Duck River

I spend quite a bit of time in and around the Duck River. If you've been keeping up with my blog I think you can tell.
I can remember as a kid when it would flood it would just inundate my home town of Shelbyville. We had a floodgate system there that would be pulled up and pumps turned on that would pump the water back over a levee and into the west side of town. I can remember standing at the old bridge below the 1st National Bank building and seeing the west side. It looked like an ocean, as far as you could see. We would also play in the water that had accumulated behind the floodgate. After they built the Normandy Dam the flooding was not near as severe.
After having gotten back on the river in the upper part recently, the thing that strikes me the most is the difference in the river from Bedford County to Centerville and below. The river is much larger in the Hickman County area and the gravel bars and shoals are much more substantial. When we floated and painted in Bedford County it was actually hard to find a gravel bar or shoal to paint on. Even the trees and the growth around the river was much different. There are some massive trees in the Centerville area, especially some of the Sycamores, that we just didn't see in the Bedford County area. But for canoeing there is a constant current that you just can't beat and lots of rock formations and little bluffs everywhere. It is a very beautiful part of the river.
We are very fortunate to have this resource in our state.