My most enduring memory of Lake Lowndes is a camping trip there during my brief tenure as a Boy Scout. It must have been before weather forecasting was commonly available. Maybe someone mistakenly assumed we were prepared.
Such was not the case. When the snow and sleet came that night, the ice coated our tents, and by morning, we were all miserably cold.
Mercifully, we were loaded on buses and taken back to the Troop 3 Scout Hut at the Hitch Lot.
My other memorable encounter with the lake came by way of the Tombigbee Stump Jumpers, who, remembers William “Ham” Roberts, put on a water skiing show for the grand opening of the lake in 1964.
By then the Stump Jumpers were in their kite-flying phase. A water skier harnessed to a large kite and connected by a long rope to a ski boat would be pulled out of the water, and as the boat picked up speed, the skier, Icarus-like, would drift upward.
As you floated upward, your skis no longer slapping the water, the world became eerily quiet.
The lake was too small for Stump Jumpers, said Roberts, who along with John Laws Jr. and Bobby Miller, was one of the founders of this band of muddy-water daredevils. The group much preferred the river with its stumps, gravel shoals and blue rock.
Lake Lowndes was wildly popular with anglers in those early years.
Dispatch carrier Jerry Davis, then a fourth grader at New Hope, remembers fishing on Saturdays with his father near the spillway.
“That was our fishing hole,” Davis said. “We had about six Zebco rods and reels apiece. We caught bream; they called them shell crackers.”
Davis said he and his dad fished until they had two or three five-gallon buckets of fish.
“We’d eat fish for supper that night,” said Davis, “and put the rest in the freezer.”
Thursday afternoon I loaded a kayak on the roof of my car and headed to Lake Lowndes for a short spin. This would be my first visit to Lake Lowndes in a decade, maybe two.
When I arrived around 4, the sun was already low in the sky. The eastern shore of the lake, its trees, already bright in their autumn finery, glowed like it was on fire.
The scene before was reflected in the mirror-like surface, and I stood there in wonder.
Had I somehow been magically transported to New England?
I dropped my kayak in the water and made a lazy loop over to the spillway at the southeast corner of the lake. Even the woods look manicured here. From the spillway I paddled along the shore in the direction of the landing.
I was past the lone fisherman before I saw him. I asked how he was doing.
“Fine,” he said, “if you would stay off my line.”
Meet Ray Helman, C Spire technician and permanent resident of Lake Lowndes.
Well, not exactly. Helman spends two months here, two months at Hugh White State Park near Grenada — Grenada Lake: “the best crappie lake on the planet,” he says — and two months at Trace State Park near Tupelo. Then he repeats the cycle.
Ray owns a house atop Lookout Mountain, which he calls home. Sorta. It’s an airbnb and is booked solid until Jan. 10, he says.
Helman says Lake Lowndes is the most beautiful and best maintained of all the state parks he’s seen. Roosevelt State Park near Morton comes close, but it’s not as well kept as Lowndes, he says.
Here nature almost seems manicured. From the camping area the grassy bank, covered by a light blanket of pine straw, slopes gently to the lake.
Friday when I returned to the lake around 4 to talk to Ray, the autumnal light show was at its peak. I parked at a pavilion and walked past campsites bedecked with Christmas lights; two young girls were chattering excitedly as they set up a tent; campers gathered in lawn chairs around campfires quietly talking. There is a sense of community here.
When I asked directions to Ray’s campsite, a camper pointed me toward a lone fisherman at the edge of the lake. By now the sun had set, and the light show on the eastern shore was over. It was quiet here, serene.
Ray continued to fish for bass as we talked. There were no buckets of shell crackers, not even a single fish on a stringer.
But then that seemed hardly the point.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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