The Pamunkey River: Sweet, Sinuous, Southern

by Charles McGuigan 2005

We are creatures of flight. Always have been. Always will be. I think it’s a remnant of the persistent evolution that pulsates through every cell of our being, motivating change whether we will it or not. We run from some thing or to some thing, but are never truly sedentary, unless we choose the life of the walking dead.

Which brings me

to the Pamunkey River—sweet, sinu-ous, Southern stream—always running from its mountain sources, impatient to pad across the Piedmont, anxious to rejoin the Mother of All Waters, to become one with the tidal bursts of the Chesapeake Bay and the swell of the Atlantic. 

Unlike other rivers in Virginia’s coastal plain, the Pamunkey is tidal even from its origin at the confluence of the North and South Anna Rivers six miles east of the fall line. It runs to something and away from something twice a day, reversing its own course, flowing downward with its past and relishing the present, which is a jumble of what was and what is to come. That’s why I suspect the Pamunkey is some-how always at peace with itself. There is balance in its time continuum.

We put in on the South Anna just below Ashland Roller Mills. At nine in the morning, the temperature’s already eighty, and the humidity so thick you could carve it with a buck knife. 

Here the water is clear, the bottom sandy and the fish plentiful. To our right bluffs of crumbling granite rise about thirty feet above the water. These bluffs are pocked with caves.  

A desperate night ten years ago, six months after my father’s death, I stood on those bluffs, howling at the moon until my lungs seemed they would rupture. I sang songs that stretched my vocal chords like rubber bands, and danced along the crumbling granite precipice, a madman in the moonlight, tripping over the roots of the giant mountain lau-rels, crushing wild ginger under my bare feet. I tipped back a flask of bourbon, downed it in my father’s memory, felt lighter than air and could easily have defied gravity, if I had so chosen. That went on until two in the morning, when I finally clawed my way down along the rock face and found a cave where I slept till first light. 

When I woke fog lifted off the water like smoke. I was chilled from the night, but the knowledge of water beneath the haze below magnetized me. I dropped like a cannonball from the mouth of the cave and crashed through the surface, almost touching bottom, then bounded up like a bobber, and was swiftly swept downstream to a sand beach. 

Later that same morning I caught a two-pound small mouth bass. I honored that fish, prayed over it, sliced through its gills with a fillet knife, severed its head, sliced it from anal fin upward and scraped away the congealing viscera. I built a fire in the cave, a fire of crackling leaves and dried limbs and green branches of mountain laurel that smelled sweet as they smoldered. I held the fish on a forked branch over the flames and cooked it slowly then ate it using my fingers as utensils. No butter, no salt. Just fish, mountain laurel essence, the water of the river, and a slug of charcoal-flavored bourbon. That night, back home, I slept more soundly than I had in six months.

As the canoe clears the palisades, a creek, raging with waterfalls, empties into the South Anna. Here there’s a strong current and it easily carries us downstream, beneath the giant arches of a stone railroad trestle. 

The banks suddenly disappear into flat shorelines and the river picks up speed. Round a bend we are spilled into the Pamunkey. 

The water from here on down is murky. Fish constantly hit the surface feeding on unfortunate insects as we pull the canoe up onto a wide beach. We eat and drink, our bodies basting in sweat under the baking sun.

Further downstream bluffs again dominate the southern shore. They are made of blue marl and speckled with the white fossil remains of mollusks. We put in to shore and trod across the spongy, clay soil, and I hunker down near an area of wash that is scattered with whole shells, primarily Turritella, spiral cones about two inches long. They were deposited here 14 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch, when this entire region of Virginia was under water.

The next day, just below my put in at 301 I see scores of birds. A great blue heron glides in front of me, showing me the way downstream. I see blue buntings, goldfinches and a lone kingfisher. I watch red-throated hummingbirds, five of them, dart among a tangle of trumpet vines, thrusting their needle-like bills into the flowers. They fly backwards, for-ward, hover, their wings beating so quickly you can’t see them, like the spinning blade of an electric fan. When they leave, they are gone like a shot, but I see where they alight on the low branch of a fallen sycamore. A dragonfly, about the same size of the birds, joins them, and the dragonfly keeps moving closer to one of them as if it thinks the bird is one of its own. The hummingbird slashes its beak at the dragonfly, but the dragonfly keeps coming back.

Below Normans Bridge I come upon a clearing and see a small herd of deer, and as soon as they’re aware of me they bound for the ring of hardwoods that form a crescent on this open field. 

Further downstream, the tide becomes more noticeable. The river is sucking the canoe ever eastward. You can feel the tug of history in the water here, and soon I pass along the land that was once Hanovertown. Back in the early 1700’s this town, and another one just to the southeast, were two of the busiest ports in the Commonwealth. 

Virtually all land in Central Virginia at that time was committed to tobacco farming. Tall ships made the journey up the Pamunkey to Newcastle and Hanovertown to unload their cargoes and then fill their holds with hogsheads of tobacco for the return trip to Mother England. The towns were heavily populated by the standards of the day, and brimmed with houses and warehouses and bustling docks.

Today, there’s not a trace of either one of these towns. Deep water made it possible for ships to make their way this far inland. What drew the ships in were the tobacco farms, which is exactly what did the Pamunkey in, and what wrote the obituaries for both Colonial towns. Over the years, soil from the farms washed into the Pamunkey, silting it in. The depth was then so shallow no ship could make the passage. And so the towns that had once flourished on its banks now withered with the depleted topsoil.

Downriver, just below Mechanicsville Turnpike, I pad-dle over to a landing at Broaddus Flats. This was the site of Newcastle Town. A week before I had taken my daughter Catherine Rose here to interview the owner of this land, Frances Broaddus-Crutchfield. She is a good steward of land and river, and has been embroiled in a battle with Hanover County for years now, a battle which the county seems to have won. Even as we spoke on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in July the county pumped waste water effluent into the river from the Broaddus land. 

What will eventually happen to the river is anyone’s guess. But some have already noticed a decrease in the num-ber of bass in the area below Broaddus Flats. 

Just below Broaddus Flats the river widens. Here the tide rises and falls three feet. I ride with the outgoing tide and am clipping along at about four knots. There are vast swamps on both shores and the water covered with pickerel weed and spatterdock. 

At my take out point in New Kent, I consider the Pamunkey tribe. True stewards of their namesake river, way back in 1918, the Pamunkeys, who had noticed a sharp decline in the shad population, created a fish hatchery. It was part of their cultural psyche, giving back more than they had taken. 

I wasn’t able to take my son for a sampling of the Pamunkey, he’s still pretty young, four years old, and doesn’t swim a lick. But one afternoon after my trip we watched storm clouds scuttle in from the west carrying with them a long-over-due, liquid promise. We walked through the rain. Alongside our house Charles spotted the canoe lashed to the roof of my Volvo wagon. 

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a canoe.” 

He looked perplexed.

“A boat,” I said.

“A boat on the water, Daddy?”

“That’s right.”

We waded in the stream that flowed along the gutter. I could feel sand and grit beneath my feet and the tug of a small current. The rain fell steadily and the water rose to well above my ankles. 

I lifted Charles onto the sidewalk and told him to wait. He began stomping his feet in a puddle, splashing himself. A moment later, I was gently tugging the bitter ends of slippery reef knots and the nylon lines, like magic, with that single pull, came free. I found the center of the canoe, slid it off the luggage rack and carried it toward the gutter like a hermit crab lugging its own home. There was enough water in the gutter to float the canoe. Charles watched me then stated the impossible, “Daddy, I want to hold you.” Which means just the opposite. 

I carried him to the canoe, climbed over the gunwale, settled into the seat aft and nestled Charles between my legs. The canoe began to move with both of us aboard. It moved slowly, but Charles was aware of the motion.

“We’re going,” he said.

“We’re canoeing.”

“I’m on the boat,” said Charles.

We continued to explore that mysterious river, all seventy-five feet of it, until we came to the corner and ran aground near the sewer intake. And then we did it again and again, until the rain stopped and the river ran dry.