SPORTING LIFE

“The Lumbee is a winding stream that gradually increases in breadth as it becomes a noble river.”    — Mid-Winter Canoe Club

John Mills, the unofficial official historian of Pinebluff, recently sent me a clipping of an article published in The Pilot many years ago about a booklet with information about the Mid-Winter Canoe Club, a small canoeing organization with headquarters on Drowning Creek. The booklet, published in 1911, disowned the name of the creek, Drowning, indicating it was an offshoot of superstitions originating with the local population. The correct name of the waterway should be Lumbee, a reference to the Native American tribe that frequented the river and often lived close to the tributary.

“All rivers lead to the sea, but there is no water road to or from the ocean within easy reach of tourists in the sand hills or those who live in the great centers of life and industry along the Atlantic Seaboard, which can be reached so conveniently and traveled so freely in winter as the fascinating course offered by The Lumbee, The Little Pee Dee and The Great Pee Dee Rivers.”

The writer of the booklet went on to describe the waterway as it looked at the turn of the century. “The timber growth along the river is semi-tropical, an unbroken wilderness that has never seen an axe except where the bluffs make into the river (once in six to 10 miles) and serve as landing places or camping grounds. Unusual bathing facilities are afforded on sandy points opposite these bluffs. Gum, cypress, juniper, pine and water oak are the prevailing woods. The green of winter is afforded by the ever-present holly trees, the pale green mistletoe, the bay bush and pine.”

Pinebluff, described as the station south of Pinehurst, served as the headquarters of the Mid-Winter Canoe Club. The president of the club was John Warren Achorn, M.D., who lived in Pinebluff during the winter and in Annisquam, Massachusetts, during the summer months. Levi Packard, of Pinebluff, served as secretary and treasurer. Directors were E.G. Gay, whose home was in Maine; Wayne McNeill, of Wagram; and Dr. Achorn.

It’s pretty clear that the good old boys who headed up the canoe club described the river in a promotional way to influence more folks to locate to the area and take advantage of the pleasures offered by the club. The ad guys at Pinehurst golf courses did the same thing in 1911, pretty successfully I might add, more so than the promoters of the Lumbee.

So that’s how it was in 1911. Later, in more modern times, three of us would have a little different experience on the river.

John Mills, Andy Alcroft and I had spent most of our childhood roaming the woods of the southern part of Moore County, but the swamps of Drowning Creek were off limits. In the early ’50s, Manly Wade Wellman, a good friend of Johnny Mills’ father, wrote a book, The Haunts of Drowning Creek. He even dedicated it to John’s dad. After reading Wellman’s novel, it was hard to keep us off the river.

One summer when all three of us were on break from college and home in Pinebluff, everything came together, and we had ample time to experience what we considered the adventure of a lifetime. The plan was to launch our skiff at the creek bridge between Aberdeen and Laurinburg, follow the creek south until it flowed into the Lumber River, then paddle on down to the Little Pee Dee, which would eventually merge with the Big Pee Dee and then on to our destination, Georgetown, South Carolina, and the mighty Atlantic Ocean.

Our most important tool for the trip was a little 14-foot skiff owned by our friend Cliff Blue. He was glad to lend us the boat and even agreed to pick us up at the end of the trip in Georgetown, but when we asked him to join us he said, “Man, there are things on that river that’ll kill you. You Pinebluff boys have always been a little strange.”

We allowed ourselves about two weeks to complete the trip, and we were cutting it close. Summer was coming to an end, and we would soon have to be back in school.

I remember we had quite an entourage when we shoved off at the bridge on Highway 501. John’s sister had a slumber party at his house the night we loaded all our gear, and the girls wanted to come to the bridge and watch us push off the next day. I was supposedly the expert on swamps and low country river traveling. My grandfather had a house and camp on the Little Pee Dee in South Carolina, and I had spent many summers fishing the sandbars of that river. The Lumbee River was about to teach me how little I knew about Drowning Creek.

We were all decked out in our jungle finery. We had pith helmets on our heads and Bowie knives strapped to our sides. Ernest Hemingway would’ve been proud. We left on a bright Sunday morning. The weather was perfect. We got the skiff off the trailer and launched it into the creek with only minor difficulty. When the boat was fully afloat, we saw there was little freeboard and we’d have to be careful when we hit the big rivers farther south. We pushed off and rounded the bend out of sight of our spectators on the bridge.

Thirty minutes later we came to our first obstacle. Three huge pines lay across the river. This makeshift bridge blocked our way. It was the first of many portages we would make. The boat had to be unloaded, hauled over the pines, and reloaded, a chore we would soon get used to.

Snakes were everywhere. As a matter of fact, they were so numerous we eventually lost our fear of them and adopted a laissez-faire attitude. There were about as many snakes as there were mosquitoes that buzzed around our heads. At one point we were all in the water lifting the boat over a downed tree when a cottonmouth swam right by us. I splashed him with water and he kept on swimming.

The trip was grueling. After sleeping in jungle hammocks, eating C-rations, boiling creek water to drink and about to run out of time, we decided to call a halt to this adventure at the next sign of civilization.

As the crow flies, we probably traveled only 50 or 60 miles, but taking into account the circuitous flow of the water — often we could look over the bank and see the same stretch of river we had just paddled — there’s no telling how far we actually traveled. That was our modern day experience on the Lumbee. I’ll continue calling it Drowning Creek. That name fits it better.

And Cliff Blue, bless his heart, was right when he said, “There are things on that river that’ll kill you.”