Wednesday, January 17, 2001

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

If he said it once, he said it a dozen times during the ten weeks we spent on the Tennessee River and its tributaries in the spring and fall of 2000: "All those years I was driving 300 miles south to sail when this was only 200 miles north!"

Since 1971, Dave had moved his boat farther and farther south to sail the bays and the Gulf off Pensacola and Panama City. He loved it, but was frustrated by distance and the cost of marinas and salt-water maintenance.

Now the skipper of a small trawler and no longer restricted by mast height and keel depth, he has discovered the broad, eminently sail-able lakes formed by the dams on the Tennessee system.

River-boating is not without its challenges. One evening on the Clinch, a tributary to the Tennessee, I sat in the bow watching twilight lower, and realized that what was lowering was the river. A mud beach appeared where trees had been dragging branches in the water a half hour before. A stob I thought was a turtle rose out of the water and showed itself to be the top of a post.

I made mental notes of how near the edge I was seeing logs, to compare with later observations. It didn't seem to be worsening, so I let Dave continue his nap. The last depth I had called out to him as we were anchoring was six feet-six inches. That meant we could afford to lose almost five more feet before the boat would hit bottom.

Earlier, when we went in to bathe, we discovered that the current was very swift. Hadn't seemed so, motoring upstream, but we put the ladder over the side and nearly lost it as Dave hung onto it while washing. For safety, we tied one of the white fenders to the gunwale and also dropped overboard a 25-foot line cleated to the stern.

It took a while before we could lower all our, er, sensitive parts into the river. (Why did the words "death's cold, sullen stream" come to mind?) It was a formidable current. Dave's a much stronger swimmer than I, and even he did not dare let loose the rope.

When it was my turn, I held fast to the line and let the water carry me flat out behind the boat. It felt as though the boat was no longer anchored, but speeding up river. Yet now the water around us was turgid, and still dropping.

When I heard Dave stir, I told him what I'd observed. He checked the instruments and found we now had only four feet-seven inches beneath us. We debated moving farther out into the river, but it was nearly dark and that seemed risky too. So we set the depth sounder and went to bed.

When we got up in the night, the boat rocked underfoot, telling us it was still afloat, and in the morning, with the gauge reading 5.2 feet, we had water aplenty to start our day's cruise.

Apparently, the swift current and loss of water were caused by their letting water out at Watt's Bar dam, about 50 miles downstream on the Tennessee, drawing down the rest of the system. The river required at least a day to come back to its customary level.

Much as we enjoyed these unfamiliar waters, we were troubled by what appears to us to be the Tennessee Valley Authority's failure to protect them as vigilantly as does the Corps of Engineers in Georgia. Corps lakes do not even allow private ownership to the waterline, but in Tennessee we saw building and clear-cutting and erosion to the river's edge.

These are beautiful lakes; not surprisingly, the banks of the Little Tennessee and the Tellico rivers are filling up with houses. We saw one lot priced at $340,000. Believe me, many of the houses along the water are works of art, obviously the product of much study, designed for maximum views and usable water frontage.

Most appear to have evolved like this: A family purchases property and builds a boat house and dock for weekend use. Eventually they build the house, add decks, stairways or perhaps a boat ramp down to the boat house, and then upgrade the boat house to match the residence. We saw boat houses easily larger and worth more than our Peachtree City house.

In many cases, those that sit high on these steep embankments have left most of the trees, all the rock they found, and added mass low plantings to hold the earth. Several times we saw what looked like acres of daylilies, with golden faces turned toward the morning sun. We also saw spectacular rock gardens, azaleas, roses and ornamentals cascading over the boulders.

But too often the homeowner or developer has cut every tree between his high perch and the water line, and in some cases even, it appears, dug out those pesky boulders and plowed up the rocky earth in an effort to plant a lawn. The red-clay gash these properties rip into the river's bank is nothing less than obscene. Like the excessive houses often built on them, they symbolize arrogance and disregard for the health of the river, hence the land.

It need not be thus. We passed several high-density projects town houses, an assisted living facility that hugged the uneven embankment, curving into the curves of the hillside, planted densely to enhance both view and soil stability. If they could do it, so could an individual homeowner.

A river belongs to all of us.

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