Days 5 thru 7 - May 25 thru 27 - New River

On Day 5 I spent some time looking around the area from Blacksburg, VA (home of Virginia Tech) north to Pembroke for a place to camp and fish.  By noon I found a nice campground with electrical and water hookups.  A friendly young lady with lots of facial piercings gave me a prime spot in the campground and a free can of coke "from her own stash."  There weren't many campers and they were spread out, but a guy mowing the lawns told me that he was preparing for a full house starting Friday.  He mentioned that Memorial Day weekend was always a busy time.  I had forgotten Memorial Day weekend was coming up - that may cramp my style later in the week.  But for now the setup was perfect.  Camelot's door was situated only fifteen feet or so up the east bank of the New River with long views upstream and downstream.

An elderly gentleman who was camped nearby saw my fishing boats and sauntered over to find out what my plan was.  I told him I was going to throw some tubes (a type of soft plastic lure) using my spinning rod, and he kindly offered me a lure he thought I should try - a type of chartreuse salamander.  I took Elaine (my pontoon boat) for a short float-and-fish jaunt past the campground and tried out the old fellow's gift and several other lures, all to no avail.  The New River is a broad river with lots of structure, but the part of the river close to the campground was featureless in terms of good fish lies, and smallmouth weren't to be found there.

I soon discovered an interesting thing about the land surrounding the New.  Over the millenia, as the Appalachians were crumbling, the river sliced a gently falling south-to-north course through a wide set of ridges, so its banks made a logical place for Americans to build railroad tracks without having to dig long tunnels, and they did.  Frequently throughout the evening long freight trains thundered by the campground, sometimes on both sides of the river at the same time.  The trains were loud, to be sure, but I had reached such a state of relaxation that I quickly fell asleep, and was barely disturbed until early the next morning.

I got off to an early start on Day 6, driving Excalibur back up to Pembroke to the HQ of New River Outdoor Company, where I met up with guide Steve Journell.  Steve hasn't done a lot of fly-fish guiding, but he's fished the river extensively for over 30 years, and we figured that between his knowledge of the river and my experience fly fishing, we'd manage just fine.  And we did.  Although Steve reported that his group had gotten off to a slow start the previous day, we were into fish within the first 15 minutes, and continued to catch them all day behind current breaks, in eddies and along seams.  Smallmouth behave a lot like trout in similar-looking rivers, I soon learned.  They were in the same places eating the same kinds of food.  I tried Steve's spinning rods from time to time, but never had as much success with them as I did with the fly rod - a Sage Smallmouth special.  That's probably a testament to my greater experience fly fishing rather than a comment on the best way to catch fish on the New River.  Here's an example of the kind of quality smallmouth bass that inhabit the New:

If you want to see more, check out this very short (less than one minute) video, which offers a fisherman's-eye view of a smallmouth hook-up in an area where we caught a half dozen or more:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lj-iUxe038.  In this video you can also hear a train whistle - a sound I became very accustomed to.

I was dead tired by the time we got off the river after 7 pm and I drove back to the campground.  I arrived there not a minute too soon because a thunderstorm rolled in.  With lightning crackling all around, often very close, I had little option but to remain inside Camelot.  For a short time I read "Blue Highways," by William Least Heat-Moon, but soon my eyelids were heavy.  The train whistles and the thunder that continued upabated for a few hours were like lullabies to me.  I slept hard until the rain picked up again the next morning.

Day 7 was a travel day.  I decided to aim for the coast of Georgia.  Since I wanted to cover a fair piece of ground and the continuous rain made the side roads sloppy, I used the interstates until I got to Columbia, South Carolina.  The interstate traffic was irritating, as usual, but The Byrds channel on Pandora radio provided relief unil I was about five miles from my exit near the intersection of I-77 and I-26.  I made the mistake of arriving there about 5:30 in the evening.  Apparently half the population of Columbia was headed for the shore to enjoy Memorial Day weekend with all the other Columbians they had thought to escape.  After driving for an hour to complete those torturous last five miles, I saw that eastbound I-26 towards Charleston was backed up as far as the eye could see in both directions.  Fortunately I had already elected to exit on Highway 321, passing through little towns like Gaston and Swansea on the north end, and later Norway and Denmark to the south.  Gaston (or maybe it was Swansea) reminded me to what Tunica, Mississippi looked like when I was child.  A raised railroad track ran through the center of town from end to end, sandwiched between roads paralleling it on both sides (including the one I was on) and long rows of weathered store fronts stretched out along the roads.  Most of the stores were abandoned but I saw one that appeared to be open.  The signs on its windows offered job counseling, job training, and so forth.  I looked around and couldn't see where anyone would find work no matter how well trained he or she was, but maybe the advice being dispensed was to get out of town.  If that were it, I hope the job seekers weren't being pointed at Norway or Denmark, because those towns had also seen better days, and probably never resembled the countries from which their names were derived in any way at any time.

Later, pointed east on another highway, I passed through Bamberg, a much prettier and more prosperous village.  Bamberg had the same basic layout as Gaston, but its railroad track had been replaced by a long, paved path through a narrow park graced with palm trees.  Large, freshly-painted houses stood on well-groomed lawns.  The only thing that marred Bamberg's beauty were the inevitable strip malls and fast food chain restaurants on its outskirts.  I was getting hungry by this time and, failing to see a local joint with any sign of customers, I dropped into a Hardees.  While there I witnessed a black man and a white man, both well past 70, chatting with one another in the manner of long-time friends.  After recently reading troubling depictions of southern bigotry in Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley" and in the aforementioned "Blue Highways," both of which were written decades ago, I was pleased to see the other side of the dichotomy that "yankees" rarely understand or acknowledge.

Tiring of looking for a campground in the rain and descending darkness, I finally stopped at a Super 8 motel a little north of Savannah and checked in.  After the desk clerk looked at my drivers license she advised me I was a "senior" and therefore qualified for a discount, which I happily accepted.  I'm writing this in the Super 8.  I'm about ready to retire for the evening, but I had one last thought about today.  For the entire drive I had a little companion riding on my dash, or sometimes clinging to the inside of my windshield, parading back and forth.  It was a yellow stonefly, and I named him Percival, one of Arthur's knights who sought the Holy Grail.  My little Percival's holy grail is a patch of the New River.  Like the knight Percival, he'll never find it, because now he's in South Carolina.  If he lives until tomorrow, he may finally escape in Georgia.  Looking around at the palmettos and smelling the salty tidal marshes, what will he think?  What will he dream?