Without warning, we found ourselves in a monstrous current moving at right angles to the river. Both banks were under water here but you could easily distinguish the thirty foot wide river channel from the fact that the woods was impenetrable on both sides leaving only the river bed itself between the heavy growth. Neither of us mentioned the dire straights we were in, although we both had ample experience to realize the gravity of our predicament. The water came rushing through the woods on the right bank and passed right across before going into a continuous strainer on the left bank. Like a hair comb, water flows through but anything solid is stopped and held. If a swimmer gets caught in a strainer, you would normally extract the body by cutting the debris away on the downstream side until the body floats free. With this dense woods going on and on, your only course of action would be waiting until the water level drops.
The afternoon had begun like so many others in our decades of urban adventures together. I had just returned home from the Coast Guard and we were trying to think of something to do. I don’t recall which of us noted that with the recent heavy rains, the rivers would be up and the resulting strong currents would mean exploring without having to paddle as much. Consulting our maps, we picked a piece of river not mentioned by other canoeists. We decided upon the west fork of the Trinity River between Eagle Mountain Lake and Lake Worth. We left one of our cars parked on Love Circle just across Jacksboro Highway from old Casino Beach. Putting in upstream at the crossing of ten mile bridge road and the old west fork channel, we slid the canoe in along with a gallon of drinking water and pushed off.
For the first hour, it was a narrow-deep channel crossed often by fallen trees. James had just commented on the lack of a strong current here. This surprised us because we had been expecting a strong current due to the weather. The river level was definitely very high, but we had no way of knowing how far the lake backed up into the river channel above at this or any other water level. Sometimes, the relatively still water of a lake backs several miles up a river during heavy rains. We were getting tired of getting out and dragging the canoe over an endless series of log jams when the water current started doing the strangest thing I had ever seen in a river.
There was something unreal and wicked about hissing sound caused by the powerful current driving into the impenetrable brush on our left as we slid along. The narrow way between trees curved constantly so we couldn’t see far ahead. Finally, we hopped out on the right bank in water up to our waists and followed a submerged trail along the non-existent bank. This worked well until we reached the point where the overflow channel dug during the depression by the Works Projects Administration, joined us in the old channel.
Now we knew where the crazy cross-current upstream was coming from. The way was much wider here and the current was at last running parallel to the channel. Feeling the end of the submerged trail, we re-boarded the canoe here and slid silently through the current until reaching the calm waters of what is normally a backwater bog within the nature center. Now and then, we passed through woods where the trees were alive with bugs and other small creatures left stranded by rising waters. We did our best to discourage stowaways.
Paddling between the completely submerged Greer Island and the nature center, our paddles wouldn’t reach the causeway normally connecting the island to the Nature Center. The cloud cover was breaking up just as we slid into the open water of the main body of Lake Worth and within a few minutes we were at the car and loading up the boat.
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