heard no more traffic sounds. Just the dip of the paddles and the occasional screech of a hawk riding a thermal and looking for game. The sensation of paddling low to the water, so close to the current that you feel almost a part of it, began to take over. It is one of the most serene rhythms I know, and I felt the familiar sense of peace that comes with being on the river, any river, with nothing particular in mind and nowhere special to go ... except downstream.

Much as I might have wanted to, we couldn’t stay on the river long enough to lose track of time. Not this afternoon, anyway. We’d started fairly late, and we wanted to have the camp set up before dusk when the mosquitoes would swarm.       

“What sort of spot are we looking for?” Marsha said.
“I expect one of these sandy points will do,” I said. “We’ll look for the one without bear tracks.”
“Very funny.”

We’d talked to a man in Ponce de Leon who had grown up fishing and hunting along the Choctawhatchee. He’d told us a story about how his grandfather (or, maybe, it was his great-grandfather) once had killed a bear back in these woods. There were, no doubt, still bears around. But they would be small and secretive. In all my time in the Florida woods, I have seen exactly one bear, and he was in a hurry to get someplace where he couldn’t be seen by me or anyone else. 

I suppose there are people who find the Florida river bottoms slightly sinister. If they’re not thinking about bears, then they’re probably thinking about snakes or gators. In their minds, they see a movie or television version of this wilderness country—a place that is teeming with danger.

Actually, the deep, wet bottomlands of Florida do not resonate with menace. They are, in fact, enchanting with their delicate, exotically colored flowers; wonderfully hued birds; tall, stately trees; and epic silences.

And as it grew later in the day and the air cooled, the river and the land it flowed through seemed to come to life. We saw a small gator—all eyes and nose—in the eddy water behind an old snag. He submerged when we tried to get close for a picture. Then we came around a sharp bend, spooking a heron from a shallow bar where it was fishing. Later, a kingfisher dropped off its perch and skimmed something off the surface of the river, then flew on downstream. When the frogs began to sing in chorus, we took it as a sign to make camp.

We picked a high, sandy beach with a wall of green willows growing like a hedge between the riverbank and the woods. After we beached the canoe, we broke out the tent and sleeping bags. We made camp in fifteen or twenty minutes and then built a fire from old scraps of wood lying around the sandbar. We made coffee and sipped it while we watched the river as the light changed, losing the harsh, glaring quality of afternoon and taking on the softer, orange shades of early evening.

We’d brought steaks for the first night, and we rubbed them down with salt and pepper and then laid them over the grill. The fat dripped on the coals and flamed. We fried two or three strips of bacon in a cast-iron skillet, which we placed on the coals. We sliced little red potatoes and onions from the farmers’ market into the bacon grease. The mingled scents of wood smoke and cooking meat hung in the air over the sandbar, and I realized I was awfully hungry.

We ate off tin plates, using our fingers as much as our forks and when we’d finished and I’d cleaned the dishes, I said, “So what’s for dessert?”
“Watermelon.”
“Perfect.”

A hot August evening in the South, on the bank of a sluggish river. What could be better than eating watermelon and spitting the seeds into the water?

By the time we were finished and I’d buried all the scraps, a breeze had come up. It kept the bugs down, so we were able to sit outside the tent and watch the sunset. Off somewhere in the woods an owl asked, Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?

Finally, the owl gave up, and so did we. It was time to crawl into the tent and zip up. But it was too hot for sleeping bags, so we slept on top of them. Sometime during the night, we heard something walking across the sandbar and down to the water. A small animal, I thought. Probably a raccoon. And I went right back to sleep.

The river was hidden in mist when I woke up. I couldn’t see it but I could hear it. And smell it. It carried a dank, organic scent. And I could hear fish working. So I rigged a fly rod and made casts to the sounds of rising fish. Nothing. So instead of fried bluegill and hush puppies for breakfast, we had eggs and bacon and listened to the woods come alive as we ate.

When the mist burned off and the heat began to gather, we packed up and pushed off.

“Going to be a hot one,” I said.
“Already is.”

And it got hotter.

We soaked bandannas in the river and tied them around our necks. Took occasional breaks to sit in the shade of some particularly restful looking tree. Drank water and lemonade, which we cooled with our last shards of ice.

“I’ve got an ace I’ve been holding back,” I said.
“What’s that?”

There was a spring marked on the map, I said. Just a blue dot and a name—Blue Spring—in tiny blue type. But it was relatively close to the river and if it was, indeed, an open spring, we could jump in and cool off.

“Sounds wonderful. How far?”
“I put the GPS numbers in. It looks like it’ll be three miles, straight line. Say five, paddling. We’ll get there in a little less than two hours.”

In an hour, it was even hotter yet. The air had that still, abrasive quality that makes you feel like you are being sandpapered when you move.
I kept looking at the GPS device and imagining that spring as a smaller version of Morrison Spring just south of Ponce de Leon or Vortex Spring, farther downriver, two of the largest springs in the state and destinations for cave divers from around the world. The little blue dot on my map suggested something quite a bit smaller. If the water was coming out of the ground at the same sixty-five degree temperature found at Vortex and Morrison Springs, then that would be enough to turn the whole day around.

But when the GPS said we were there, we saw no evidence of a spring. No change in water color, no trail back into the woods. Nothing.

“So much for that,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Marsha said, with a lingering note of longing in her voice.
“Could be I got the coordinates wrong,” I said, hoping that it was true.

There was a wall of willow trees along the bank as we rounded the next bend in the river. I noticed a small pocket near the end of that green wall.

“Maybe ... ”

When we reached the pocket we could see it was full of clear water that stopped abruptly as it collided with the turbid water in the river. A channel angled off from the pocket, up through the willows. We pushed the canoe up the channel, and I put my hand down in the water.

It was so cold it seemed to make my skin shrink.

The channel led to a basin, maybe thirty feet across, full of perfectly clear water. It could have been air. The water’s surface roiled slightly where the spring came boiling out of the ground. First we marveled, and then we dove in, like kids, and the water was so cold it took our breath away. Juan Ponce de León himself would not have been happier if he had found this spring and believed it to be the Fountain of Youth itself.

So we spent an hour there, and then, restored and refreshed, resumed our languid journey downriver. We ate jambalaya that night. Peaches for dessert. We saw ospreys and swallow-tailed kites soaring over us for most of the next morning. We caught sight of a small cottonmouth breaking away from the bank and swimming across the current in easy, sinuous loops, and we admired some lovely white swamp lilies growing on the bank. A thunderstorm drenched us, and we learned a lot about catfish from a man with a beard and piercing blue eyes—the first human we had seen in two days on the river. He looked like he should have been riding with J.E.B. Stuart, but he was a mild, gentle soul who just loved the river and liked talking about it.

We never saw a bear. But there is always next time. The river had won me over, and I figured I’d be back.