history
Narrgansett to Nashville (N2N) May 15-June 19 2012
By S. L. Alligood June 2012
Special to The Tennessean
PICKWICK, Tenn.- When Vic Scoggin was in elementary school, he lived on the shore of Old Hickory Lake, but learned early on that the lake was really a river and that if he slid a jon boat into the main channel that gravity would ease him on the path of least resistance all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
This was the river’s promise. That’s why he fell in love with the Cumberland.
He’s still smitten with flowing water. Some might say obsessed, particularly in light of his latest adventure. On May 15, the Coast Guard licensed captain departed Rhode Island bound for Nashville at the helm of his new boat, an 80-foot, 90-ton vessel named the RV/ Eastern Surveyor. His plan is fairly straightforward: make his boat available as a research vessel for university students, environmental activists, Boy Scout troops, anyone who has an interest in doing research on the Cumberland and the region’s other navigable rivers.
“This is where I want to spend the rest of my life, educating people about the rivers Basically I am motivated by the educational aspect of these rivers and the outdoors and keeping our environment clean,” Scoggin says.
With his wide, slightly lopsided smile, a southern drawl and intense coffee-brown eyes that peer directly into yours when he’s addressing you, Scoggin makes his retirement dream sound easy.
It’s his charm at play. Nothing has been easy. His savings is down by $100,000 plus. On the Atlantic, he nearly lost the Eastern Surveyor to a spitfire of a storm named Beryl. On shore, his 19-year marriage began to unravel as he prepared for this trip, but didn’t.
If he’d known how frustrating, expensive, difficult, and, at times, how dangerous, the journey on this new boat of his would be, Scoggin might have reconsidered, he says.
He smiles. Nah, not really.
The swim
On a hot Sunday afternoon in mid-June, Scoggin stands at the wooden wheel of the RV/ Eastern Surveyor, an 80-foot, 90 ton boat that on this particular afternoon is the largest craft in the water, not counting a towboat pushing barges loaded with shredded scrap metal. He reaches for the handset of the CB radio and hails the lock operator at Pickwick Dam
“Can you give me an ETA on when I might be able to get in?”
About an hour’s wait, he’s told. The towboat has just begun to lock through.
Buying a research vessel is not Scoggin’s first turn at doing the unexpected. At 36, in the summer of 1996, he swam the Cumberland, all 696 miles, from Harlan, Ky., where it originates as a cold, swift mountain stream, to Smithland, Ky., where it unceremoniously empties, broad and slow, into the Ohio River. His swim led to years of activism on the Cumberland’s behalf: protecting an endangered crayfish, raising objections to shoreline developers and promoting the river’s beauty.
Standing at the wheel, with the thrum of the boat’s idling twin Detroit diesel motors in the background and the whine of fast-moving wave runners occasionally circling wide around the boat, Scoggin ruminates about his life to this point.
“I’ve been dreaming of this since I was 7 or 8 years old. When the teacher said raise your hand and tell the class what you want to be, it was an oceanographer,” he says. Scoggin said he later came to understand rivers are where he’s most comfortable.
“They give life. You look around and see all these people out here enjoying it and it gives your sanity back.”
He found the RV/ Eastern Surveyor in Rhode Island about two years ago after searching for a suitable craft in the United States and overseas. The wooden boat, a Navy patrol yard vessel, was originally used to train junior naval officers. Equipped with radar, sonar and other equipment found on much larger ships, the patrol yard vessel would go on two-week training runs with a crew of 10.
“The Navy built it. Two and a half million dollars in 1979. This boat’s never been on these rivers right here. None of them have. They all stayed pretty much on the coast,” says Scoggin, rubbing a spoke on the wheel with his fingers.
“She loves this river,” he says.
Before purchasing it in 2011, the boat was being used by students at the University of Rhode Island. The first time he went aboard was a field trip with students.
“They were doing water sampling and pulling a device behind the boat. So it’s kind of neat that the first time I stepped aboard this thing it was going out to do exactly what I’m going to do right now,” he says.
Rivers are dynamic structures, ever changing, yet, staying the same. Sort of like people, Scoggin notes. He’s not the brash 30-something who, in 1996, told his beautiful blonde bride of one year, Julee, that he was compelled to swim the Cumberland River because he had given breath to his dream by writing it on paper. Staring at his handwriting, he felt destiny calling, he told her.
Scoggin is older and wiser now, wise enough to throw out a lifeline for his marriage when the couple separated for a time about a year ago. His new dream, unlike the swim, pulled them apart. Scoggin doggedly pursued the dream, but realized he couldn’t do it, didn’t want to do it, without Julee.
He appeared at her doorstep with heart in hand and offered to kill the dream if she’d accept him back. They reconciled feelings, him and her, her and the dream, and him with God.
“Faith is what got us here. I can give testament to that,” he says.
Full speed ahead
The light at the Pickwick Lock blinked green. On the river, green means go, too.
Scoggin pushes the throttle forward and the water churns white behind the R/V Eastern Surveyor as it enters the lock, which will lower the boat to the water level below the dam.
“This is the first time we’ve locked down. We came up from the ocean. Now we’re going back down.”
He’s been on the water more than a month, guiding his boat down the eastern seaboard (stopping long enough to take photos of the Statue of Liberty and seek safe harbor from boat swamping swells off the South Carolina coast), skirting around the tip of Florida, curving around the Sunshine State’s panhandle into Mobile Bay, then sliding up the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway to the Tennessee River at Pickwick. The last leg will be through the Barkley Canal at Land Between the Lakes then onto the Cumberland River past Clarksville, Ashland City, and stopping at Nashville.
His only companion has been his brother and one-man crew, Troy.
“I really couldn’t have done it without him.”
The hydraulic elbows of the lock in front of the RV/ Eastern Surveyor open and Scoggin nudges the throttle forward.
“We’re on the home stretch now. I look back where we were two and three weeks ago. I don’t want to be there. I’m glad I’m up here now,” he says.
Soon, he’ll be home, where the real work begins. First, he’s got to finish up his time at Carlex, the former Ford Glass Plant factory, where Scoggins has worked in the powerhouse for nearly three decades. Retirement, he says, will be soon.
“I told Julee the other night that now the hard work starts because I’ve got to go back and try to make this thing at least pay the bills. It’s just another monumental thing that I don’t have any control over,” he says.
“If you get too comfortable you’re not going to see the miracles. I can lay testament again that when you put yourself out there, there’s no training you can do, there’s nothing you can do until you just go out and do it. And you have to do it big. And you will see the awards for your efforts.”
The RV/Eastern Surveyor responds to Scoggin’s push on the throttle. The wind whips the American flag on top of the wheelhouse.
The delighted captain notes his boat has reached a speed of 11.4 knots per hour, the fastest speed of the journey.
“That’s how you make up for some time.”
S. L. Alligood is an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University and is the creator of TennStories, a multimedia approach to telling the story of Tennessee’s people and places.
