A Visit With An Old Friend

[Al Agnew]

As I slid the canoe into the water, it really felt like I was once again visiting an old friend, neither of us the same as we once were when we first got to know each other, but still alive and kicking. I think a river is a live thing, and while nature is always impartial, some rivers never seem to be aloof and impersonal. When the current catches the canoe I can't help but pause and think of how glad I am to be there, and with a river that's as familiar as an old friend, I think how nice it is to see it again.

The river's name is Big, and if I was the river I'd be disappointed in the lack of imagination of the pioneer who named it. "Big River" just doesn't have the poetry of "Current River" or "Gasconade River". I grew up within a mile of the river, a little farther upstream, and I didn't "meet" this stretch north of the town of Bonne Terre until I had spent a lot of time with my "home" stretch around Desloge. I remember well the first time we met. At the end of a drive down a steep hillside on a rutted rocky road, my friend's father pulled up to a ramshackle cabin in the woods, and Rick and I jumped out of the car and ran to the riverbank to behold a quiet pool, bigger and a bit murkier than what we expected from our days on the upper river. We were 13 years old and veterans of days and nights fishing, swimming, and camping on the river near our homes, a stretch of stream that was almost urban in character with highways and houses and quarries and mine dumps as visible as bluffs and gravel bars. This spot, halfway through a stretch that was more than 8 miles between bridges, seemed like wilderness to us. We spent the night in the cabin, ran a few limblines and caught a few channel catfish. We wondered whether the river was always this murky, and we wondered if there were smallmouth bass in it like there were upstream. We vowed to come back and try for bass.

Rick's dad disposed of the cabin soon afterwards, and we never spent another night in it. But our imaginations were fired, and the next summer Rick and I, along with another buddy Jeff, cajoled our parents into transporting us to that stretch of river for our first long float trip, three days on the river from the bridge north of Bonne Terre to Washington State Park. On that float, I found a friend. Beautiful pools, big gravel bars, high bluffs and solitude were all a part of it, but the clincher was that I caught the biggest smallmouth I'd ever seen up to that time, a legitimate four pounder. Forty two years ago, and I can still remember that fish. I remember exactly where I caught it, and exactly how it took the little Rapala minnow I was casting.

So I visited my friend whenever I could. There were other stretches of river I liked as well, but the stretch from St. Francois State Park a mile above the Highway 67 bridge where we put in on that first float to the little settlement of Blackwell about 13 miles downstream became one of my favorite parts of the river. The fish seemed a bit bigger and more numerous there, and as I grew up the fishing became only a part of the experience of floating, and I appreciated the scenic quality of that reach. As time went by, I never missed the chance to float the "park to Blackwell" stretch at least once a year.

So now it's the summer of 2008, and this would be my first visit of the year. The river at the park was a bit low, though not nearly as low as I've seen it, and fairly clear. But I noted a bit of a smell. It's one manifestation of how unkind civilization has been to Big River. With five cities and numerous real estate developments and 40,000 or so humans living upstream, with barely adequate sewage treatment plants and overloaded septic systems and a whole lot of livestock in the valley, the river suffers from what is ephemistically called "overfertilization". To be honest, the water gets a little funky during hot weather, with a fecund smell and some unsightly blackish green algae coating the bottom and floating to the surface in mats. It used to be worse when I was a kid on the upper river, and I can still remember one town meeting when I was not long out of high school. Upgrading the Desloge sewage lagoon was being debated, and one city official stood up and said, "The water coming out of our sewage lagoon is clean enough to drink." And I wished that I had a glass of that sickly green water to hand him and say, "Then drink some."

But the fish are still there, and in the first pool I caught a nice 14 inch smallmouth. I was glad to see it. One of the many ills Big River is suffering is the invasion of non-native spotted bass, and in this stretch they started showing up about 7 or 8 years ago. For a while it looked like they would completely overrun the native smallmouth, but in the last couple of years the spot population seems to have stabilized and the smallmouth are apparently holding their own, still outnumbering spotted bass by a small margin.

Like old friends sharing stories, every pool and riffle of a river you know well holds memories. I passed the pool where I learned how to fish for February redhorse suckers with worms, and the pool where I once hooked and lost two huge smallmouth in the space of four casts. That second pool, I noted, had changed, and not for the better. The current had shifted due to a channel change in the riffle upstream, and sand laced with mine waste had filled in part of what had been a deep run along a vertical clay bank. The character of the river in this stretch is not as defined by the waste from the old lead mines as it is upstream, but the fine sand and gravel that is the residue of millions of tons of crushed ore, washed into the river with every rain for a hundred years, is a fact of life on Big River. It fills in the pools and makes this river shallower than the average Ozark stream, and worse, it fills in the spaces that are abundant in the coarse gravel and cobble bottoms of most Ozark rivers, spaces that furnish the habitat for the bottom organisms and crayfish that feed the web of life and ultimately feed my quarry, the smallmouth.

By the time I drifted under the 67 bridge with its roaring non-stop traffic rattling the span, I'd caught a dozen or so bass of all three species. Not far below, I came to a spot with more recent memories, a sharp-dropping little riffle with an eddy below that gave me a 21 inch smallmouth a few years ago. The next few miles, to the Highway E bridge, hold several such spots where I've caught or hooked big fish throughout the years, but that one was one of the biggest from this whole stretch. On this day the eddy yielded a small spotted bass, a bit of a let-down.

It was nearing lunchtime when I came to the E bridge, and as always when I float this long reach of river, I knew I was running late and had a lot of water to cover in the afternoon. I stopped at my usual lunch spot, a shady gravel bar across from a nice bluff a half mile below the bridge, far enough away that the occasional traffic on the highway wasn't noticeable. This float is actually too long to fish really thoroughly in a day, but I never want to cut it shorter, and other than the Highway 67 bridge, all the intermediate accesses are private. I usually visit the owners each year and get permission to use them, but never seem to take advantage of it. So I fish hard through the morning to figure out a pattern of where most of the fish are holding, and then concentrate my fishing in optimum spots in the afternoon.

When I come to the pool where two years ago I caught the only two walleye I've ever seen on the upper river, I fish it thoroughly with a deep-diving crankbait to see if those walleye are still there. No luck. But when I switch back to my homemade shallow running crankbait in the riffle below, I immediately connect with a pretty 17 inch smallmouth. Today the fish are mostly very near the heads or tails of riffles, if not in the pockets within them, and so the afternoon passes in leisurely paddling through the quiet pools, soaking up the beauty that's still to be found in my old friend, and carefully fishing the areas with noticeable current. This stretch of river is slow by Ozark standards, so there is plenty of water to paddle through, including the Settle Hole, which is nearly a mile long. The fishing today is rather slow as well, which is alright by me. At times in the past, the fishing has been hotter, and the fish have seemed to be everywhere in the river. And when it's like that, I just can't pass up any spot that looks good and end up fishing almost frantically and then having to paddle out the last few miles in the dark. That wouldn't be an option this time, since my wife is expecting to pick me up at Blackwell at 7 PM.

There is a stretch, running past where my childhood buddy's cabin was, that is a series of those slow pools. At the end of it begins one of my favorite pieces of this whole stretch. It starts with a chain of riffles, comes out onto a shallow reach with a flat bedrock bottom, flows over a wide solid rock riffle (called, appropriately, Rocky Riffle) and continues for another half mile or so in shallow runs and riffles. It doesn't look like much as far as bass habitat, but it is always full of fish. Well, almost always. Today, I don't catch a single smallmouth from it until I near the end of the reach. I've had days when I caught twenty or thirty smallmouths from this mile long stretch of shallows. A few of them were big ones, too.

At the end of the shallow reach is the Big Sandy Hole. I learned the names of these places along the river from an old-timer who had spent his entire life on it. I guess I'm getting close to qualifying for old-timer status myself now. He was an inveterate noodler, and probably caught more catfish by hand from the river than any one person ever did with hook and line. He loved noodling in the big boulders beneath the bluff at the Big Sandy Hole, and I spent several nights there myself, camped out on overnight floats and fishing for those catfish with rod and reel--I never had any interest in sticking my hand into holes underwater. I remember one time when my buddy Rick and I were camped there. It was late, and he had given up on the catfishing and crawled into his sleeping bag under the stars. I was still awake, and walked down to the water to check on the rods, still baited and out in the river. One of them had a fish on. I reeled it in to discover it was a 3 foot long eel, the first eel I'd ever seen. Then I got a nasty idea. I walked back to Rick with the eel dangling from my rod tip, and let its slimy, writhing tail swipe his upturned face. He awoke to the sensation of slime and this huge snake-like creature gleaming in the firelight right in his face.

I ended up in the river soon afterwards.

The river had changed in the spot I always considered one of the prettiest on the whole river, not far below the Big Sandy. It was a long, fast, rock-studded riffle angling out of a pool, and you looked down the open corridor of the riffle to a high, rugged, reddish stained bluff. I've painted it a couple of times in the past, and I always look forward to seeing it again. But last spring's flooding shifted the riffle to the other side of the gravel bar it had flowed through, into a narrow channel closed in with tree canopy, and the bluff was mostly obscured by the foliage. Rivers change all the time, but somehow Big River in this area seemed to have changed less than most, and it was a bit of a shock to see this particular alteration.

I came to the private low water bridge at Cole's Landing. In the little pool just below the bridge, I hook a big smallmouth, probably 18 inches or better, but I don't have it on long. The river leaves the pool and goes into a piece of fast water where I once ran over a cow. The Dickenson family, which owns the land in the big horseshoe bend at Cole's, has had a herd of dairy cattle there for as long as I can remember, and one day I was floating by myself in my old aluminum Grumman canoe, and came to that riffle. The river was up a bit and flowing pretty fast, and as I came around a blind bend in the middle of the fast water, there was a big cow standing udder-deep dead ahead. I knew I couldn't avoid her, and I knew that trying to avoid her would turn the canoe broadside and be sure disaster, so I just kept the canoe pointed straight at her and held on. The prow of the canoe hit her square in the ribs and bowled her completely over onto her side underwater, and then the canoe slid right over her before she knew what happened. I looked back as she came up bawling and spitting and snorting, and watched as she clambered out of the water apparently none the worse for wear, but I suspect she had some bruised ribs.

There is a rock submerged right in the middle of the next pool. It's not a big rock, nor is it a deep pool. You can barely see the rock, but I always make sure to fish it carefully, because over the years I've taken several big fish off that rock. This time I catch a fish, but it barely makes 12 inches. But there is also another obscure rock toward the lower end of the pool which has occasionally produced a good fish, and today I get a strike from something that seems big, but miss it.

I pause and realize again that on this river, I fish with memories. There was the float I made in November, during an unseasonably warm deer season, and when I came to that rock, there was a hunter in a tree stand near the riffle at the bottom of the pool who watched me take a 20 inch smallmouth off that rock on a buzzbait. He said nothing, and I didn't let on like I'd seen him, but I often wonder whether he wished he'd been fishing instead of hunting.

The river runs beneath an impressive bluff as it rounds the big horseshoe bend, with a long pool lined with boulders that always holds fish. On the opposite bank, however, the cattle have unlimited access to the water, and it seems like they are always there, beating down the bank, fouling the gravel bar. One more ill my friend has to suffer; it's sometimes amazing to me that the river still harbors anything but carp. Then it runs down a dead pool that I always paddle through, even though the memory always comes back of the second time I was ever on this stretch and had two big fish blow up on a Tiny Torpedo in that pool without getting hooked. Below a riffle comes the next long pool and the biggest spring on Big River. It comes in beneath the bluff over a jumble of moss-covered rocks, and as Ozark springs go it isn't very impressive--Big River isn't as heavily spring-fed as many Ozarkian waters.

It's starting to get late. I still have a couple miles to go, and only 45 minutes in which to cover them. So I paddle a little faster, and fish only the very best spots. But there is one small spot I slow down and fish carefully. It doesn't look like much. There is a long, dead pool above and a longer, deader pool below, and the spot is where a small wet-weather creek comes in between those two pools. The creek has deposited a little bar of small rock at its mouth that narrows the river a bit, and a gravel bar on the other side narrows it a bit more. The rock bar is covered with water willow. There are a couple of slightly larger rocks along the water willow in no more than 2 feet of water, and that's about all there is to recommend this place. But this is where I caught that 4 pounder on that first ever float trip. Over the years since, it has produced other big fish, but maybe the most memorable was a 17 inch smallmouth with a deformed, crooked back that I caught one summer close to 15 years ago. I released it, and the next summer I caught what was obviously the same fish, same crooked back, same lure, but it had grown an inch. The following summer I floated this stretch a couple of times and didn't find that fish, so I figured somebody else had caught it or it had died from some natural cause--or maybe it had simply gotten too wary to catch. However, late that autumn I floated the river one more time, and caught that fish again, although this time it had moved to the lower end of the long pool below. It had grown another inch, becoming a 19 incher that would have gone over 20 inches had its back been straight. I felt fortunate to renew my acquaintance with old crooked back one more time.

I passed Mill Creek coming in on the left, getting close to the take-out. The landowner at the mouth of the creek had been bulldozing brush and putting in a gravel ramp to the water. A bit more intrusion into the river's solitude, a bit more pressure on it, but that is not the worst insult to the river that Mill Creek represents. One summer day back in 1975, a buddy and I were planning on floating this stretch and were running our shuttle shortly after daybreak. It had rained rather hard the night before, although not hard enough to muddy the river upstream. But as we got to the old Blackwell bridge, we were shocked to see the river running solid red mud, so thick it looked like you could walk on it. We altered our plans and floated farther upstream that morning, and learned that evening that a barite mine dam had failed up on Mill Creek the night before and dumped millions of tons of red silt into the creek and down it to the river. The silt was so thick it totally wiped out almost all life on the river from there to Washington State Park, and it took more than 10 years for the river to recover. There are other "tiff" dams up Mill Creek and within the watershed, some of them no safer than the one that failed, so perhaps it's only a matter of time until another disaster occurs.

The take-out at Blackwell has always been problematical. There was once a ricketty old iron bridge high over the water, and the only access was down a short, steep bank off the Engledow Road near the intersection at the bridge. You had to drag the canoe up a five foot high rock outcrop to get it out of the water. For a while the Conservation Department had an access a mile upstream, but to get to the river there you had to either get off MDC land on onto the adjacent landowner's property, or cross a small creek with 8 foot high vertical banks. At times the landowners of the bottom fields above the bridge would allow people to drive across their land to get to the river, but I'm sure that's a thing of the past--why is that people seem to be so much less respectful of others' property these days? And a few years ago, the county finally replaced the old iron bridge with a high new span, and re-shaped the intersection at the bridge so that there is almost no place to park. They raised the road there as well, so the bank leading down to the river is much higher and just as steep. It isn't an easy take-out after a long day of floating, and the parking is such a problem that I don't leave a vehicle there anymore. I'm thankful I have such a forgiving and accomodating wife, who will consent to driving the hour from home to pick me up there once or twice a year. She arrives just as I'm dragging the little canoe up the bank, with supper and a milk shake. I tie the canoe onto the car and take one more look at my old friend, the deep, quiet pool there reflecting the bankside trees and sky beginning to color with sunset.

Farewell, old friend, until the next time.

[wily]

great read...thanks

[Thom]

Al:

Thank you for the refreshing story. This is indeed a fishing forum and it is worth sorting through all of the political dribble

to read such a great article.

Thanks

Thom

[Mark]

Great read Al but now you've given up your secret spot! LOL

Al, I really want to get together with you for an hour or two sometime this fall or winter. A friend and I are planning a 2 week vacation next summer to Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana and need ideas and suggestions. Mainly camping and fishing, but have plans for another friend to fly into Jackson, WY and meet us, want to find an area with plenty of fishing and cabins nearby to allow different options without travelling too far when we get there.

Maybe meet at the Midway some evening??

Mark Vogt

[Andy & JoAnne]

Awsome read....Despite the conservation issues, it was really refreshing...Tell us another

[Al Agnew]

Great read Al but now you've given up your secret spot! LOL

Al, I really want to get together with you for an hour or two sometime this fall or winter. A friend and I are planning a 2 week vacation next summer to Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana and need ideas and suggestions. Mainly camping and fishing, but have plans for another friend to fly into Jackson, WY and meet us, want to find an area with plenty of fishing and cabins nearby to allow different options without travelling too far when we get there.

Maybe meet at the Midway some evening??

Mark Vogt

Sounds good to me, Mark...phone Mary and me.

[snap]

very enjoyable reading Al!!! Have been wondering for a while about putting in at Frankclay off Hwy 8. Where could we take out? any ideas or help would be appreciated. Pass the river often on trips to Potosi and like the way the water looks...just have never had the chance to float it.

[Al Agnew]

It's about 7.5 miles from the bridge on the gravel road that's a quartermile west of the Hwy. 8 bridge to the MDC access at Leadwood. That section suffers from serious livestock overfertilization and subsequent aquatic weed growth, but other than the weeds choking parts of it, the fishing is okay. From the Leadwood Access, it's 2.5 miles to the county landfill access of Hwy. P at the outskirts of Desloge, and another 5 miles to the old Hwy. 67 bridge at Desloge, kinda behind the Wal-mart near the intersection of Hwy. 8 and Hwy. 67. That section suffers the worst from the mine waste.

[Danimal]

Great read. Thanks for sharing. Dan-o

[snap]

thanks for the info Al. Was afraid of something like that! Love to wade anyway...guess I will have to stay close to home and continue with the Fouche de Clue and Brushy Creek. Keep the posts coming!!!