Camping at Lock A, Cheatham Dam, This Past Week

 

I have a little photo album of my camping trip to Cheatham Dam Lock A Campground last Monday through Thursday. Well, to clarify...

I had reserved Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights at my bestest favorite campsite up at "Cheatham Lake," really just a wide spot in the mighty Cumberland River. From  HISTORIC CHEATHAM COUNTY TOUR SITES:

               ASSEMBLED AND WRITTEN BY
                     J. M. ALLEN
                        Corresponding Secretary CCHGA
                     FOR THE CHEATHAM COUNTY HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL ASSOCIATION

LOCK "A" & FOX'S BLUFF

CCHGA 3

    Located at the end of Cheatham Dam Road off Highway 12 North in Cheatham County. The Lock was completed and placed in operation November 26, 1904 at a cost of $490, 010 .77. It was 52 feet wide and 280 feet long. lt was erected to control the waters of Harpeth Shoals, a fivemile stretch of the Cumberland River between Ashland City and Clarksvillle which interrupted more steamboat business than all other natural impediments along the navigable course of the river.

    On November 19, 1906 Captain W. T. Hunter became the first Captain on the Cumberland todeliberately "Jump" a Dam with a Steamboat. He accomplished this feat at Lock "A" on the "H. W. Buttorff", while the water was at high level.

    The peak of the cliff overlooking Lock "A" is Fox's Bluff with one of the most scenic and picturesque views of the Cumberland Valley anywhere in the area. It used to be one of the local points of interest for visitors to the area but is now inaccessible due to the area being part of the Camp Grounds at the Cheatham Dam Recreation Area ..

NOTE: SEE: "Steamboating on the Cumberland" by Byrd Douglas

The whole story of the building of the site and the Army Corps of Engineers campsite there is an engaging one, and I recommend more research, and a visit if you are anywhere in striking distance. One of my favorite features is the grove of pecan trees that lines the river, lacing through the campsites and yielding delicious nuts every year, that is if you can time your harvest to beat the squirrels to them.

Anyway, long story short, I got to the campsite in a light drizzle and set up my tent and other gear, spent one rainy night and awoke into a chilly but lovely day riverside. I wanted to hike on Tuesday but the Cumberland River Memorial trail is closed, small bridges and who knows what else having been eradicated by recent heavy rains. So I spent Tuesday chilling in my chair and hammock, for which I had just purchased  a nice, heavy but portable stand, and fishing. Reading and playing mandolin. It was a very lovely relaxing day. Toward the end of the day I checked my Ventusky weather app and was convinced that it was going to start raining at dark and essentially not stop, with at times downpours, for the next three days. I made the difficult decision to pack it up. 

I did that, then I added all my remaining local firewood to the campfire and sat in my camp chair playing mandolin and enjoying the fall light on the Cumberland until the drizzle started to increase in intensity, threw my chair into the car, and headed home. I'm glad I did, since Ventusky had done me a solid. I enjoyed the next couple days as my usual ones, relaxing and painting in our lovely home in The Nations neighborhood of my birth city. 

Here's the few pics I took. One of them yielded a painting subject, and a piece to paraphrase Philip Levine, a long ago mentor at his teaching residency at Vanderbilt, to celebrate the exquisite in the mundane. That will be at my scottmerrick.me site when it is finished, but the photo is in the album. Look for the stone on the ground with a mossy bowl inhabited by a tiny, perfect, plant. Here, click the photo for the album, silly:

November, comin' right up!

 Time's a'flyin'. As I always say, "Time is money and money is time and we ain't got all day."

One of my many bosses at Williams Island Club in North Miami Beach, Florida used to proclaim while stomping his diminutive frame through the about-to-open restaurant, straightening place settings, "It's only a job of work. Get it done!" I was the Club Manager and it never sounded as good in my nondescript Nashville accent as it did in his high-pitched South African one. 

So, I say to me own self this chilly October's end Friday morning, "Get it done."

I performed a proof-of-concept camping road-trip back starting Oct. 17, driving to Montgomery, Texas, that little lake town with its twin city of Conroe, to visit my dear older brother. On the way I stopped outside of Charlotte, TN to have a brief visit with childhood friend John Depriest, after fortuitiously passing his remote house and turning around at the first opportunity to do so. After driving halfway through Arkansas, I camped at Iron Mountain Campground at DeGray Lake, arriving there after 7 hours driving, around dusk, setting up my Oasis tent, sleeping in Casper, my new Kia Soul, on an air mattress in the back, awakening cold and on a deflated air mattress around midnight, blowing it up with the electric pump and pulling it into the tent, turning on a borrowed (thank you, Rocky!) ceramic heater, and awakening snug and warm in my sleeping bag to 36 degree pre-dawn. I broke camp in the dark and headed out to the nearby interstate Cracker Barrel for a big breakfast, only to discover it closed due to an overnight power outage. Around Texarkana, TX the interstate route became obsolete and I hit 300 or so miles of state highways, enjoying the fall colors and everything else about the drive. 

You can thumb through my pics at https://photos.app.goo.gl/E8B3LFXNQWtxJmFeA . It was a good trip in a number of ways, not the least of which was the chance to be with my brother, the other last man standing from our nuclear family, and visiting with old friends along the way. I really enjoyed the drive down to Texas City with Ed and our unproductive but relaxing fishing at "the longest fishing pier in the world," the Texas City Dike.

Fishing at the Texas City Dike

On the way back,  I stopped and had dinner and a spare bed at the home of childhood friend Ross Bandy and his lovely wife Donna. They are retiring together in 2023 and I was able to pass on now-expert advice about this new leg of life, for what it is worth. It's all about scheduliberation, you know. 
Now that I'm back home, I attended my painting class with Master Charles Brindley yesterday and did some more work on my current acrylics project, working from stills from friend Brian Siskind's award winning film, "On the Inside." Here's the film, and you can read more about it at tnstateprisonfilm.com. Thanks to Brian for his permission to screen-grab and paint. 

And here are some snaps of my first OTI painting in progress, on reclaimed 2x12 lumber:

At the very end of class, Charles gave me suggestions for how to approach the bars and I'll be spending the day today on bars, as opposed to in bars, or behind bars, to create the bases for varying washes that will retain the depth of the darkness within the cells and still convey the abandonment of the structure. This'll be fun.

More bars

More bars. I thought about taping for clean lines but the process for building up the negative spaces and tidying up their relationships with the bars is intriguingly meditative. There is much more to do before completion, including fixing that bottom left shadow of open door and thinking about whether the texture for the central open door is what I want.

October? Really?

 Allllllllllrighty, then...

It's early October. I spent some time yesterday putting together a little 41 song playlist of one of my favorite songs, one we covered in Alaska Summer/Summersong back in '77, in The Last Frontier Band in '79, and on the cruise ships in (I think) '81. This new mini-infatuation with listening to versions of songs is made simple by Spotify and I'm having fun with it. If you have Spotify, I suggest listening in the app and sorting it by duration--that way you'll get any remasters/rereleases played back to back for comparison. And there's one lurking in there that's not a cover, but rather a song by the same name. I like to leave those in for fun. Fun fact: the 11+ "The End" Doors masterpiece was included in the search results originally and I almost left it in since in the duration sort it came at the end. Ha.

Listen (might take a moment to load):

 

On other fronts, I had a fun one-night camping experience at Cheatham Lock and Dam last week. I had intended to make it two nights but the first night's low was 46 degrees and the 2nd was predicted to hit 40 and I discovered over a long first night's "sleep" that I needed a little more gear. I have that now, and my upcoming road trip to Texas to see my much-loved bro' will be more comfy camping. It's a 12 hour + drive and I plan to break it up with a night camping at another US Corps of Engineers dam campground. I like dam campgrounds. Dam campgrounds are damn good. Here's the view from the fishing chair outside my new tent. This will soon be a painting.

pano at dusk, cheatham lake (really just a wide spot in the mighty cumberland river)

By the bye, I am loving my painting classes (really an "Open Studio") with Charles Brindley. I learn a little each time I am in the room with him, and the two classes a week for 3 hours duration are perfect. Here are the two pieces, one on canvas on one on upscaled 2x6 discarded lumber, that I most recently completed:

purple vetch, barbed wire, and montana

riders on a piece of brownland farm in franklin

That be all for the mo'. I'm not gonna promise to blog more regularly. Something about scheduliberatedness has made me comfortable with doing it when I do it and not when I don't. You should try it in all kinds of scenarios. It's a dam good thing (sic).