A Journey Down Twelve Mile Bayou

Shreveport, La - I’m always up for a little adventure. Last year, my roommates Matt and Jonathan decided to go on an excursion down a body of water here called Twelve Mile Bayou.

The Bayou is frought with history. Back in the early 19th Century, the Red River near Shreveport was blocked by a giant raft of timber. The river blockage was HUGE, measuring nearly eighty miles in length. It was also reported to have been blocking the river for more than three hundred years, if you can imagine. The blockage acted as a dam and the water behind it backed up so immensely it created several very large lakes. Twelve Mile Bayou served as a waterway between the Red River and one of those lakes.

The Great Raft (as it was known) was a pain in the butt for almost everyone because it blocked river commerce. There were ways to needle your way around the blockage, but it involved picking your way through Twelve Mile Bayou and was usually complicated and annoying. Then a military Captain named Henry Shreve (you guessed it) successfully dislodged the Great Raft with great difficulty, and the Red River began flowing again. Afterward, many of the lakes behind the dam dried up leaving only remnants of the many waterways that once proliferated behind it. Later, during the Civil War, Twelve Mile Bayou was used by military forces and even in the late 19th Century the Bayou was frequented by steamboats.

The first time I traveled Twelve Mile Bayou, we were in the wrong kind of boat and it took us nearly ten miserable hours to get back to Hamel Park on the Red River where we parked our truck.

Last week, Donna and I went down the bayou again, me for the second time and her for the first time. This time we took a kayak. Oddly enough, the stretch that took us about eight hours last time only took three and a half in a kayak. Every time I kayak a body of water, I like to ponder the history of people that have boated or paddled the water before me. It’s easy to get lost in the modern considerations of speed boats and cell phones and digital cameras. But if you only pause for a moment, it’s not hard to imagine what the land looked like a hundred or two hundred years before. To me, that’s what kayaking is about.

We had borrowed the kayak from our new friend Brian here in Shreveport. Believe it or not, Brian and his brother have kayaked the Mississippi River in it’s entirety from Lake Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. His brother actually paddled upriver on the Red River back to Shreveport and the local news station KTBS did a story about him. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2bqN_ntSMY&feature=player_embedded)

I will not be kayaking the Mississippi River anytime soon, but after one day on the water, I can’t even imagine what three months would be like. I have always been an outdoorsman so I would not be afraid of the technicality of the trip and the camping. And I supposed physically you would adapt. However, I think what would challenge any man on a trip of that size and magnitude would be the seemingly endless nature of it. That could wear on any man after a while. People like Lewis and Clark really amaze me when I think about stuff like that.

At the end of our short journey I dropped Donna off at her car. The mouth of Twelve Mile Bayou is very conveniently right next to the Samstown Casino parking garage in downtown Shreveport. I continued on into the Red River and Donna picked me up about an hour down river at Hamel Park. A lake wind advisory had been issued by the National Weather Service and let me just say I have a very practical real-world application of the phrase “lake wind advisory.” The river had white caps on it which, at first, were a little intimidating, but gradually grew to be more fun as I faced them headfirst.

All in all it was a successful day. In all honestly, I think a four or five day trip would be more worth the trouble of obtaining and moving the kayak. I have my sights set on a four day trip down the Red River from Dension, Texas back to Shreveport. Perhaps someday soon!

That’s the story of my life…