This story caught my eye this morning:
ST. LOUIS – They may be a right of passage, but beer kegs, beer bongs and “dry ice bombs” will not be tolerated on the Current and Jacks Fork rivers, the National Park Service said Tuesday in announcing a crackdown on drunken, rowdy behavior on the federally protected streams.
Noel Poe, superintendent of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways in south central Missouri, said he will sign new regulations Wednesday that will take effect May 1.
The new rules are aimed at halting public drunkenness, illegal drug use, fighting, public nudity, littering, profanity, loud music and other “obnoxious behavior” that park rangers have struggled to control the past few years along the rivers’ 134 miles, Poe said.
A minority of river users are causing the problems, he said, mostly 20- and 30-year-olds coming to the rivers on weekends “to let off steam.”
“But family groups, Boy Scouts, church groups and other users have been driven out of here,” he said. ” … We want to get the message out to the public and to our visitors that this isn’t going to be tolerated. We will do our best to enforce it.”
It sounds like this is long overdue but, unfortunately, the key will probably be enforcement. You can have a kegger in any basement; there’s no need to go to the river to do it. But you can only enjoy the peace and quiet of the river, the beauty of the scenery, and the experience of floating these great streams on the river. Presumably, the rowdies go to the river to escape supervision.
Some of my happiest memories are of floating the Jack’s Fork and Current Rivers. I can remember paddling around in a john boat on the river when I was scarcely out of diapers and I’ve floated from the shallowest put-in point on the Jack’s Fork where the stream was only a few feet wide to the point where the Current joins the Mississippi dozens, maybe scores of times. I used to know the rivers like the back of my hand.
Maybe I’ll dig out and post some of the forty year old (or even hundred year old) pictures of the river I have.
No doubt things have changed enormously since then. Signs of he times.
Even twenty years ago it was well known that if you didn’t want to contend with a bunch of drunken yahoos you didn’t float the Jacks Fork or the Current. You could usually get a day in on the Black or Upper Meramac without many morons, but not the nicer more southern rivers. (Of course if you wanted almost complete privacy there was always the Huzzah or the Courteois (sp?))
Nice to see they are finally doing something. Hopefully they wont go overboard and fine everyone who brings a six pack in their canoe.