As a seasonal resident along the Allegheny River for over 40 years, first as a cabin renter, then as the owner of a RV, and now as a cabin owner, I’ve taken innumerable canoe and kayak trips on the river.

Inevitably, there have been a number of trying times during these excursions. Some have been caused by the violent summer thunderstorms which will occasional sweep up the river, necessitating a retreat from the river and a soggy wait on the shore or on an island until the tempest has passed. Once lightning struck a tree so close to where my wife and I and two close relatives from Erie (on their first trip on river) waited that we could smell the smoke from the strike.

On one late spring trip down the river south of Tidioute with other members of the Allegheny Outdoor Club, I had to drop my wife off at a shoreline community due to an impossible headwind and switch to rowing the canoe on to Tionesta instead of paddling. (My canoe has a center rowing seat.) But then I drove up the west side of the river from Tionesta I had a very difficult time in finding the exact cottage where I had left Judith. She still recalls her long shoreline wait amid the chorus of seasonal mating calls by toads.

But perhaps the kayak trip I took down the river from the dam to Point Park almost two years ago had the strangest and most ignominious ending of all the river trips I have taken. It was another lesson to me of the perils outdoor lovers can face due to bad luck, or the vagaries of nature.

There were a host of canoers and kayakers at the boat launch below the twin plumes of water spewing from the Kinzua Dam early in the afternoon of Aug. 23, 2015 as most of the boaters prepared to run the Allegheny River for about seven miles from the dam to the Allegheny Outfitters livery near Warren’s Glade Bridge, where they had rented their canoes or kayaks and had them hauled up to the launch.

This stretch of the river is one of the most popular with canoeists and kayakers as the distance makes for a decent workout but not a too strenuous one (unless there is stiff breeze sweeping up the river) and the river is translucent throughout the trip as the dam’s discharge waters are very clean since that portion of the river is without any large sediment-bearing tributaries. It is included in the 86.6 miles of the middle portion of the Allegheny River that are part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers system.

The south shore of this river segment borders the 513,000-acre Allegheny National Forest, while there are cottages on private property on the opposite bank.

The group I was with, 9 other members of the outdoor club in 7 kayaks besides my 14-foot Dagger and one canoe planned to go about two miles beyond Glade Bridge, to Point Park in Warren, which is located at the mouth of Conawango Creek which drains a large area of agricultural land to the north and is apt to make the river a little more turbid after its entry, given the amount of sediment it often carries.

French explorers used the Conawango when they entered the area from the north in the 17th Century. They called the Allegheny “La Belle Riviere,” and those who frequent the river today would undoubtedly agree with this assessment.

The enduring quality of the river is reflected in that the U.S. Canoe Association often chooses Warren to host its National Canoe and Kayak Championship races on 16 adjacent river miles.

I was not aware of it at the time, and I venture that most of the others who were about to enjoy the river that beautiful late August day weren’t either, but 2015 was the Kinzua Dam’s 50th anniversary year. It was completed in 1965 after five years of construction which followed a siting dispute which was settled by President John F. Kennedy. The dam resulted in the displacement of nearly 700 Seneca Indians and the flooding of 10,000 fertile acres of their reservation.

One of the largest dams in the East, the Kinzua Dam is 179 feet high and 1,877 feet long. The hydroelectric power generated there is sent to Pittsburgh. The Kinzua is one of 16 large flood control reservoirs in the Pittsburgh District of the Army Corps of Engineers. The others are located on tributaries of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers.

The impetus for their construction came with the St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936 in which over 150 died (including 45 in Pittsburgh) and which idled Pittsburgh’s steel mills.

The Seneca Indians who lived on a reservation upriver from the present “Big Bend” site of the dam opposed its construction as it would submerge one -third of their land. They proposed an alternate site for the dam which would have left their river valley land intact. They contended that the Treaty of Canandaigua (or Pickering) which was signed by President George Washington and the Seneca chief Cornplanter in 1794 guaranteed the inviolability of their reservation. It was the nation’s oldest treaty still in force.

The Indians vs. feds dispute has retained a prominent niche in local lore, and until relatively recently the Warren radio station WRRN, would occasionally play Johnny Cash’s mournful and bitter ents ballad “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow.” (The title refers to the promised tenure of the accord with the Senecas). In the lyrics, Cash laments that the dam will flood Indian graves including that of Cornplanter, (“Cornplanter, can you swim?” he intones) and he refers to the reservoir behind the dam (which now runs some 25 miles up into New Yok State) as “Lake Perfidy.” (Cornplanter’s grave was relocated.)

In the ballad, Cash laments that an expert the Senecas hired “showed them another site and showed them another way” other than throwing up a dam across the Allegheny, but that the “U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said no, the Kinzua Dam is here to stay.”

Cash was referring to the “Conewango Plan” devised by Dr. Arthur Morgan, one of the nation’s most respected civil engineers, to divert the floodwaters to Lake Erie. Opponents of the dam argued that the plan would have saved the government millions of dollars and preserved the integrity of the Seneca community and preserved the country’s honor.

In compensation for the loss of their Allegheny Valley land, 305 acres were added to their reservation to the north

Aside from flood control (it is said that the dam’s $108 million cost was paid for more than once over in the $247 million in damages it prevented downstream during 1972’s Hurricane Agnes and that it has prevented $1 billion in property loss), the Kinzua Dam also guarantees that there will always be at least a modest flow of water in the Allegheny, even in very dry summers.

The National Weather Service said that 2015 had been a rather dry year through mid-August, with the accumulated precipitation in western Pennsylvania some 8 inches below normal. The outflow from the dam that August day I and the other the AOC members went down the river was only about 1,200 cubic feet per second, according to figures in the Times Observer, which publishes river data daily.

The highest amount released in the past few years that I have noticed was between 18 and 19,000 cubic feet per second in the late spring of 2014. (A river “old timer”, who owns a cabin on the river next to the one my wife and I have 8 miles north of Tidioute at Althom, said he hadn’t seen the river that high “since Agnes.” )

Contrary to what one might think, when the river is low it can be more difficult to navigate in a small boat than when it is high. There are more semi-submerged rocks to run into and shallows on which to run aground, and the low water accentuates the rapids. When the river is high, the placid travel is smooth, but in a deceptive way as capsizing can be more dangerous.

My kayak trip down the river that day with the other outdoor club members was quite pleasant and scenic, with one exception: the low state of the river accentuated the “rooster tail” rapids that run for a short distance opposite the southern end of the United Refinery complex, which extends for a mile or more along the river at the eastern end of Warren.

All in our party got through the rapids without mishap, but the river’s turmoil resulted in a very sad conclusion for me of that day’s outing.

After we arrived at Point Park and hauled our craft up from the river, I couldn’t find my car key which was on a ring with a house key. I always place the keys in the aft compartment of the kayak along with a change of clothing and my street shoes.

After a long spate of frantic searching I finally followed up on the offer by another kayaker, Bob Gregersen, to drive me up to the dam to look for the keys and possibly pry a way into my car where I thought I may have stowed a spare car key. We were in luck, as I had left the driver’s side window open a crack so that we were able to insert a stick through the crack and pry up the plunger for the car door’s lock. Luckily, I found I had left the spare key in the car.

Without the window having been left slightly open on that hot day and my having inadvertently left the spare key in the car, my plight that day would have been much worse.

The others with whom I traveled down the Allegheny that day possibly attributed my difficulties to age, since I am not exactly a youngster, and by the end of the day, I had begun to share this viewpoint. Perhaps I had just dropped the keys between the dam parking lot and boat launch, or had somehow inadvertently flipped them into the river.

It was a couple of weeks later after another trip to our river cabin that my wife suggested we drive up to the dam “to look for the keys.” I agreed, since even though I knew that the trip would be futile, I also knew that I could swim at the fine Allegheny Reservoir beach above the dam on that hot afternoon.

But I told her that first I wanted to spray some sealant on the bulkhead to the kayak’s rear compartment which had been leaking a little. I went out and flipped the kayak off its supports and opened the taut rubber hatch to the rear compartment. And there were the keys!

After some thought, I came to this conclusion as to what had happened. During the passage through the severe rapids at the refinery, the keys had become loose from one of the shoes in which I always placed them, and had bounced up and lodged on one of the wires that control the kayak’s rudder. When I flipped the craft over, they were jarred loose.

I e-mailed my theory as to what had happened to the keys to five others (including the club’s president, the Warren author John Young, who is rather famous locally for his book “Murder in the Courtroom”) that were with me on that river trip.

Young wrote a rather commiserating reply: “I once lost a library book for a winter in my old Honda. The book was a paperback about Ted Bundy, so I kept it under the front seat so any of my passengers wouldn’t think I was a fan of a serial killer. Well, that Honda had a hole in the floor so that sometimes water and slush got in and pooled on the floor just behind the pedals. When winter came the book got wet and froze, and when it froze to the springs under the driver seat, this action raised the book off the floor so that when I looked for it under the seat I couldn’t see it.

“I gave up looking for it and went to the library and paid for it. Then came spring and the book thawed out and dropped to the floor, where I found it. Of course it was ruined.”

Another of the kayakers, Greg Burkett, (who worked in management at Cook Forest State Park before retiring) also replied, saying that my assumption “made sense.”

Perhaps the three were skeptical as to my theory and thus didn’t reply.