To everyone who has ever touched it, the Buffalo River bathes the soul.
For me, my son Matthew and our friends Bill Eldridge, Rusty Pruitt and Ed Kubler, it is a place of healing and cleansing, of friendship, fellowship and brotherhood.
We float the Buffalo annually in the spring and again in the fall. It’s hard for so many busy people to schedule a three-day float trip, but we are very protective of this tradition.
It appeared in jeopardy three weeks ago. Pruitt’s plate was full with a new job, and the steady drip of chronic wasting disease news made it hard for me to get away for a full day anywhere, let alone three.
That all changed May 28 with the death of my son Daniel, who frequently participated in these floats. We reserved June 5-7 to take a memorial float fishing trip from Spring Creek to Rush. It’s our favorite section, and also the last section that Daniel floated in 2014.
Interestingly, a lot of people volunteered to join us but — one by one — they all bailed until only the core group remained. Pruitt and Kubler, not knowing how many to expect, brought enough food to feed twice our number. None of it was wasted.
We arrived much earlier than usual last Sunday and found the Buffalo remarkably high and swift. That’s great for floating, but not for fishing. It’s a quick trip to our traditional first campsite in low water, but Sunday’s flow would get us there in about 30 minutes without touching a paddle to the water.
Wishing to fish, I tied my canoe to a belt loop and waded upstream. I was dismayed to learn that the water was too fast to fish soft plastic lures except in pockets of slack water next to the bank, and in seams and eddies.
Kubler joined me after a couple of hours. He caught a couple of nice smallmouths from a wide eddy below a short, brawling riffle a mile or so upstream from Spring Creek.
While Kubler probed the eddy, I noticed smallmouths chasing baitfish. Aha! Instead of submarine warfare, maybe the smallmouths itched for a surface engagement. I tied on a ¼ -ounce Pond Magic buzzbait and fished above the shoal, where the water was fast but smooth.
The water along the bank was calm and slow beside an assortment of large rocks, bushes and downed trees. My first cast was beside a rock near a bush. The buzzbait scarcely touched the water before a smallmouth jumped on it. I caught three more, plus a big Ozark bass and a longear sunfish.
I stayed with the buzzbait the rest of the day and got plenty of strikes casting at the bank and retrieving perpendicular, but the fish struck tentatively. I caught three more bass out of about 20 strikes, but they were all small. The rest of the group reported small catches, too, in size and number.
Only a sliver of the gravel bar where we usually camp was dry, so we camped at at a different bar about a quarter of a mile upstream on the opposite side of the river. Eldridge, a traditionalist, rued this, but we assured him that the new site was superior, and that we should have camped there all along. Its only detraction was that it was quiet. We loved the other site because of the constant roar of its rapids.
Dinner the first night was, as usual, a feast. Using his secret blend of sauces and seasonings, Kubler grilled hubcap-sized ribeyes to perfection. He also baked potatoes and corn on the cob, wrapped in aluminum foil, in the campfire.
Usually, I eat about a third of one ribeye in one sitting. I nibble on it for the rest of the trip, but I must have worked up an appetite working so hard all day against the current. I consumed the biggest steak and two ears of corn before going to bed.
Daniel was a melancholy presence when the trip began, but his irrepressible spirit lightened the mood. We shared stories about things he did and said on previous trips and recalled facets of his rather peculiar outlook on life.
Every place on that river has a memory of Daniel fishing, swimming, skipping stones, climbing rocks or just sitting on a gravel bar sipping a Mountain Dew. I saw him everywhere, but I embraced the new memories of this and anticipated those to come.
The river fell about 6 inches overnight and cleared somewhat, but it was still too swift to fish with slow-presentation lures. I tried something new, a Zoom fluke on a weighted hook. It fell quickly, and its fast-twitch action was ideal for casting around rocks and submerged wood. I caught two bass, but the current was still too swift to fish it effectively.
Crankbaits were ineffective for the same reason.
Eldridge finally figured out a pattern near the end of the trip. He cast a Zoom lizard into a slow section of a shoal, put down his rod and sat down to eat a ham sandwich. About 10 minutes later, a fish dragged his rod into the water. He recovered it and miraculously managed to set the hook on a 15-inch smallmouth. It was the biggest fish of the trip.
Either it took that long of presentation to provoke a strike, or it took that long for a fish to find the lure.
Near the end, I beached my canoe one last time and uncorked my pressure-cooked grief.
I looked upstream at Pruitt, who beached his canoe and started a fire of dry cane at the edge of a gravel bar. When it burns, it sounds like machine gun fire as it echoes from the bluffs. It was Pruitt’s private tribute, his version of a 21-gun salute.
Weeping bitterly, I turned away and plunged headfirst into the water three times.
When I emerged, my tears were bound for the White River where they will someday meet the Mississippi River, which will carry them to the Gulf of Mexico. There, they will evaporate into the heavens and return to the earth as life-giving rain.
Renewal begins where sorrow ends, and the river was welcome to as much of mine as it wanted.
As I slicked back my hair, I felt clean and free.