benefit into the mix. The springs are cold, and when the air temperature pushes 100 degrees, nothing’s better than planting your ass in sixty-degree water.
We floated from Cedar Grove back down to the ferry, a distance of eight miles, a four-hour trip. Halfway down the river, we stopped at Maggard’s cabin, a favorite hideout for the James Gang as they were terrorizing the railroads and banks in Missouri. This was the spot where the gang holed up after the Gads Hill train robbery fifty miles from here. The hideout has been restored, and the legend preserved.
We hit Welch Spring, home to the concrete shell of a spooky old abandoned country hospital, a sanitarium established by a doctor who built the monstrosity into a bluff over a cave, hoping to lure sick lungs to gasp for clean, cool, cave air. Long since abandoned by humans, the cave is now home to bats.
Drunken canoeists whine and bitch that the bats shouldn’t be the only mammals allowed in the cave. But ecologists prevail, the delicate bat nurseries thrive, and the bats show their gratitude by eating their weight in bugs every night. Go bats!
Welch Spring explodes onto the river with the force of a hundred hydrants, and the water is bag-shriveling frigid. So when the air temperature and humidity are right, the cold water emerging from underground hits the warming water in the river, and causes a pea soup fog as thick as anything off Nantucket. The phenomenon lasts a good half mile downstream, during which surprised canoeists can’t see beyond their own canoes, and they can only drift, listen to those banjo bullfrogs, and shit their swimsuits.
The cold water of Welch Spring and its wall of fog energized my useful senses as I felt and listened my way downriver to Akers and its real live ferry that keeps Route K continuous. We emerged from the fog and arrived at the ferry crossing in late afternoon, where we emptied our canoes and our trunks and our bladders.
The end of the float brought the same satisfaction that millions of visitors feel each year. The float is not whitewater; novices can complete the journey relatively unscathed. Still, it’s an exhilarating escape from the normal daily grind, escape from TV and texters and tweets.
The ferry is nothing much to look at, a flat barge that can hold three cars, maybe four, although there rarely are more than one or two vehicles waiting on the riverbank at one time, even during rush hour. The barge propels itself using an overhead motor that clutches two cables, one from either side of the river, and reels one cable in as it lets the other out. Erifnus has floated the barge a half dozen times, but she wouldn’t today. She was waiting patiently for me under the shade of a sycamore tree on the fringe of the Akers Ferry campground. And she was ready for the next leg of our wilderness plunge.
Even as I stepped out of my canoe, Branson was calling, for a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed business breakfast early next morning. But the late afternoon sun still allowed enough time to check out another geologic wonder named after Satan.
Devil’s Well is a big stomach, says one of the area’s preeminent geologist-explorers. It’s Mother Nature’s idea of an indoor pool, except that it’s cold and dark and underground and scary as hell, hence the name. It is the world’s most dramatic peek into an underground river, a hundred feet straight down through a hole no wider than a backyard trampoline.
Before the Devil relinquished this well to the National Park Service, visitors could descend into the stomach, er, sinkhole in a bosun’s chair. It was a ride much like the worm experiences when dangled from a fish hook, although the conclusion is less digestive.
On that hot afternoon, I saved a couple of friends. Three of us—Cheryl, Dean and I—walked the steep winding trail down into the sinkhole that drains into Devil’s Well. The sinkhole’s dimensions are such that it would make a perfect sheath for a small tornado, if Satan wanted to store one here. The hole narrows to the size of an inverted forest tower, descending to a platform where we peered over a ledge through a hole that could easily become plugged by an elephant if it fell from the sky into this tiny vortex. A few dozen feet below the hole is the water. The cavern is damn near the size and circumference of the Astrodome, best I can tell. So this hole is the world’s first domed sports facility.
Thanks to well-hung electric lights, we saw the cavern and its pool, which would be the eighth wonder of the world except that it already has a higher ranking as the seventh wonder of Shannon County.
We ascended the staircase out of the hole with the realization that the surrounding terra was not that firma. That was our first unsettling revelation.
Our second unsettling revelation came when Cheryl tried to start her car. Dead battery. Middle of nowhere. No cell phone service, and a gravel road that switchbacked up a steep hill for two miles to the nearest country blacktop. So I started running up the gravel road to find help.
Up the hill, closer to the fringes of the outer beginnings of the path to the edge of civilization, I met a van carrying a vacationing family from Wisconsin, descending into the valley that contains the hole that leads to the Seventh Wonder of Shannon County. Friendly and willing, they provided the jumper cables and the juice to start Cheryl’s car and get us out of the vortex of the Devil.
That evening over homestyle fried chicken at a country cafe called Jason’s Place, among friends whose jobs it is to set tourism lures, we relayed the story of surprise and despair and the kindness of strangers, all within the clutches of the Devil and his well.
Missouri’s Wild Belly
Far back as I can remember, float trips on Ozark streams ended with me riding back home, asleep in the back seat.
Not this time.
After dinner at Jason’s pavilion, I set my sights on driving a hundred miles west, as the crow flies, to Branson. Only one problem: From these razorback ridges and deep ravines, there’s no direct path to Branson, or anywhere. On my highway map I found my current location, halfway between Salem and Eminence and a half inch to the west, at the confluence of several routes that begin and end with K. The map confirmed there was no straight line to Branson. If I wanted to stay on paved roads, the route would require backtracking on an alphabet soup of blacktops and highways, first going in the opposite direction, then south in a sweeping circle that finally turns west toward Branson. Hours of extra driving.
“What Would Magellan Do?” I mumbled to myself.
Magellan and I are kindred spirits. We both let Columbus go first, and do the dirty work, testing the edge of the world and battling sea serpents and scary stuff like that. Magellan and I both like to travel, except that I have better maps, and don’t have a penguin named after me, or the most treacherous strait on the face of the Earth, for that matter, and I wasn’t murdered on my journey, either. Not yet, anyway. Other than that, well, we both put a lot of miles behind us. Oh, and we both had a penchant for finding a new way from point A to point B. Seeing no direct route from here to Branson, I channeled the ghost of Magellan.
And I asked directions.
“Got a shortcut from here to Branson?” I asked Gene Maggard.
“Yep,” he said. His directions were sure as sundown, and not all that complicated, really. But the shortcut used every kind of back road I’d ever imagined. Blacktop. Gravel. Dirt. Low water ford over the river, and a right turn at a one-room schoolhouse.
That much would get me across the river and point me to Raymondville, and save at least an hour.
“But watch for deer,” Gene cautioned. “They’re thick, especially at dusk.”
The deer own this part of the Ozarks, with its dense forests draped over steep valleys. I thanked Gene and started my journey along the narrowest ridge used for a Missouri highway. The ridge’s name? Devil’s Backbone, of course.
It was nine p.m. With a quick check of the gas gauge and a kick of my tire with the slow leak, I took off toward the sun, which was burning the treetops along the horizon. First mile of blacktop, three deer darted across the road. A dozen deer later, deep into the woods, I adopted a tactic most similar to the Indiana bat. Every fifteen seconds, a beep from my car horn bounced off anything with ears. Hopefully, the deer would realize that a car was barreling through