I'm back home from my short trip to east Tennessee and western North Carolina. Last weekend I attended the centennial celebration at the camp I went to as a kid. It was the first time I'd been by there in some five or six years, and it was fun to be back for a short while. I enjoyed seeing old friends and acquaintances, and just as important is that none of the people I didn't like (i.e., bullies) showed up.
For the first time in nearly 40 years, I shot targets at both the archery range and the rifle range--those were among my favorite activities way back when. My targets weren't very good: it was a reminder of how truly athletic these pursuits are. While different from, say, gymnastics or basketball, shooting sports require a similar degree of calm control.
I also spent some time on the lake paddling my whitewater boat, doing the same kind of drills I'd been doing in the harbor here at home. Then, once the festivities concluded Sunday morning, it was time to go run a whitewater river. A couple of hours west of the camp property is the Nantahala River, a clear dam-controlled stream that played a big role in my paddling education in the 1980s. It was an advanced run for campers because of its cold water that flowed more swiftly than the entry-level streams we ran, and back then I couldn't imagine a more formidable gauntlet of whitewater rapids. Of course there are many rivers that are much more difficult than the Class II-III Nantahala, and in due course I moved on to some of them. Now, for me, the Nantahala is just a pleasant, relaxing place to work on some skills. And that's what I did Sunday afternoon.
One not-so-pleasant part of Sunday was navigating the chaos around the Nantahala Outdoor Center. When I took my first canoe trips to the Nantahala in the early 1980s, the N.O.C. was still in its salad days. Pretty much everybody who worked there, from the raft guides and canoe & kayak instructors to the person ringing the cash register in the store, was a paddler. A number of the employees were slalom racers earning some money while they pursued their dreams of making the U.S. whitewater team. The store carried a little bit of non-paddling-related stuff; the Appalachian Trail passes right through the area, so it always made sense to have some hiking and camping gear, for instance. But the main focus of the place was excellence in paddling, and those early visits to the N.O.C. were a big part of my catching the paddling bug. Sadly, the place now more closely resembles the maw of a tourist vortex, especially on summer weekend days. The traffic congestion is horrendous at times and finding a place to park is no small feat. The crowds of people milling about the N.O.C. campus are much more interested in buying a tee shirt in the store or having a drink at the outdoor bar than giving the slightest thought to running a whitewater rapid skillfully and gracefully. The company now offers many activities that have nothing to do with paddling. I think they host a lot of corporate-team-building events with their ropes courses and zip lines and stuff. Once upon a time the cashier in the store would have been a seasoned river rat or even a world-ranked racer, but nowadays that person is more likely to be just some college kid working a summer job, and if you ask about his or her paddling experience, you'll probably get an answer like "Well, I haven't been kayaking yet, but I'm hoping I'll get to go before the end of the summer."
Look, I get it that it's a business, and it has to evolve and grow and compete for a slice of that ever-fickle consumer market. I'm just looking back wistfully on simpler times, that's all. The N.O.C. property is the takeout for paddlers on the Nantahala, and by the end of the day, after I'd sat in the traffic on the two-lane highway and searched for a place to park my car and weaved through the throngs of tourists and all, I was more than ready to move on.
Move on I did. I continued west, back into Tennessee, and made camp at a Forest Service campground on the bank of the Ocoee River. I got up Monday morning and put my boat on the Ocoee for the first time in maybe a decade. The Ocoee is a step up from the Nantahala: more of a Class III-IV run. It's kind of the summertime staple for whitewater paddlers in the Southeast because of its reliable dam-released flows. And it was here on Monday that I realized just how rusty my whitewater skills are. If you're familiar with the Ocoee, then you know all the fun little moves you can do: the elevator move above Broken Nose; the ferry-into-an-ender move at Slice & Dice; flat spins at Moon Chute; the various eddies at Tablesaw. Once upon a time I had those moves dialed, but on Monday I couldn't do any of that stuff. Whitewater play is pretty much a matter of leaning the right way and taking the right stroke at the right instant, and right now my timing and my confidence in my balance are gone. So I had some frustrating moments while running the Ocoee.
What else should I have expected? To be good on whitewater you have to do whitewater, and I'd barely paddled whitewater at all in the last eight years. Even if I were twenty years younger I couldn't reasonably expect to pick right up where I'd left off after so much time away. Here in late middle age I might have to lower my expectations to simply being competent on the river. And that's the problem: I don't want to be just competent. I wanna be stylin' it out there!
In about a week I'm planning to join a friend on the Gauley River up in West Virginia, and the Gauley is quite a bit more challenging than the Ocoee. At the very least I need to get down it in one piece, and I'm not too worried about that, seeing as how I've watched a lot of people far less skilled than I presently am run that river. I just hope I can re-adjust to a serious whitewater environment and recover at least a little bit of my old mojo. That's the minimum of what I hope to accomplish as I work to get ready for two weeks in the Grand Canyon a year from now.
When I finished my Ocoee run I loaded up the car and headed back home. The weather had been delightful over there in the southern Appalachians: sunny, a high temperature not much above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, overnight lows in the 50s. I was sorry to leave that behind. By the time I was in middle Tennessee the dashboard temperature display in my car had risen into three digits. The temperature here in Memphis has been around 100 degrees for the last couple of days. I've spent that time just recovering. I've been sore in my shoulders, lats, traps, lower back, quads... all over. All those flatwater drills I'd done in my whitewater boat were fairly intense, but there's just no way to prepare for all the stresses of whitewater without paddling some whitewater.
I woke up this morning feeling not so sore anymore, but still tired and sluggish. I got myself down to the river to see what I could do. I paddled the surfski to the mouth of the harbor hoping to find some wake-surfing opportunities out on the Mississippi, but there was no barge traffic in sight. So I headed back to the dock. Another sizzling hot day was taking shape, and while a south breeze kept me cool when I headed south, coming back north toward the dock I was as hot as could be. I practiced a couple of remounts by way of cooling off.
Back at the dock I hopped in the whitewater boat. I'd just received a brand-new sprayskirt I'd ordered from the River Elf company of Florence, Alabama, and I set about the process of breaking it in before my Gauley trip. My old skirt had been leaking like a sieve, and I could tell already how much drier my boat was as I did a number of rolls. One of the things my recent river runs reminded me of is how rarefied a flatwater environment is: making the boat glide and spin is so much easier when you don't have all the various opposing currents that rivers like the Nantahala and Ocoee and Gauley have.
Getting good and wet in the whitewater boat, and then taking a hose bath on the dock, felt good on a very hot summer day. I hope for cooler weather in West Virginia next week.
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