Nath Thompson, the late director of the summer camp I went to as a kid, was not great at any one camp activity, but he was good at a lot of things, and at the very least he tried them all, including paddling. I used to tease him about a photo proudly displayed in his office in which he was floating through Nantahala Falls in an aluminum canoe, his hands gripping the gunwales for dear life. There's also an old story of lore in which Nath was in the bow of a canoe approaching Bull Sluice on the Chattooga River, and at the brink of the drop he turns around and sees an empty seat, his stern man swimming for the bank... or maybe Nath was the one swimming for the bank... I can't remember.
Anyhow, that was the Nath I loved, and in the photo above, his son Alfred follows in his footsteps. Alfred, who would take the camp director's reins from Nath several years later, runs Suddy Hole on Big Laurel Creek in the spring of 1994. My best recollection is that he stayed in his boat for this entire trip, and a kayak has no gunwales to grab.
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