Just Like Home (Inland Transit Day 7)
Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Mile 387
Fulton, MS
Log Entry by Program Manager Tatiana Dalton
Monday, October 31, 2022
2156
Last night, I dragged my feet getting ready for bed, waiting for the Pickwick Lock, our last big stop before we left the Tennessee River (and Tennessee altogether).
I asked Dan to let me know when we had arrived. He agreed, so I went to the 5-man compartment and crawled into my bunk. I read, and waited. Then I dozed off. The next thing I knew, Dan was whispering to me that we were there.
When I arrived on deck, we were entering the towering Pickwick Lock from downstream. The huge doors, made of metal bars, looked like they were built to crush boats like ours, not shepherd them safely up and down the river. As we motored into the chamber, a funky smell like boiled cabbage settled around us. I looked around and realized we were essentially in an artificial low tide, the walls of the chamber a dull collage of freshwater scum. I was reminded of King’s Beach, just north of Boston and not far from my hometown, which becomes famously smelly at low tide because of an overgrowth of brown algae that decomposes when left behind by the receding water.
Unhindered by the stink, Geoff, Captain Hill, and Andrew worked together along the whole length of the boat—quarterdeck to monkey deck—to get us secured to a floating bit. As they did that, an otherworldly noise ricocheted around the chamber. It sounded like a pterodactyl, or at least how Hollywood sound designers have convinced us those prehistoric animals sounded.
I looked for a flying monster but found a spindly Great Blue heron instead, winging across the chamber to perch on an edge. What a strange presence to guide us through this lock, I thought, but Captain Hill knew better. “They’re always hanging around these locks,” he told me. When fish get trapped in the locks, he explained, they get disoriented by the contradictory currents and become “an easy meal” for birds like this heron.
For as long as we waited in the lock, rising higher and higher with the water, the heron watched us. From time to time, it unfolded its great unwieldy wings to find a different spot on a different railing, it’s squawking echoing and distorting off the metal and concrete.
Since the Pickwick lock, I have seen Great Blue herons everywhere. They watch us in the locks, and they sit poised on branches as we motor by their shores. They are one of my favorite birds to watch in the Alewife Brook nature preserve back home, where they perch on a nearby parking garage to survey their surroundings. For all of the new and different things we have encountered on this transit, it’s nice to know that herons everywhere like looking down from great heights like they’re pretending to be Batman.
***
Even later last night, we arrived at Grand Harbor Marina for our pit stop. By the time we left this morning at 1130, we had fueled up, done laundry, taken hot showers, pumped out our wastewater tanks, filled up on freshwater, and stocked up on some fresh groceries.
It is now 2150. We have traveled 63 miles and transited four locks since getting back underway. So far, Mississippi is almost as beautiful as Tennessee—at least the parts I can see from here.
