In the Heart of the Chickahominy

by Charles McGuigan 06.1999

This cover story first appeared in June 1999, four years after the founding of NORTH of the JAMES magazine. 

It is a river you want to wrestle one on one like a crocodile in an old Tarzan movie, but a small dagger will never subdue the upper Chickahominy. You need to climb inside it, plod through the heart of its secret interior. It is not the sort of river you can paddle down with leisure. Though the water is flat, it is obstructed, and its spongy shores—swamps a mile wide in some places—flutter and slither and creep with an abundance of hidden life that waits in silence to make its move. It is unlike any other river in all of Virginia. 

I saw the Chickahominy as a salvation of sorts, a way to make sense of the events of the past year, the primary one being a divorce. It was an entire year of uncertainty and inner terror, of grieving and sleepless nights and nameless dread. A time when reality was as horrifying as a nightmare, when dreams no longer offered relief but merely inflamed sore spots in the psyche. Nausea and headaches and seasick giddiness. Save for my daughter and her continued growth and health, it was not the best of times. 

And now it was spring, edging close to summer, and I wanted some of these things put to rest. It was the time of new beginnings even after terrible ends and deep winters. 

So on Shady Grove Road I unlash the canoe from the top of my car and put in just to the west of the bridge to explore the headwaters, nothing more than a trickle surrounded by the towering futility of Wyndham. The water is sluggish and not particularly deep. For the most part I pole my way along with a single paddle. On the north shore grows a stand of jack-in-the-pulpits, flanked on three sides by arrow arums and lizard’s tails. It’s serene, but even this far upstream there is evidence of the most dominant large animals on the Chickahominy— beavers. Their population over the 35 miles stretch of the river that I paddle must be staggering. When I can go no further west I turn around and at the bridge carry the canoe across the road. I make it downstream about a mile but the beaver dams and fallen trees are so thick I turn back and put in on Staples Mill Road. 

Here the water is flat and deep and clear. It has an amber tint to it, and along certain stretches you can see clear to the heavily pebbled bottom. I scoop up a handful of water. It’s the color of weak tea. 

Margo Garcia, professor of environmental engineering at VCU, had told me the water in the Chickahominy, save for two trouble spots—one near Upham Brook and the other near Tyson’s Food—is reasonably clean. She told me this river’s watershed embraces some 300,000 acres, 46,000 of which are in Hanover and 74,000 in Henrico. “It is a fabulously interesting river on all levels,” she said. 

A mile east of Staples Mill the Chickahominy becomes serpentine. It slithers through the flat terrain, winding its way southeast. This is a remote section of the river. There is no development, no hum of traffic. The surrounding woods are alive with insects, frogs and birds. The only two bird calls I can identify are those of a blue jay and a morning dove. In this part of the Chickahominy sound dominates everything, it saturates the air. About 200 different types of birds have been spotted along the Chickahominy. 

“It’s really a productive river,” Bryan Watts had told me. He’s director of the Center for Conservation Biology at William & Mary. “It’s one of the most pristine tributaries of the bay. You can see that in the water bird population.” 

I pass under Route 1, the fall line, and here the river changes. It spreads out somewhat, but on the other side of Meadowbridge it becomes a totally different river. The main channel is hard to keep track of because there are streams that radiate from it like phalanges. And more than once this second day I mistake these lesser streams for the real river. This part of the river is lush. A palpable fecundity electrifies the soil, charges it with life. This is what attracted American Indians centuries ago to its shores—Pamunkeys and Rapidans, but also tribes from as far north as New York and as far west as Ohio. They would winter here, setting up temporary hunting villages. They hunted turkey and deer, fished for snapping turtles and catfish, and harvested hazelnuts and dug the potato-like roots of the tuckahoes, what we call Arrowhead plants today. 

In some ways, for the east coast at any rate, the Chickahominy at that time a sort of Manhattan or ancient Alexandria, at least during the winter. “There is a 12,000 year history along the Chickahominy and its tributaries,” said Dan Mouer, a professor of archaeology at VCU. “All along the margins of the swamps and the confluences of the tributaries there were hunting camps. It is an edge area between the coastal plain and the Piedmont and people have been making and breaking points there for thousands of years.” 

Below Mechanicsville Turnpike the river spreads out even more and there are swamps, some a mile wide, flanking its shores. Diane Dunaway, who works the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, wants people to understand the damage they can do by ignoring the watershed they live in. “Everything that everybody living in the watershed does has an impact,” Dunaway told me. “Think of a watershed as a tree. Creeks and streams are the xylem and phloem that flow down into the trunk of the tree with food and water. And each one of us is a leaf of that tree, gathering sunlight. Everybody needs to believe that their leaf has an impact on the Chickahominy.” 

This part of the river is a vast savannah. Trees killed over the years as the river widened into a swamp stand leafless and colorless like bleached bones. It’s what naturalists and hydrologists call “deadening.” It’s a result of the beavers that have built more than 45 dams and lodges between Meadowbridge and Mechanicsville Turnpike, I counted them, I portaged over them. “Beavers alter the water regimen,” Gary Speiran, of the U.S. Geological Survey, told me. “They’re natural engineers and take advantage of what’s there.” 

The Chickahominy is smorgasbord of fish variety. I’ve caught bass and pickerel, walleye, large mouth bass, catfish, blue gills, pumpkin seeds, herring, shad, carp, even those most primitive of fish called grinnel. But the river teems with smaller fish, some of which are exceedingly rare, including black-banded and blue-spotted sunfish, the swamp fish, a dozen types of minnows and shiners and so on. 

“The Chick is a good habitat,” said Greg Garman, director of the center for environmental studies at VCU. “It’s about as close to a natural coastal river as we can get. As long as we don’t destroy the wetlands and riparian areas we’ll be able to maintain a clean river.” 

Directly to the north of me, somewhere in that quagmire, there is high ground where Chief Powhatan kept his treasures in some 40 longhouses. No one knows quite sure exactly where it was, but it was called Oropax. “We do know that Roanoke beads [trading beads] and food was stored there.” Greg Garman told me. “It’s a very important site and would be a great find. Powhatan had a confederation of chiefdoms and Oropax was the capital of that confederacy.” 

The Chick played an important role in protecting another capital of another confederacy. Union General George MacLellan called it that “confounded Chickahominy” and it served as a sort of moat around Richmond, the crown gem of the Confederacy.

Well below Cold Harbor Road, as I approach the New Kent county line, I decide to better know this inscrutable river. The polyethylene husk of the canoe has kept me untouched by the Chickahominy, so I give myself over to it in a baptism, a dunking, a total immersion. My heart freezes as I hit the water and everything in front of me is the color of strong tea. As I drop deeper something moves past my face—a bass, judging from its length and shape—and then something soft, like the pelt of an animal, touches my calf. I drop in slow motion all the way to the bottom and the only sound is the pulse in my ear. But there is no fear of anything left in me. It is a relief, a lifting of a great weight. This is the thing: The Chick is only the present. There is no leaden past, no unpredictable future. It may be an infusion of ancient Pamunkey wisdom that has silted the river, sifting down through the slow stratas of dark water for a thousand years. The motes now drifting by my eyes may have started their downward journey a thousand years ago like light from a distant star just reaching the cone cells of our eyes after a millennial-long journey. It is the motion of the water itself whose past is too long ago to remember, whose future never seems to come. Not like a tidal river or a fast moving mountain stream. The Chickahominy is filled with present water. I stand confidently on the floor of the river, sinking my heels in. Then something moves under my left foot, and, in a start of panic, I bring both legs up and spring for the surface, frog-like in my movements. Snorting out water through my nose as I break through the surface, I do not get back into the canoe, I simply float there, treading water. I’ve been to the bottom, curled my toes in the primeval ooze, and I’ve earned this time of floating on the surface. As the ripples from my eruption settle down and as the surface calms, the river comes to life. A common water snake passes by, its slowly slithering body forming a perfect metaphor for the river it calls home. It doesn’t even startle me.