Living Water

Savage Gulf , chock full of rivers, streams and waterfalls, is an eight hundred foot deep forested canyon, cut into the South Cumberland Plateau up above Chattanooga, Tennessee. An old Indian trail follows a crack in the rock at the top of the escarpment . Called the Stone Door, ten feet wide and a hundred deep, the crack gives access to the gorge below. I went backpacking there for some solitude and wilderness time last spring. I went in on a Monday and came out on Thursday. I got a couple little sprinkles but, it was right in between the time two bad storms tore through Tennessee, so there was a lot of water, especially the first day.

Coming in through the Stone Door by the Big Creek Gulf Trail ,I turned off on the Connector Trail to camp at Saw Mill at the bottom. Right before the camp site, a hundred foot, swaying, bouncy suspension bridge crossed a roaring Collins River what seem a few feet below the bridge. Two days later I returned to Saw Mill via the old Stagecoach Trail. During that two days I passed three major waterfalls and numerous rushing streams, including a roaring current disappearing into a cave, and I made one scary stream crossing.

The second time I camped at Saw Mill, the rushing stream I got water at was bone dry. I went back up river to the suspension bridge. The former rushing cataract had dropped twenty feet leaving behind small pools among the giant boulders. I climbed down to the bottom to get water where a tiny lone minnow swam in a pool left behind.

It was early in the day. I had camp set up by eleven in the morning. The place where the stream rushed into a cave, without a heavy pack, wasn't that far away, about a mile and a half. With the water down so much I thought I might see what was going on in that cave with the water rushing into it. In my new Keen sandals, a trekking pole lengthened to a staff, a trail map, a water bottle and a baggie with some beef jerky stuffed in my pocket, I set out for a nice walk in the woods following the almost dry stream bed up Collins Gulf.

On my way to the cave I took a side trip up to Schwoon Spring. It was about a quarter mile up an old steep jeep trail. I had seen springs in Wisconsin, a bit of water burbling up out of the ground. Schwoon Spring is different. It makes me think of when Moses touched the rock with his staff. Inside a cave, roaring out of the rock, a gush of water six feet across, fell twenty five feet into a crevasse and disappeared. Lower down on the slope is a sinkhole thirty feet deep. A blast of cool damp air hits you when you climb part way in. Somewhere behind the gloom, deep behind the rock, you can hear water rushing. I had always imagined underground rivers more like water seeping through a sponge. This spring did not fit with my own understanding. Anxious to see what was going on at that other cave, I resumed my journey up Collins gulf.

A half mile uphill, the trail started following a running stream. A half mile after that is where I was headed, the sight of the previously mentioned scary crossing while trying to ford the rushing cataract. There, around Hummer size boulders, the stream split in two, one side rushing head long into a cave. I couldn't see much more than I did two days before. It was still a lot of water pouring into a hole in the ground. I decided at least some underground rivers are just that. Rushing rivers.

Where the streams split I clambered over the rocks and sat on one of the big boulders looking upstream. High sand stone shelves rose along side the banks, the water rushing and spraying and roaring. In the distance small waterfalls stepped down toward me. Here and there water spewed from the sandstone shelves as if the whole land itself was bursting. I sat on my boulder, my feet and legs wet with spray, surrounded by the tumult, eating my beef jerky, washing it down with water I purified out of the same stream. I thought of the tornado producing storms that went through a few days before, and more storms threatening, I knew. I thought how much like God it all was, certainly not tame, nothing your able to hold back. I Thought about the Samaritan woman that Jesus promised streams of living water. I thought of the Holy Spirit, rushing as on the wind.

I pray the Holy Spirit be a river bursting out of my heart and yours.