Chattooga by Lane John;

Author:Lane, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2004-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Easy Water

SECTION II FROM LONG BOTTOM FORD TO EARL’S FORD

What I wanted was to float

my piece of the river again.

JOHN GRAVES

Good-bye to a River

CLOSING IN ON NOON it’s becoming obvious that Watts Hudgins’s friend Matt has stood us up. It’s the river runner’s nightmare: establish a long-distance shuttle—two cars from two separate cities—and the second car doesn’t show. We’ve done all we can to give Matt some extra time, unloaded the kayak and the canoe in a misting, early spring rain, discussed the possibilities for delay or abandonment—girlfriend problems, car trouble, an accident. Finally we’ve walked down to the Chattooga and filled Mike Tindall, a first-timer on white water, with a few frightening stories concerning how water, boats, and humans can collide on the twenty-eight miles of the Chattooga River below Russell Bridge.

No other boaters are using the launch site at Long Bottom Ford this day. Watts stops at the river’s edge with the canoe, says he likes the water level and he likes the solitude. He’s rail thin, dark haired, and dressed in vintage outdoor clothing. His red Patagonia fleece is probably a decade old. He’s in his early thirties, almost twenty years younger than I am, but we share the same paddling aesthetic. Neither of us has made the leap to the new, tiny “play boats,” and we’re proud of it in some strange, reactionary way.

A lover of adventure sports from a young age, Watts began paddling and rock climbing at Camp Pinnacle in the mountains of North Carolina when he was a teen and has since kayaked many of the most difficult and wild white-water rivers in the Southeast and beyond—Gauley, New, Nantahala, Nolichucky, Ocoee, Obed, Yough-iogeny, Cheat, even the Colorado through the Grand Canyon.

As Watts begins the litany of his past adventures on the Chattooga, I realize that there are probably a thousand boaters out there in the Southeast like us—men and women who gained their white-water stripes on the Chattooga and still return to her for recreation and repose. The “war story,” as recounting near misses has come to be called, is a part of every paddling trip.

The three of us stand watching the river flow. The day has warmed up a little, but it’s still cool, in the low fifties. Watts keeps glancing toward the parking lot, checks over his gear, stuffing a few things in a dry bag. He tells Mike about his first frightening run down Five Falls, the quarter-mile series of Class IV and V rapids almost thirty miles downstream.

“When I first paddled Section IV, I was drifting below the Highway 76 bridge and I realized it was too late to abort the trip,” he says. “About the time we got to Surfing Rapid, the bridge disappeared upstream. I was on the intimidating ‘river of death,’ a push up from anything I’d done before.”

I tell a similar story of my first trip down Section IV. “I swam at the bottom of the first falls, Entrance Rapid, and missed my roll. Corkscrew, one of the most difficult and dangerous rapids on the river, was just below,” I explained.

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