Ouachita Float Tour

The Ouachita Float Trip

We did some. I wish I could say WE DID IT with authority, but since we bailed so soon, I can’t. We put the Solar Troller in at Camden, and spent an idyllic week on our little houseboat floating down the Ouachita River with the kids. We had great weather for the first several days, during which we could make about 20 miles a day on quiet, clean, odor-free, solar energy. Then the clouds and eventually rain started moving in and we learned the 1st maxim of solar boating: It’s great while the sun’s out! And I’m not even mentioning the mosquitos.

This year, the year of the Ouachita Float Trip, is coming around the bend to the home stretch, and it’s looking pretty bad for too many more miles in the Solar Troller. The panels and charger and batteries need to go back to their rightful home, Mr. Bob Nagy of Green Power Videos, and we need to park the boat and realize that the kids are in school now, and we can’t just light out for months at a time without ruffling some feathers.

Looking back on what we’ve done so far (and I assure you we will do more, namely Arkadelphia to Camden, just don’t tell the kids) I am glad we logged as much water time as we did. We have done over 60 miles in the canoe. We spent about two weeks on the Solar Troller, though one was endured on a flooding Lake Ouachita, and managed to go over 100 miles down the river, covering most of the river’s length in Arkansas. That is certainly more of the river than I did last year, but realize we’ve still only covered about a third of the navigable length of this mighty stream.

In terms of what I learned from the experience, I would have to say that I had no idea about the true scope of the project I had outlined. I was used to traveling with the aid of a tank full of hydrocarbons, and its easy to go long distances very fast in all weathers using that method. But paddling a canoe or running a motor off of energy captured from the sun is a much slower way to go (honestly, the canoe was faster, certainly in the floods). If we truly had taken all of May as we originally planned, we could have done the whole river, but that plan was banking on luck we didn’t get. When your travel plans are dependent upon the weather, I advise allowing for a little more time. Of course, if we had a bigger, beefier, more mosquito-proof boat it wouldn’t have mattered as much, but this trip was about being in nature, not subduing it.

One of the best things that happened during the project was meeting and getting to work with Cheryl Slavant, the Ouachita Riverkeeper. Her motivation and single minded hard work towards achieving her goals of cleaning up the river have been an inspiration. She gets results the hard way: long range planning, short term goals, and work, work, work. She has pulled together a coalition of people who might not otherwise bump into each other, but share a dedication to preserving, protecting, and improving the health of the Ouachita River watershed, and are working on the problems from their respective areas of expertise. Working with her organization has been a pleasure and an education, and we will continue to help the Ouachita Riverkeeper  bring awareness of the great beauty and value of this natural resource to the people of Arkansas and Louisiana.

We have other tours we are dreaming up. We want to break down barriers for touring tuba-accordion duos across the globe. We want want everyone in America to know the ratios of resonance of a standing wave in a tube of a given length (OK maybe that’s just me). I am still clinging to a couple more river trips, and we are going to put on a show for Low Key Arts, but its time to wake up and smell the music: the Ouachita Float Trip is (practically) over.

zac

Today we went diamond diggin at Crater of Diamonds State Park. That park is brilliant, they have the diamond “mine” (picture open field with clay like mud on a slight hill) and then they have a brand spanking new water park for the kids.  So just when your kids get their belly full of “nature”, you can take them and douse them in chlorine water with slides and sprinklers galore. I love it when our state parks get all creative. We paid our $14 to go in and have the pleasure of the kids whining about mud and being bored (Eureka claimed today was the most boring thing we had ever done!  Wow!) and we came home with one broken rock.  I just had to take a rock home.  Something.  Next time, I’m stopping at the tourist trap and spending $14 on a broken piece of blue glass from south america.  Or maybe just a bunch of ice-cream and toys.  A tom tom.  A wig wam.

On the two hour drive down there we got to talking about the float trip.  The weather this August has been so moderate thusfar, that we were reinspired to head down the Ouachita and just do it.  Before school starts.  Before schedules and surly teachers start. While everyone else is out of town getting their last bit of summer in. And just when I was going to start calling around scheduling our boat trailer taxi, Zac thought that we should take a look at the flood levels of the river.

Check it out yourself:

River Gauge Page

The river is back in flood!  And it will still be in flood on Friday!  What? Just when I thought I could accept the mosquitos for who they really are, and make the kids do it (talk about boring!!!!) the river goes back in flood. Sometimes I think the Ouachita River just doesn’t really like our boat. Maybe we didn’t go upscale enough.  I don’t know. I would almost vote to just go anyway, but Zac, who is in a rather sensible mood right now, assures me that our boat does not have the power to take on the mighty Ouachita. But really, if we did just careen down the river, all 333 miles of it, totally out of control, wouldn’t we eventually get stopped a the dam at Old River Control? And then the trip would be over in about 4 sleepless days. It is kind of tempting. OK, maybe we could do it, narrowly escape death, and then it would be made into a Hollywood blockbuster.  Then we would be famous because of our dumbassedness, not our musical savvy.  I’m sure the Hollywood Blockbuster would use our tuba/accordion talents against us. Or perhaps in a moment of being embarressed for us, they wouldn’t even mention the instruments.  Or my hair.

I know everyone is dying to know what we’ve done for the past two weeks while Zephyr and Eureka were at my parent’s house and at the NC coast with my sister and cousins. Was it dig out the well in the back yard so we can have free water for the garden only to get covered in anaerobic gunk? Was it go to the theme park without the kids so we can finally ride the rides they’re too small for only to get whiplash on the bumper cars? Was it put the finishing touches on the chicken shack and pen in anticipation of some yummy autonomic protein synthesizers? Or was it wilt in the heat in the morning then head inside to soak up the AC during a lazy afternoon nap? Or maybe we just tried to send an honest accounting of our time, only to be flagged by Net-Nanny and told that we were violating community standards, causing us to resort to personal platitudes and rhetorical questions?

Well, enough of the insightful explanations.

We will be in Eureka Springs this weekend for the Fat Tire Festival.  Friday night we play at Sparky’s Roadhouse, and Saturday night we play the awards ceremony at the Pied Piper. If you love single track riding, and you are an avid consumer, come and check out this event!

Then we retrieve our children from their grandparents and we head straight to the nearest Wal-Mart.  We have a little system in our family. You can gauge how spoiled a child is by how many minutes it takes them to throw a tantrum in the toy aisle.  Your job as parent is to start the stopwatch and keep saying NO. Then you take the number of minutes to meltdown and multiply that by the number of tablespoons of sugar in a can of Coca-Cola, and that is how many days it will take before you have a normal interaction with your child again. Last year it took 14.28 days.

Then we will trot on back to Hot Springs, where, true to its name, it is HOT. This is the point in our lives where our kids head to school.  The rest of August will pretty much be taken up by sock darning and mending frocks. Then the kids will rocket off to school, and we will finally get something done.

You might be asking yourself, “What ever happened to the Float Tour?” What happened was this.  Rain, Rain, Heat, Heat. We hope to go in the fall, after we see how keen the administrators at the school are with kids missing two weeks of school. Heck!  What could possibly go wrong?!

Sincerely,
Zac & Cheryl
The Itinerant Locals
www.polkayoureyeout.com

We are in Eureka Springs for the weekend.  We played yesterday at the Basin Spring Park downtown, and then this evening we will play at the Squid & the Whale from 5-8.  The kids want to swim in the pool and watch TV, so motivation to go downtown and shop is low.  When we realized the train doesn’t run on Sunday, that killed any motivation we had to go out in the world and seek some fun.  If you call walking around in 95 degree weather with two small children fun.  Happy Fathers Day!

Ok, we’ve done the Ouachita River from the top to Arkadelphia.  We thought we would seriously be ready to go today, but when I insisted we check out the Nick’s Ferry Bridge, our plans were once again waylayed.

We drove down, and the world seemed so dry compared to the day we couldn’t even GET to the bridge (rain on the road), but when we arrived we saw what a flooded river she still was.  The mosquitos quickly filled up the car, and covered my legs with their genetic impulse.  I try not to take it personally, but it was rather uncomfortable.  We walked across the bridge, and the clearance was maybe 6 feet. There were two places you could get through, but the rest of the bridge was clogged with debris. And when you stand there and look at the water, just racing under the bridge, you just kind of wonder what would happen to an oversized pontoon hillbilly houseboat on water going that fast.

And so it stands.  We still can’t float the darn river. Of course, that didn’t keep Zac from wondering at 1 AM last night if we just shouldn’t go anyway.  He presents these things to me when I am mostly asleep and can’t really fight back.  Kind of like asking your husband to mow the lawn right before you lose reception on your cell phone.