The Wolf River

     Urban Stream of Consciousness

By Randy Parker

At our put-in, near the antebellum town of La Grange, Tennessee, the Wolf River looks more like a ditch than a river, its mud banks studded with exposed tree roots. The swift current, however, quickly takes our party, organized by the Wolf River Conservancy, deep into a hardwood bottomland forest. Catalpas, water oak, Tupelo gum, river birch, and sycamores canopy our watery avenue. Small brown water snakes swim out to meet us and then continue to the opposite shore. Large ones as big around as my arm lie coiled on fallen tree trunks. There are cottonmouths, too, we were told. But, thankfully, we never see one.

The Wolf is a 90-mile long shoestring of a stream that begins in the Holly Springs National Forest of North Mississippi and ends in downtown Memphis at the Mississippi River. While it looks extremely wild here in the upper end, this river is the same one whose lower end was once the dumping ground for dead horses and livestock, tannery waste and human slop in the early days of Memphis, and for industrial effluent, including meat packing waste, termiticides and a whole host of other toxic chemicals, more recently. It is the same river that, back in1960, stunk so bad the city diverted its mouth well north of downtown.

As fellow canoers and kayakers wash into strainers or bottom out on submerged logs, my wife and I pass to the front of the pack. We have our share of troubles too. The narrow Wolf has hairpin turns that make navigating a 14-foot tandem kayak seem like driving a tractor-trailer rig through the tight streets of the French Quarter. We thread our boat through slim passages and then back into broader water. Then we all stop and gather at an ominous sign: Ghost River Canoe Trail Entrance.

We enter the Ghost, the most popular section for paddlers, single file through tall grass. The landscape quickly becomes otherworldly, dark, primordial. Giant bald cypress trees tower around us in what appears to be an endless swamp. There is no longer a river to follow, and only the experience of our leader and some blue markers show us the way. We paddle like mad to coax our boat into impossible turns and between trees barely far enough apart to allow passage. I break down my kayak paddle and just used half so I can get between the trees and navigate the invisible knees just below the surface that constantly redirect our boat like a log flume ride. A shrub of some sort steals the sunglasses off my wife's head.

Finally we see bright sun, and we are spit out of the swamp and into Spirit Lake, a sunny and wider part of the river carpeted with fat green leaves and white blooms.

On this day, I realize what the Wolf River is— not just the muddy, channelized stream snaking through Memphis, but a trip through five distinct ecosystems as beautiful and wild as any. I had already heard that it was important, that it replenishes the aquifer from which Memphis draws its drinking water. I already knew of the work accomplished by an impassioned Wolf River Conservancy, quietly buying land along the shore, waging legal fights, organizing paddling trips and leading hikes to the Wolf’s origin at Baker’s Pond in the national forest. But until I actually came and experienced the river, I knew, perhaps, but I did not understand. And it wasn’t until I learned of this seemingly insignificant river’s history did I come to realize the immense role even small streams play.

This is the same Wolf the Chickasaw Indians fished in, the same river slave plantations plied to bring the harvest into town, the same river to which, as late as the 1940s, public swimming beaches attracted the locals, replete with concessions and bath houses.

This is a river worth preserving and protecting. There are urban streams like the Wolf winding through cities all over the country. Their stories run deep and their surfaces are a reflection of us.

As writers have noted for eons, rivers are like time, always running, passing us by. The Wolf is no exception, At the head of the stream, all is new. Water flows pristine out of the ground. Along the way and especially at its mouth, time collects and forms a delta of history comprised of everything from the ruins of a cotton gin to rusty old bedsprings to yesterday’s fast food wrappers.

What happens in between? Between a river’s origin and its confluence with something much bigger?

That’s where we stand. The occasional paddler, the fisherman, the conservationist, the environmentalist, the private landowner, the farmer, the factory owner, and last but not least, the resident who expects to get clean, good tasting water from his tap. We all stand in the gentle current of the present. The question is, what will we all do while we’re here?

I, for one, am going to paddle the entire Wolf. I know where it goes. But I can only guess where it will take me.

MORE ABOUT THE WOLF

A River runs through us An excellent overview of the river and its growing importance to the region.

Ghost River Rentals A good place to rent a boat.

Put-in information from Wolfriver.org:

The put-in for the Ghost River section in on Yager Drive south of LaGrange, TN. From Hwy. 57, turn south on Main Street at the flashing yellow light. This becomes Yager Dr. Drive one mile to the bridge over the river and look for the boat ramp and parking lot to the right. The take-out is 2 miles down Bateman Rd. at Bateman bridge, south of Hwy 57. Bateman Rd. is 2.5 miles east of the Hwy 57/Hwy 76 junction in Moscow, TN, or 6 miles west of Main St. in LaGrange.

The put-in for the Bateman-Moscow section (another popular section of river) is at the Bateman bridge boat ramp. The take-out is at Feemster bridge, where Hwy 57 crosses the Wolf River west of Moscow.

Popular canoe access points in Shelby County include:

Germantown Pkwy. (enter at Walnut Bend Rd. just north of the bridge), Walnut Grove Rd. (enter at the Shelby Farms soccer field parking lot), Kennedy park (park entrance is on Raleigh-LaGrange Rd. between Austin Peay and Covington Pike, canoe ramp 1 mile into the park), and at the north tip of Mud Island where the Wolf meets the Mississippi River.