Rain Day Canoe and the Hunt for an Elusive Big Screen...

Me and Mary went on another of our duck hunting trips. We may have to call it something else because while ducking hunting this year no ducks have been harmed. We did have some fun and found a great creek to canoe on. 

I have often enter Pophers Creek from Sam Rayburn Lake and it's a great fishing area. I have not been down there lately but I bet that area is clogged with the invasive species Giant Salvinia.  We launched at the bridge crossing FM 2021 and first headed down the creek and is was not long before we ran into some sparse floating mats but as the flood waters of the lake spread out over the banks we headed upstream and away from it as I was not sure ducks would find good open landing surfaces. 

Here is someone's old camp catfish. It's a tarp and some other framework from a primitive camp campsite. It's flooded and hard to tell when last used. 

Mary stalks up on an elusive big screen. It s is a good way down the creek and we sighted it not far from the dorm room sized refrigerator ( I did not make a photo, my hobby is photos of abandoned TVs) floating all white and pure against the dreary winter landscape. These items were located just past the various ice chest parts (may be with the high dollar Yeti Coolers people won't loose the lids so often) that were stranded by the current against every log jam. I don't know how these items got here but it could not have been real easy. As a public service I announce there are quality recycling services available from the City of Lufkin and the unloading of unwanted items is much easier than hauling it down this creek. Who is alive right now that does not know littering is bad? 

By the way as long as I am raving this creek is named after a native American Chief Popher. I was familiar with the legend and it is documented in Bob Bowman's book "Land of the Little Angel" that the Chief's son was convicted of murder by white settlers. The son fled. Popher offered himself in the son's place and the settlers were just as happy to hang one Indian as another so somewhere along this creek I imagine the Chief's unsettled spirit drifting through the pine woods troubled by injustice and every now and then saying to himself "and just how in the hell did that TV get there?"

Heading up creek. Nice high banks and rolling terrain makes for an interesting trip. I just knew we would find some wood ducks on the creek but as it often is with duck hunting I am here, they are there.   

We squeezed through a few log jams and actually Mary got out on this log and pulled me and the boat around one end and over the log. Mary the muscle! 

Every so often along our paddle back (the Texas State Historical Commission list the creek as three miles long to the lake) I spotted a green switch cane stalk floating in the water. I did not remember those on the way up. With recent big foot sightings in Rusk County those canes looked chewed to me.   

Big foot, the ghost of Chief Popher, rain, cold, no ducks. Let's head home.