Santa Fe River Rise

That's it, right there on the left. That's where the Santa Fe River comes out of the ground after tunneling under for some three miles. Supposedly it brings with it a lot more water when it emerges then it has when it goes underground. Such a phenomenon also brings with it apocryphal stories of children getting sucked into the aquifer and then expelled months later, three miles downriver. I realized when I got there that I had been there before and the rise itself was frankly a little anticlimactic.

When I left the house this morning, it might as well have been nighttime--there was no hint of the sunrise and the clouds hung low. By the time I put in at 441, it was not much brighter, but the subdued lighting made everything  hallucinatory. I imagined faces in the shadows of submerged logs and ancient cobwebs in the muted grey-greens of the Spanish Moss. No appreciable difference exists between upstream and downstream here, and yet I imagined that my kayak was sucking down into the water as I approached and came back from River Rise. Perhaps the river really was rising here?

The lack of flow I did not imagine, however, and I tested that hypothesis by reclining for 30 minutes about halfway back. I have figured out that if I prop up one of the wings of my PFD, it serves as an excellent pillow. My boat did not move at all the whole time. I came very close, in fact, to falling asleep before I decided I needed to get back and begin the day the rest of the world was beginning.


The most surprising thing about River Rise was running into a friend, out there in the middle of nowhere, co-working with a co-worker. They know a completely different river than I do, and I felt envious of their knowledge. I paddle in relative ignorance out here, but I must admit that I love discovering the natural world as if I were the first person ever to see it.