CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/35097
boats can bypass the dams through the locks, which basically work like liquid elevators, but they rarely do. There is no full-time lockkeeper, and the Corps requires at least 48 hours notice. And you can only go through on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. But Mims is a licensed captain whose pontoon cruises are considered commercial, so he’s able to call the lockkeeper and pass through any time he pleases. The locks and dams are good spots to drop a line. “Every freshwater fish that’s native to North Carolina live in this river,” Mims says. Striped and largemouth bass, American Shad, herring, Atlantic sturgeon, bream, and the biggest catfish in the state, some of them weighing in at more than 80 pounds. So I’ve heard. “We saw a gar as long as my leg,” Mims says. His wife thought it was an alligator, a species that also happens to inhabit the river, but the reptiles are confined mostly to the swampy lower stretches of the river, below Elizabethtown. “I’ve seen a hawk swoop down and grab a snake,” Mims says. “I’ve seen deer swim the river. I’ve had people see a bear.” The river may not be raw wilderness, but it has a wild streak about it. REDISCOVERING THE RIVER 38 | July/August • 2011 There is such a thing as loving a place too well; development gone wild would naturally spoil the wild aura of the Cape Fear and ruin the qualities that make it so inviting in the first place. Still, the city which owes its very existence to the river has not much used it as a selling point in recent decades. Many newcomers — and we do get many, courtesy of growth at Fort Bragg — don’t even realize Fayetteville is a city where a river runs through it. Even lifelong residents, like 34-year-old Aaron McDowell, had never been on the Cape Fear until some 15,000 rubber ducks were dumped into the river in May for the first-ever Fayetteville Duck Derby. As it turns out, Freddie Mims was leading boat tours that day, and he had a tide of people pooled up on the dock throughout the afternoon, ready to view the river from his white cushion seats. It seems the river drips with a certain mythic quality among the natives. “Stories of maneating catfish,” McDowell tells me when I ask how he could go 34 years without ever experiencing the Cape Fear. But he was pleasantly surprised, he says, by the scenery, and the history. “It was very entertaining.” Mims would like to have more of Fayetteville’s white-collar community come test the water for themselves. “The people that need to experience the river are the lawyers and doctors, the people who live in Haymount, the people who read CityView, the people who’ve never seen the river but from the bridges,” he says. “They don’t know anything about it.” And you don’t need a boat to get a feel for it. There’s the paved Cape Fear River Trail, which laces 4.2 miles through luxuriant woods along the river’s west bank, roughly paralleling Ramsey Street. It stretches from the Clark Park Nature Center north to the Jordan Soccer Complex. In some spots, with deep ravines and creeks and an understory of mountain laurel, there’s the illusion of being in the mountains. You can also visit the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens off Eastern Boulevard and Arnette Park on Old Wilmington Road, just south of Fayetteville, for walks in the woods and great views of the river. MAKING A BIG SPLASH Make no mistake: The river is hardly ignored by those with rods and reels and ski ropes and sunscreen. Spend a summer afternoon in my riverfront back yard, and the buzzing of boats is about as incessant as the classic summertime