Despite my misgivings, Steve kept some fluids down and didn’t barf after midnight, so I reluctantly agreed to get back on the river.
Peter gave us a lift to the next boat launch down so we could avoid the rapids at Mills Falls, and I parked Steve in the shade on the riverbank while I reorganized and packed our gear. He still looked a little green, but at least the sun was out.
Lucky for us, the stretch of river on the docket for the day was a relatively mellow one. Washington’s Crossing was anticlimactic, save for the threat of Steve barfing out of the back of the canoe. The high water passed us over Scudders Falls without a hitch. As the river became tidal, we realized we weren’t moving quite as quickly as we’d planned and were in danger of hitting Trenton Falls when the tide was low enough to reveal the boat-shredding ledges along the fall line, but we managed to scrape through just in time.
We had hoped to end a 30-mile day in Burlington, NJ for a night in a hotel with Steve’s dad, but the tides (and the smell) of the river below Trenton overcame us and we only made it as far as the Bordentown public beach. I dragged my gray-faced sternman ashore and we called his dad for an early pickup; the rest of my day was spent resupplying and reorganizing our gear for the final stretch of the river while Steve slept his way through the rest of his bout with food poisoning.
It’s one thing to be confronted with an environmental emergency and know that you’ve got a limited time frame to warm your paddling partner up before things get serious, but it’s absolutely horrific to see someone you care about (and depend on) sidelined by a fucking chicken sandwich. Steve’s a pretty unstoppable force when he wants to be and the poor bastard spent these two days exhibiting all the vigor of an overcooked spaghetti noodle. Beyond making sure he was staying hydrated, I was completely helpless- and that’s not a feeling I enjoy.
Steve woke up feeling like a new person and consumed his normal pair of breakfast sandwiches, and then we set off to tackle a day that now included an extra 13 miles due to our chicken-based shortfall. On tidal waters. In unrelenting, blazing sun.
We paddled hard until we could see the Philadelphia skyline on the horizon… and then kept paddling. And paddling. For HOURS. For an endless series of bridges we never seemed to reach, past landfills and chemical plants and trash barges, all while the sun beat down on us full force from a cloudless sky. The pristine, crystal-clear waters of the upper Delaware had given way to a translucent brown solution of chewing gum, wrappers, and dead fish parts. The smell didn’t deter either of us from getting fully submerged when we stopped for lunch in an attempt to cool off, but it may have been related to Steve barfing up part of his breakfast.
We stared at this fucking bridge for hours. HOURS. Goddamn Sisyphean paddling effort, this was.
Eventually we timed ourselves passing under a bridge and realized we had ceased making functional headway, and rather than continuing to crawl forward at less than an eighth of a mile per hour we pulled up at an East Philadelphia boat launch to reevaluate. We were ashore just long enough for me to get verbally harassed by some locals and for the local police to inspect our boat and tell Steve he should “get his knife out and keep it handy” before pulling back out into the tide to find safer harbor.
An hour of furious paddling against the rising tide landed us at Camden Petty Island, which we affectionately dubbed “Murder Island”. We were sketched out enough by our previous landing and the visible grave remnants on Murder Island that we tied onto a half-submerged piling from a rotten pier and resigned ourselves to waiting out the tide in the boat. As Steve fired up the Jetboil in the stern, I dug out headlamps and backup lanterns. We had twelve miles to go before we could get off the river, and we were going to have to do it in the dark.
This might be the coolest picture of me ever taken.
As much as the following six hours sucked, paddling a canoe through downtown Philadelphia after dark was hands-down one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. The water was dead calm. The jetskis and pleasure boats that had plagued us with their wakes all day had retired to the marinas. The bridges and the skyline went from a distant silhouette on the horizon to a glimmering array of lights reflected all around us on the river, and we could hear the echoes of hundreds of thousands of people going about their evening. Periodically a barge would loom out of the darkness and we lurched through the wake, knowing full well that despite our running lights they probably had no idea we were there. We passed the tall ships, aircraft carriers, dockside cafes filled with laughing couples drinking wine under string lights; not a soul made any notice of our passing. It felt like we were getting away with something, sneaking through the city under the cover of darkness with only the splash of the paddles to give us away. It was completely surreal.
My rookie rugby coach and dear friend Bazooka was meeting us at Darby Creek south of the city, and our directions were “look for the quarantine house after the airport, then turn right at the statue of the king of Sweden by the Holiday Inn”. Shockingly, that made total sense from the river even if it took us until 2am to finally reach the place. A true hero, Baz met us with cold beers; this made us feel better about having the hose turned on us before we were allowed in the house.
We only made it as far as the couch. I remember ‘Captain Blood’ being turned on, and then I passed out.
I woke up the next morning still mostly-upright on the couch, having not moved once. Bazooka’s fiance Bri handed me a coffee and said we were going out for breakfast, and I immediately fell in love with her. Keep her, Baz.
We drove into downtown Philly for dim sum in Chinatown, then second dim sum at a place that had better soup dumplings and scallion pancakes than the first location. As if Chinatown hadn’t been overwhelming enough for two river rats who hadn’t had any social interaction for a month, we then took a terrifying tour through Reading Market that consisted of more smells, people, and sounds than I’d ever seen in one place. The entire time Baz offered up a running commentary of historical factoids about literally everything we passed, peppered with updates on rugby gossip and a plethora of terrible/wonderful jokes.
Back at the house for hot showers and more beers, Bazooka delighted in Steve’s “1930’s era explorer” look and love of terrible puns and Steve was treated to the horror stories of my shenanigans in my early rugby career. We watched ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ and I reflected on how lucky we are to have such fantastic friends and family who are so tolerant and supportive of our bad adventure ideas while Bri made ribs and steaks for a cookout with the neighbors.
Happy clean people stuffed with delicious barbecue. Photo credit to Baz.
I have never eaten such incredible meat products. Sorry, Mom; sorry, Grandma; sorry to all the uncles and relatives that have such faith in their grilling prowess. Bri has you beat.
We lounged off the food coma on the couch watching ‘Young Frankenstein’, but at least managed to drag ourselves into the guest bed instead of falling asleep sitting up for the second night in a row.
Unfortunately for me, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and was violently (and stealthily) ill. I managed to creep back into bed without disturbing anyone, and got a few hours of fitful sleep before waking up with a raging headache and a sore throat.
Bazooka made sure we were loaded up with baked goods before dropping us back at Darby Creek, and we debated kidnapping Bri so she could cook for us on the river. She wasn’t having it, which was too bad.
Bazooka defending Bri and the brilliantest pibble Darwin Porthos, both of whom we tried to kidnap.
Aaaand cue another long day of getting almost nowhere. We had hoped to make it into the D&C Canal, but the odds were not in our favor. We stopped for lunch to wait out the tides under an overpass on the edge of a landfill and built ourselves a tarp-and-driftwood fort to get out of the wind and sun. Steve joked that this was a “romantic beach vacation with an excellent view”; to be fair, we did have a pretty good view of the DuPont chemical factory, and it was super nice of him to make tea while I had a mediocre nap under the tarp.
High tide came early in the evening, and we pulled back out planning for another late night of paddling. Unfortunately the wind picked up, and as hard as we fought we couldn’t seem to get out of sight of the bridge we had spent the afternoon. We had to keep far enough into the water to avoid the rocky piers and breakwaters that jutted out from the banks, and between the wind and waves we couldn’t determine what the scattered lights on land were. Docked boats? Buildings? Barges? Not a clue. Objects kept looming out of the darkness, and their shape changed three or four times before we could decide what they were. We passed dilapidated piers, power lines, spits of land, and eventually a massive uprooted tree that barely missed scraping broadside against our hull.
What, you can’t tell what you’re looking at here? Congratufuckinglations. Neither could we.
Despite the area’s reputation for being “murdery”, we called it quits and pitched the tent on a narrow strip of beach vaguely near Delaware City. There’s a fine line between “this is sketchy, but we can pull it off” and “OMG what the hell are we doing”.
The sound of the rising tide woke us up, and we were unpleasantly surprised to find that we were camped fifty yards from a steaming culvert unloading liquid waste from a nearby industrial site. No wonder the water had been so warm when we put to shore in the dark. I couldn’t decide if I would rather attribute my lingering headache and sore throat to illness or proximity to toxic waste.
Unrelenting rain had once again decided to join us and now all our gear was covered in weird-smelling sand, but at least the wind had died down. Fortunately we were within an hour’s paddle of the turn for the D&C canal, and as soon as we hit those waters the current picked up and we gained speed. Ospreys nested on the transmission towers along the channel, and large fish ruffled the surface of the canal. Both of us were glad to be off the Bay and back in a river-like setting, and after an in-boat brunch we felt way more human than we had waking up on the shores of a chemical dump.
Doesn’t this look delightful?
Just after lunchtime we pulled into the Summit North Marina and parked the canoe between a pair of yachts that were each bigger than my apartment. We were disappointed to find that the marina bar was closed for renovations. (At this point we’d come to terms with the fact that we were basically on a 500-mile-long, paddle-powered pub crawl.) The dock hands were in such disbelief that we’d paddled there from upstate New York that they let us leave the boat overnight for free and even gave us a lift to nearby Lums Pond State Park so we could get a campsite for the night.
The campground had zero staff on site (to be fair, they were “open” but it was still very early in the season) so we ended up reserving a site over the phone. They had yurts, so we splurged and figured we could dry out all our gear and shake the sand out of our pants.
The definition of “disappointment” is finding what appears to be a heating unit in your yurt and nearly weeping with joy as you drag your soaked gear out of the 50 degree rain… and then discovering that it’s just an air conditioner. I’m honestly not sure which of us was closer to tears.
We made the best of it and covered every inch of the yurt’s interior with damp gear, periodically getting up to sweep the sand outside as it fell off our stuff. Some careful math determined that we could have a meal made entirely of fruit snacks and still have enough for the remainder of our lunches. We hadn’t exactly been “roughing it” the previous week, but it was still nice to be out of the rain and sleeping on a mattress… even if it was about 4” too short for Steve’s comfort level.
It only took us three and a half weeks, but we’ve embraced the fact that we hate getting up early.
Significantly drier and less sandy, we repacked our gear and hiked the two miles back to the marina. Steve did a bad job loading himself down with gear and steadily complained until I made him trade portage packs just to shut him up, so by the end of it we were both an inch or two shorter. (Yes, I recognize that that was probably his goal all along. Mock me all you want- the man’s got a mean whine.)
The weather wasn’t unpleasant and neither was the paddling. We stopped in Chesapeake City to resupply on alcohol, since there were thunderstorms in the forecast and if we were trapped in our tent we didn’t want it to be completely dry. I foolishly stayed with the boat while Steve hitched a ride to the liquor store, and he returned with two VERY nice bottles of scotch and proceeded to shame me for buying Old Crow back in Hancock. (I can’t say I didn’t deserve it.)
We strolled into town looking for lunch and found a tavern called the Tap Room advertising fresh seafood. We were the only ones in the place, all the tables were covered in brown paper, and we decided this was as good a time as any to eat some fresh Maryland crabs. Mad props to the waitress; she was very patient with us and our ignorance of all things crustacean, and she didn’t laugh at us at all when we made her explain everything on the menu. After eating our weight in crab parts, Old Bay fries, and Yuengling we wobbled back to the boat poorer but better for it.
I was solidly buzzed at that point so frankly I have no idea if we were paddling with or against the tide for the rest of the afternoon. Steve claimed total sobriety but spent a lot of time slapping at seaweed and pretending his paddle was a sword, so I have my doubts.
With a view as stimulating as this, it’s no wonder our senses of humor have become so warped.
Eventually we landed on a beach at Elk Neck State Park because Steve had to poop, and we discovered both a full bathroom and a cluster of “rustic cabins”. The prospect of hot showers was very appealing after being damp for three days (and after the “heater” disappointment of the previous night), and I still hadn’t been feeling top notch since Philly, so we decided to call it a day. We hunted down a ranger with assistance from a couple staying in one of the cabins and talked our way into a rental for the night despite having completely missed the reservation window. (Thank you, kind ranger, for taking pity on us. We know we’re weird and smelly and showed up unannounced.) Huge props as well to Kevin and Denise, the “neighbors” in the next cabin over who gave us a lift to the reservation station and took the only photos we have from the entire trip that make us look like we know what we’re doing.
The majestic explorer surveys the beach, pondering his next poop.
We were briefly flummoxed by the concept of a real stove and running water in our “rustic cabin”, but we hung our gear on the walls and made the place look hilariously domestic. We draped our still-damp gear on the covered porch, took wondrously hot showers, made ourselves a plate of hors d’oeuvres (aka cheese and summer sausage slices), and felt downright fancy having dinner at a table. We absolutely did not enjoy an evening scotch, because no alcohol is allowed in Maryland state parks and that would have been breaking the rules.
It may have been overkill to spend two nights in a row in a real bed, but between the hot showers and the scotch that we totally did not drink in a state park it felt downright luxurious to curl up on a plastic-covered, forest-service-issued mattress.
In addition to waking up in the middle of the night and repeatedly having to dump trapped mice out of the trash can, I woke up in the wee hours feeling like I’d swallowed a sea urchin, aching all over, and barely able to sit up. Steve woke up to me coughing and was moderately concerned until he shone his headlamp into my throat and immediately became very concerned; apparently it also looked like I’d swallowed a sea urchin. After choking down a cocktail of every painkiller we had in our first aid kit, I fell back into a fitful and wheezing sleep with Steve’s hand on my back in the hopes that if I stopped breathing, he’d wake up. (Steve isn’t one to worry about… well, anything, really, so his uneasiness made me more nervous than pretty much anything else on the entire trip.)
Morning was rough. Steve made me choke down two shots of scotch and gargle some Listerine, which made my throat hurt a little less, but I could barely swallow and felt like my head was attached to my body by a very long string. Despite Steve’s assertion that calling off the remainder of the trip and going to the hospital was completely okay, I’m nothing if not stubborn as hell and there was no way I was backing down from the last full day of paddling of the entire excursion. The prospect of canoeing across the Chesapeake Bay was also less daunting than trying to obtain access to health care with questionable insurance and an 18’ canoe in tow… which, for the record, might be a sign that our system’s not in great shape.
Kevin and Denise saw us off, and so began the slog across the Chesapeake Bay into the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Look at us go. We’re basically professionals at this point!
For those of you unfamiliar with the area, this involved a three-mile stretch of open water directly into America’s oldest active military weapons testing facility. Even though there was barely a breeze, the crossing of the Bay was a little unnerving; waves came at us from every direction, meaning Steve had to focus on steering while I provided most of the forward motion. (I’m sorry to say it wasn’t my finest work that day.) However, as unnerving as the Bay was, it was nothing compared to the lush forest forcing its way right to the edge of the beach of the APG that was dotted with large signs warning us not to put to shore because the terrain was littered with unexploded ordnance.
We paddled a fine line between being so far out in the bay the waves caught us and being so close to shore we came within striking distance of a series of small, suspicious buoys that could potentially be marking things that would blow us to smithereens. The bay was completely deserted save for a handful of anchored mid-sized boats that appeared to be marking the shipping lane, and the woods on shore echoed with a discomfiting variety of gunfire. Our normal workplace is located near a good-sized firing range in Vermont, so some of the sounds (machine guns, rifles) were familiar, but periodically the trees were rustled with the thundering PHOOM of something much, much larger. We nervously joked about the prospect of seagulls landing on shore and suddenly evaporating in a cloud of feathers. I hit a new low when I peed in our bailing bucket since we were unable to put to shore. The overall scene was eery- not at all what we’d expected from the area. Every time something exploded, we reassured ourselves that they wouldn’t possibly be firing live rounds over the open waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Surely that would be madness.
We stopped for a snack several miles in, and as we bobbed in the shallows one of the boats in the shipping channel unmoored and came speeding towards us. When the boat turned on its flashing blue and red lights, I completely lost my shit and started laughing uncontrollably. Here we were, floating off an island covered in explosives, me half-delirious with pain and fever, and we were getting pulled over. In a canoe.
As it turned out, they WERE firing live rounds over open water. The boats we had seen marking the shipping channel were actually a security perimeter, and they had let us paddle straight through because they thought we were “swamp weeds”. The officers were more horrified that they missed us than anything, and by the time they’d spotted us we had already cleared the target range.
Oops.
Fully stoked that we hadn’t had to test whether the kevlar of the canoe was bulletproof or not, we paddled onward looking for a place to camp. One island after another revealed “unexploded ordnance” signs and endless fields of poison ivy. Hours passed. I have vague recollections of my 17oz paddle beginning to feel heavy as an iron bar. As the sky darkened, we finally hauled ourselves ashore on Hart Miller Island.
The campsite was beautiful; right on the beach, fire ring, picnic table, and not a trace of other visitors on our entire end of the island. The stunning location was mostly lost on me since I could barely keep my eyes open, but we did enjoy dipping our toes in the surf while watching the sun set.
We set the tent up as far from the water as possible, and battened down the hatches for the impending rainstorm on our last night on the water.
A solid downpour and the waves lapping within a foot of our tent woke us up EARLY. Mad props to my roommate Ilana for answering a frantic 6am phone call asking what time high tide came in the Chesapeake Bay; turns out we juuuuuuust barely scraped by without getting washed away. We went back to sleep for a few hours to try to wait out the wind and rain, and to give me as much downtime as possible to regain some energy before getting back in the boat.
The rain eventually let up, so we balled our wet and sandy gear into our portage packs for one last day of paddling. The departure from Hart-Miller Island was a little sloppy as we tried to force ourselves into the surf, but we managed not to dump the boat and once on open water the conditions were much more pleasant. The paddling was bittersweet; we were wet, cold, covered in sand, and I was still sick as a dog, but the end of our adventure was in sight. As we discussed the depressing process of reintegration into the “front country” (and the list of things that had happened on the river that we could never, ever tell our parents about unless we wanted to instigate a life-threatening cardiac event) the mainland grew ever closer and the “miles to go” number dropped steadily.
That number dropped even faster the moment we rounded the corner of North Point State Park. The wind picked up and suddenly the waves swelled to the point where the crests were over our heads. It was all we could do to balance forward motion with keeping water out of the boat.
At one point we passed a lone duckling, separated from its family, frantically paddling for shore and losing ground; Steve saw my heart melt and yelled something to the tune of “it’s natural selection, which is what I’m going to do to you if you flip this boat trying to save a duck”. (The mental image of that doomed duckling haunts me to this day. Sometimes when we’re drunk Steve likes to bring it up, because he’s an asshole like that, but at least he always concedes that I didn’t dump the boat.)
We made it about a half mile under those conditions before we were forced to accept impending doom if we tried to continue. The Baltimore harbor was just around the next spit of land… and we would undeniably be swamped if we tried to get there. We crash-landed on the shoreline at the edge of the lawn of the last house before the border of the State Park, and unceremoniously dragged Blaze of Glory down their driveway to sit on the curb and call our ride for an early pickup.
Not quite what we were hoping for, but hey- it beats drowning.
The fact that we had made it to within Baltimore County limits wasn’t nearly as comforting as the bottle of whiskey we dug out of my portage pack.
It’s unclear whether this photo says “we’re victorious” or “we’re just completely exhausted and also Emily’s face is all swollen and puffy because she has a raging fever and can’t swallow and also won’t remember this being taken”.
Steve’s dad, the ultimate support driver, came to pick us up and shuttle us back to civilization. After an uncomfortable Olive Garden experience (THEY SAID THE BREADSTICKS WERE ENDLESS!), a lukewarm shower (we didn’t realize the hot water wasn’t turned on), and a long battle with Steve’s mom’s wifi, we had a couple of semi-celebratory Rifton-brewed beers and caught up on three weeks’ worth of John Oliver. Out of sheer determination not to have to re-make any of the beds, we spent the night in sleeping bags on the floor of Steve’s mom’s house watching ‘X-Men’ and trying to find a way to avoid going back to the real world.
If retrieving us from various boat accesses up and down the eastern seaboard hadn’t made him enough of a hero, Steve’s dad came by and made us pancakes for breakfast while we did laundry and shook the last of the sand out of our gear. (Ok, fine, there will be sand in our gear forever, but we tried.)
Smelling a little better than the last time we’d been in her, we reloaded Latoya for the drive north. Despite the bummer of the trip being over, it was very reassuring to see that the frigid brown tundra we had left behind in late April was now a lush green- and to know that we won’t be getting sick of oldies sing-a-longs any time soon.
The original plan was to unload the gear, change clothes, and then reconvene at Burt’s for a welcome-home beer. We’re not good at following plans, though, so we ended up going directly there with the canoe still strapped to the car. Our fellow barflies were somewhat surprised to see us alive.
We toasted the canoe with the first round of beers. The second round was a freebie from friends in honor of surviving. By the third… well, let’s just say there’s already another bad idea in the works.
