An imaginative stretch

By Wesley Houp

The mid-afternoon sun finally breached the cloud-cover as we passed under the tight array of bridges linking Frankfort proper to South Frankfort and satellite communities to the west, and the roar of water over the spillway at Lock 4 rekindled in us all the dreamy exhilaration the summer squall had temporarily neutralized: we would be locking our canoes through the only functional lock on the entire 255-mile mainstream of the Kentucky River.  For paddlers of the otherwise post-navigable Kentucky, such a prospect represented at once a portal to past river-experience forever dead and gone and a shimmer of hope that the future might not be so dismally fragmented for slackwater venturists such as ourselves, that the option of free and open passage the length of the Kentucky might still become a viable reality…again.

Slackwater venturists heed Ricky G's direction while in Lock 4.

After passing Twin Bridges just beyond the mouth of Benson Creek, the gravity of our long-awaited passage set in, and like parishioners on the Sabbath we fell into a solemn line, holding no further confab, our jubilation suddenly constrained, hearts stilled and ready for the lockmaster to deliver sacrament: we would be born again, delivered from this pool to the next without even relinquishing our riverine frames.  There would be no purgatorial portage.  As we neared the upper gate, a figure rose on the bank above the lock-wall and lumbered toward the pit.

“There he is,” I heard Gary mutter behind me. Continue reading »