The Young Men and the River

Living in close proximity to bodies of both fresh and salt water led all of us to a familiarity with most forms of aqua-fun. Swimming, fishing, water skiing were everyday parts of our lives and were immediately taken for granted as something that everyone did. And that made it even more special when the opportunity came to do something totally different. Unique. An adventure!

Moss Point is located within five miles of the Gulf of Mexico and is situated on both the Escatawpa River and the Pascagoula River. Today, the Pascagoula River is recognized as the very last free-flowing, unobstructed river in the United States. During the 1950's, it seemed even more primative to pre-teen aged boys who were members of Boy Scout Troop 220.

Boy Scouting was a central part of the youth of almost every boy in my neighborhood. Parents approved of scouting and they approved of the scoutmaster, Sam Wilkes. Sam was about the same age as most of our Dads and, at the time, had no kids. He later rectified that. But the time he spent with us was time we treasured. We met weekly in what we called the Scout Hut, a small shell of a building with a fire place and a few chairs and a table. We did the usual things done in scouting. Games, skills, merit badges. Some of us (make that some of them) even advanced to the rank of Eagle Scout. Our patrol excelled in the Camporees held in the Lyons Lake area. We were always as good as our competition in the areas of camp site preparation, fire building, knot tying, and the like. But when it came to the morse code competion, we had no peer. Samuel B. would have been proud.

But the Fall approached and Mr. Wilkes broke the news. There would be a canoe trip. Canoes would be rented and transported to the bridge over the Chickasawhay River north of Lucedale. By road, this was probably a fifty mile trip. By water and its meandering method of path selection, it was a bit farther.

The day came. Carson, John Lundy, Mike, George, Neal Luther, Bill, Butch and a few more whose names don't come immediately to mind, clamoring out of cars and racing down the embankment from the bridge to the river. Half carrying the canoes and half dodging them as they slid down the damp clay path toward the point of shoving off. Sam Wilkes was no one's fool. He knew that all canoeists were not created equally, so he paired strong paddlers with less skilled ones. And he know that anything that had to be treated respectfully (bedding and food headed that list) went into the boat he was in.

Then came three days of racing, swimming, forcing the other canoes onto logs in the river and trying to overturn them, choosing the fork in the river to take without even considering that our scoutmaster wasn't about to let the wrong one be chosen , climbing the sheer clay 'bluffs' that hindsight would likely measure as no more than forty feet in height, sleeping on sandbars, fighting mosquitoes, blistered hands so raw that the blisters broke and then paddling on, and contracting some of the most severe cases of sunburn ever. And we thought every minute of it was fun.

We were greeted at Lundy Williams fishing camp in Escatawpa that first year. We had paddled through Little River into the East Pascagoula and there were the parents on the bank, waiting as though we had been gone for years. Photographers were there. We were featured in the newspaper. We had conquered the wildness. We had mastered the rivers. We were MEN!

Every so often, someone still drags out a picture of those boys. Tired and smiling. I look at those pictures and I think of every minute of the trip. But what I remember most isn't in the pictures.

Its the break of day when light first showed through the tops of the cypress and pines. The sun light played on the top of the warm late Summer water on a cooler morning and a fine mist rose not unlike fog. And the mist sparkled as though there were tiny silent explosions taking place. I was thirteen years old and I thought it was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. I still do. I hope I get to see it again.

But if I don't, that's the way I remember it.