Vigo County Public Library

A Hovercraft Adventure by Josh Speer

Weekends filled with camping, spending time with friends and family, a beautiful river to admire, and hovercraft.  Who could ask for a better weekend?  The Wabash River provides many places to explore and pretend you are a kid again.  I have spent a lot of time on the Wabash River doing just that.

I love the outdoors.  Living in Terre Haute, Indiana the Wabash River has always been an interest of mine. One day a friend of mine said to me.  “Why not get a hovercraft?  I love to take mine out on the river.”  So the challenge began.  I rehabbed an older craft to hone my driving skills and enjoy nature and the river.  Every trip was a new adventure.  We have had many day trips that always seem to begin at the ramp at Fairbanks Park in Terre Haute, Indiana.  This is a great place to park and travel up or down the river.  Our favorite trip is to travel north to Clinton.  We always stop and get something to eat at the local Dairy Queen that is located right next to the river. 

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One of my most memorable and well-publicized trips came about when my friend, Dennis came to me with a unique idea. There was no record of anyone ever having traveled the entire length of the Wabash River in a powerboat. The reason is because the Wabash begins as a tiny stream and gains size on its five hundred-mile course to the Ohio River. The first one hundred or so miles are rocky, shallow, and narrow and are difficult to navigate, even in a canoe. An important piece of equipment for a journey would be the right boat. Dennis had already purchased a 17-foot flat-bottom aluminum bass boat, with an inboard jet drive. This would allow operation in very shallow waters. He then had a canvas cabin built on the boat for weather protection. We began serious planning of what we came to call the “Wabash 500.”

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(This poem is actually about the Eel River in Clay County, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to submit it. I also don’t live in Vigo County anymore, but I wanted to participate anyway.)

There is poetry in this river.

Ghosts of spoken word, dating back to the time when open mics were voices of Piankeshaw Indians echoing in wide open banks, are still whispering in the current that trickles over fallen logs.

When the river’s low in the summer, metaphors in mussel shells wash up on the sandbar, and I can pick them up to draw inspiration from their pearly sheen.

Each grain of sand is part of someone’s footprints. They snuggled together in the tracks of raccoons grasping at minnows. They lay behind Daniel Harris as he forged new trails along the river with his Indian guide. And the river continues to push these grains of sand, rolling them little by little under the skeleton of a trestle that once carried the Evansville and Indianapolis Railroad over its waters. The passengers and their baggage fade away like the decaying concrete pylons, but the thick-trunked trees that flank the bank can still remember the roar of steam engines, and they try to recite the engineers’ verses in the leaves they drop each fall.

There is poetry in this river. Sometimes the only ones to hear it are the catfish and the water striders, but sometimes it can be heard by children swimming under Feeder Dam Bridge, if they listen closely to the splashes they make, because they’re the same splashes made by pioneer children when the bridge was new and horse hooves clip-clopped above.

Rusty language of farmers who plowed the land flakes from the steel I-beams and falls into the river below as evidence they once crossed here. They wove their literary works into fields of corn and wheat on both sides, and they built limericks as they built levees to protect them.

There is poetry in this river. People paddle through in haiku canoes and each person has a verse or two.

Fishermen reel in lines of rhyme that flow through the mud veins of catfish who filter it off the bottom.

Poetry is in this river, and it winds through Clay County. It serves as inspiration for the country folk who wade in and take the time to listen, for they are leaving their poems in the river, too.