By Cain Madden

Special to the News-Herald

Ever since Jeff Turner started writing his Riverkeeper report in The Tidewater News, folks have been on him about turning it into a book.

“They eventually got on me enough about it, and I had the time to do it, so, I just decided I would get to it,” he said. “It wasn’t that hard to do, because the stories were already pretty much written. Now, for some of the older stories, before I started putting them on paper, I had to do the memory thing on a few of them.”

The book begins in 1993, when Turner met Moonpie, who would become his constant companion on trips along the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers, and it continues to early 2014, with Spirit of Moonpie still in attendance.

Prior to Moonpie, Turner had another dog, Pigface, that went on the river with him. When Pigface died, Turner said he didn’t want another dog because of how tough it was going through the death.

But one afternoon his parents tricked him.

“That was kind of a sneaky thing my folks did,” Turner said. “They took me out on the premise that we were going to eat. And then we drove up to somebody’s house, and they had a bunch of puppies.

“Once I had puppies jumping all over me in the yard, I was like, ‘Oh, man. I’ve been had.’ But that worked out good.”

It took some time to get Moonpie trained to ride the rivers in the back seat of the Riverkeeper boat.

“Within 3-4 months, I started taking her on the river and getting her acclimated to being a river dog, and all of the fun things that come along with training a new dog,” he said. “People just assumed that Moonpie came into the world and was the perfect river dog. But it was just like a child or anything. They have to be taught to do stuff, and some of those early years were not pleasant.”

But it was still well worth it to train her, Turner said.

“She was a good companion,” he said. “It was also a good early warning thing at night, when I am doing shore camping. And she became such an icon around here, by people reading the stories or seeing her out there with me.”

“When people would see me in the grocery store, or when I was giving presentations, that was the first thing they’d say to me, ‘Where is Moonpie?’” he added. “We even made up a bunch of T-shirts. She became quite the Riverkeeper program’s mascot out there.”

Turner has self-published a book about the Moonpie years, “Tails of Moonpie and The Riverkeeper,” and it is on sale at the Peanut Patch. He will be present from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 11 to sign books, which are selling for $15.

The stories encompass a range of human emotion and river activities.

There was the Nottoway paddle trip interrupted by a dangerous storm: “We got into a big lightning storm, and it was raining so hard and so fast and the water was so shallow that the boat was grounded out. It had basically sunk,” he said. “And the lightning was flying.”

So he got out of the boat, grabbed Moonpie, and ran up to a bank he could stand under.

“There was a hole in there. I don’t know what lived in it, but I stuffed her in that,” Turner said. “I just sat flat against the bank, figuring that this was as good as I was going to get.

“And then, like 50 feet away, lightning hit a tree, and it fell into the river. I thought I was going to get suntanned from it — that’s how bright it was. I could feel the heat from it, and it had this weird smell, like burnt ozone. It was a real clean smell.”

And there are stories about just being on the river that make it all worth it.

“We still like going out there,” Turner said. “You notice that I said we. She’s still with me.”

“We just love being out there with the wildness. It’s always a challenge.”