What Makes Love Stay

I'm pinning! Its Memorial Day weekend and I'M PINING!! Stuck here in the office by un-welcome work-related problems I'm gazing out the window at my boats stacked up under the trees. Dry!

They're pinning too. To get wet! I can feel it.

I stare out at them. They stare back.

Back in my old paddlin' days this was the weekend to run the Nolichucky which falls off the north slope of Flattop Mountain in western North Carolina and splashes into Tennessee.

Crashes is a better word. With a vengeance!

That's coal country and there's a line on river left where 40 thousand horses on wheels strain to jerk the stuff out of that awesome gorge, 100 carloads at a time. The energies of the river's class 3 and 4 rapids and the screaming iron horses combine with the paddler's own and it all adds up to one hell of a gig.

Sorta like Godzilla on steroids!!

The best those boats and I are gonna get today is a paddlin' trip by proxy. So I reach way back in the archives to an essay I wrote back in the early 90's. This won't be the first vicarious paddlin' trip I've been on. I was on one the day I wrote this.

But the trips that inspired it? Hey, most of 'em happened just like I told 'em.

We couldn't know it at the time but, compared to today, it was a time of innocence. And, with things like the Berlin wall coming down, promise.

Hell, we're all connected up anyway. So you might as well see where we've been. And we might even learn somethin' 'bout things like curiosity and maybe even about what makes love stay along the way. So, won't you join me?

C'mon, let's paddle!!

WHAT MAKES LOVE STAY

I luv them both as brothers. But, to me, they've always been about as different as night and day. And they'd gone to the mighty Grand Canyon at different times too, to challenge that granddaddy of whitewater paddling, the Colorado River. O.C. Merritt went first in his canoe in July followed by John Hiscox in his kayak later on in September. The latter is a wimp by certain questionable paddling standards because he likes his boats with lids on them while the former likes his just like he likes his women... TOPLESS! The standards referred to are only held by the open boat community and are, understandably of course, questioned by anyone in the paddling community who paddles anything but an open canoe.

I'd asked each of them at separate times about how IT was and so it wasn't a case of one of them saying, "this is the way it was" while the other nodded in agreement. No-sir-eee!!! All I had to say was, "tell me about IT" and they each would morph into some sort of mystical stupor as if they had been brainwashed by the same guru. The tone in each of their voices was the same as was the gleam in their eyes and their body language was a mirror of one another. The Colorado had cast its spell on these boys dressed up in middle-age bodies and now they were so much one like the other that they were the same except for their separateness.

I mean even the descriptions were almost word for word... "you look downstream at one of those major rapids like Crystal and it's impossible to comprehend you're about to float through that. Then you do it and afterwards, when you come down enough to see through the adrenalin rush, you look back upstream at what you've just floated through and it's impossible to comprehend that you were in that! You had to pinch yourself to try to keep yourself from falling into believing it was all just a dream and even then...."

And so, there I was pinching myself while looking out a cabin window of a 727 as it flew me toward a visit back home. Out and down through five miles of November and toward somewhere in east central Tennessee. Naked hardwood forests got lost in a sea of evergreen spread out over a bunch of bumps and lumps that went on and on except for its all being surrounded by oblivion and broken by a grayish looking ribbon that rambled on and on, seemingly with no method to its meandering except that it was all sort of cradled by and held together within the depressions running amongst the lumps and bumps scattered throughout the forests that would cause it to loop around in giant horseshoe fashion and almost run into itself before it would amble off in another direction... with another depression in mind.

Like the hammer finding the nail, it struck me--"That's the Tennessee River!" Down there was the sum total of the Tennessee Valley watershed. The creeks and rivers of a hundred counties spread out over seven states. Familiar ones began echoing through the halls and bouncing off the walls of my mind as it drifted back in time and I felt the breath of an Indian maiden calling me back to the cool clear Hiawassee and Canoe Schools and, "what's an eddy turn, anyway???" And friendships found and a luv lost... and... connectedness cued by curiosity... and... a full moon rising behind a black lace tree... and... imagination whetted by legend... and... local folks doing what local folk do best... which is to mess with the foreigners every chance they get.

Around the Hiawassee paddlers or anybody from anywhere but Polk County, Tennessee are considered a foreigner by the locals. I walked out of Webb Brothers' General Store late one afternoon as a pair of them were crawling out of a battered old fleet side pickup. Even though it was July and hotter'n a grizzly in heat, the two were dressed in Osh Kosh B' Gosh pulled up over flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up just above their elbows and caps... baseball type sky-pieces!

One was worn backwards like a catcher chasing a pop-up and read, "My wife said next time I go fishin', she's gonna leave me. I sure am gonna miss her".

The other, worn missionary style said, "I chew Redman and I'll spit in your eye". Coffee colored chew juice gave credence to the warning as it oozed out from a straggle-toothed grin and chased a crease connecting the grin to a chin.

"Me no bad guy", I mumbled as I walked past them toward the parking lot with hands up, surrender style.

"Huh?", the local with the Redman cap puzzled.

I turned to ask, "been fishin' or goin'?" ...it was a question posed out of peripheral curiosity.

"That ain't bait back in the back!", came the reply from the other one.

I looked past him and his answer to a battered old Jon boat with fishing poles poking out over it's sides that was tied up in the back of the battered old fleet side. The poles were the cheap sort that come already put together and stapled on a card wrapped in cellophane with a Zebco 202 reel, a full load of ten pound test line, and a picture of a fisherman standing, full-wader deep in a stream with a smile planted on his face, the rod and reel reared back with both hands over his shoulder and bent in obvious big-fish-on-the-other-end fashion followed by it's line disappearing into the depths before him. I could have turned around, walked back inside, and ole Webb could have sold me one for a dollar-two-eighty exactly alike except for one thing...

HEX NUTS!

They'd tied hex nuts to the lines for sinkers!!

The Jon boat was as wide as the truck bed was wide inside to inside so the outside of the boat touched the inside of the truck on both sides at the back by the tailgate and was pulled forward by a rope as far as it could be pulled into the truck so the bow of the boat touched the front of the bed but the stern hung out the back because the boat was longer than the truck bed even with the tailgate down where it was even wider than the truck... and there, right there in the widest part of the boat and beginning just above one gunwale and extending down the inwale to the bottom and across the wide, flat bottom to the other side and, up the other inwale to where it poked up above the other gunwale... was... the biggest damn catfish I'd ever seen! And in the middle of the boat, placed upside down between the two seats, in its most stable riding position... was... a wheelbarrow of contractor proportion complete with dried up cement cleaving to its sides... but... with its wheel askew... because the wooden undercarriage, which is also the frame for the wheel, was freshly trashed... and, along with the shinny new scrapes, scratches, and dents, tipped me off that the whole thing had been in an obviously recent wreck. Paint chips littered the bottom of the boat and new ones went flying blasting dried up cement into puffs of dust as Redman pulled his heavy frame up onto the step of the stepside and sat down on the side rail in cocky anticipation.

"Nice fish!", I said.

"Fair ta middlin", Redman said.

"What's the wheelbarrow for," I asked the other one who, by this time, had worked his way around to the back and was leaning on an old splintered 2x6 c-clamped to the stern and straddling the cat with a 180 degree grin.

"Brang this hare fish out," he said, as if the answer ought to be obvious.

"Bring the fish out," I asked, with what was by now puzzled curiosity.

"Yep. we fish a spot bes' got ta by walkin' the right-way in 'long the river," he said as if that ought to make perfectly good sense to anybody including a foreigner.

"So?" I said.

"So we left the wheelbarra with the fish in it on the tracks while we went back ta get the boat and a freight hit it."

"Oooooohhhh-kay.... well gosh, it sure tore hell otta your wheelbarrow eh?"

"Yep! But that ain't nothin' next ta the mess that there train made when it derailed..."

.....

The Ocoee: 1200 cubic feet of water crashing down every second from atop a 30 degree, 30 foot tall earthen dam. They call the dam Snow White. How appropriate!! When the water rolls over it and down that bumpy face it looks like its covered with snow. A gigantic high-powered water pistol with a four mile range and a lake for ammunition! A powerful combination and the connected confusion that comprises the first rapid it shadows is known to paddlers as The Seven Dwarfs. I wonder what might happen if I throw a handful of beans out the window of the 727... or, maybe, someone already had!

It had happened two years ago last fall when I had occasion to paddle the Ocoee's "Surge" for the first time. Perhaps it was one of those mysterious, enigmatic moments like whatever happens with déjà vu. Perhaps it was just my imagination, fueled by the combination of birth and death and the emotions of each so enmeshed in one another, playing tricks on me. My excitement over the birth of a river all around and under me as I paddled along mixed with grief over the loss of my dear friend Jay Hall who'd been killed on a gray, drizzly morning just two Saturdays earlier. He had been on his way to this same river when a low-boy trailer, painted the same color as that drizzling morning, came loose from the hitch of a dump truck and caromed across the high-weeded median of Interstate 575 crashing head-on into his pickup. He never knew what hit him.

For weeks after the accident my dreams were filled with lowboy trailers coming head-on at me out of shadows. Wake time was filled with paranoia whenever I'd get behind the wheel of my truck. Mortality became reality. I miss Jay and think of him often. He treated everyone like they were the most important person in his life. He could love people for who they were and he did just that whether you wanted to let him or not. But what made him so special was he could do that without invading your space... without smothering you. He had an intuitive way of going about allowing folks to be themselves. He simply loved people and he loved life. Everyone who knew him knows how he loved the rivers too, especially the Ocoee river, and in particular, it's Table Saw and Witches Hole rapids. Perhaps his love has now turned to legacy... an energy to be carried along in the hearts of each of us who paddle the rivers. Perhaps it was that energy that made that particular trip so special.

That Saturday started out like most any other fall day at dawn in the east Tennessee mountains, shrouded in a wet, dripping, chilly, mist I could reach out and touch. I never could get quite used to that kind of cut-to-the-bone chill before the rising autumn sun would wring it out and chase it away. But, a cup of coffee later and this time, it was gone... kicked out by an old, anxious anticipation from days before the notches on the gunwales counted past dozens... turned into pure, hot, metallic, fear!

The "Surge," that's what I'd heard 'em call it!!

"West Virginia steep creek stuff!" That's what I'd heard Dub Ellis call it... and he'd get that same gleam in his eye he'd get when his adrenalin dam explodes. He'd been there before and told me about it and I'd been on enough other rivers with ole Dub to have more than curiosity satisfied by that body language.

There were four of us on the trip that morning. Tyros to the tide three of us were... Dick Conner, Dick Creswell, and myself all paddling Dagger Canoes. Ric Simmons was the only one among us that day who had ever paddled the surge before... the sole surge-sayer. Except for Ric in his C-1, it was a Dagger dance to a brand new tune.

"Something's different!" My eyes followed Ric's quizzical stare past the rock jumble at the base of the dam where we were putting in. The 400 cubic feet of water exploding every second from the crack in the water gate beside the wooden diversion flume on the far side of the river meant drawdown to winter pool for the reservoir upstream was in progress. It had brought another reminder of the clock around the corner and an icicle chased a naked tree through my bones. We hauled our boats across the jumble and joined the 400. In an instant I was broached against a boulder. My draw stroke was still asleep. It was a lesson learned cheap.

Normally all the water is diverted into that wooden flume through a gate at its mouth at the far end of the dam right next to the relief gate. The only surviving and still working wooden flume in the country, its a sixteen foot square cube strapped to the side of the mountain overlooking the river gorge. The river bed follows the topography dropping 200 feet in four miles while the flume stays just short of level as it shadows along above the river and terminates at a penstock where it develops head as it drops on a 45 degree incline straight down through two giant tubes into a generating plant perched on the bank of the river.

With only 400 cubic feet of water to work with, floating down through the Ocoee's put-in rapid was like dissecting a boulder field. We grouped up at the bottom of it and played in a still sleepy souse hole named Grumpy waiting for a TVA Tech to wake up and stick a cork in the flume forcing another 800 cubic feet to crash down every second from atop Snow White and right into our laps.

"Go with the flow till the flow don't go but it'll be different today," said Ric. "When you ride the surge you go like hell on the face of the wave through the narrows and drops. Then, where the river broadens out, you get the sensation that the water literally falls out from under you as it spreads out to fill up the pools and holes. With 400 out in front of us, some of those pools will already be full and it won't take long to top off the rest. We'll be moving fast.... real fast! Surf's up", he yelled. "Get ready for a wild ride!!"

"Surf's up" echoed back and forth between the rest of us scattered across Grumpy.

I looked back upstream past Ric and through 150 yards of an hour past dawn to a waking Snow White. Suddenly, the gleam in Dub's eye rushed down my spine, did a half dozen 360's, and chased away the fear swarming over that good-morning cup of coffee.

Ric was right! Eddies were there and then they weren't. A rock at the upper end of a diagonal ledge morphed into a souse hole. Then the hole was chased by a curling wave down the spine of the ledge and it broke into a dance as it spat out the other end. Poetry! Childbirth! Genesis! Catch a falling star! Chase a rainbow! Magic!

By the time my mind caught up with me we were down to a rapid formed by the river constricting and crashing over an offset ledge creating a pair of side-surfable souse holes named Double Trouble. With that 400 out in front of us we really didn't have the surge that is the tip of the tongue of a big long wave. But we did have a slanted wave stretched out, under and behind us, for maybe 50 yards where it melted into 1200 cubic feet chasing us down the river. So I didn't have much time. But, I just had to do it! I paddled to the side, got out, and pulled my boat back upstream toward the launching pad forming before me. Not much time to think about this one. Blast off! Two good forward strokes and I was on the curling wave that points to the upper hole. Plant a high brace and ride the wave. Drop into the hole sideways and turn the paddle over on a low brace for balance.

The hole does a dance with my very soul. Then suddenly I look up and see it coming... three, two, one, a huge exploding crest on the wave crashes in on top of me. I was in the hole sideways and perpendicular to the main flow as the crest rolled over forward and slammed down on my upstream gunwale. It was instant window shade! The lights go out and somewhere in the darkness a river troll dials a washing machine to fast forward. Who put these bowling balls in here? Helpless! Powerless! Fate turns a page and my God comes to mind. Amazing the places I run into Him! Thank You is such an understatement sometimes.

We'd been sort of leap-froging as we went along. First Ric was in the lead, then Conner, then Creswell, then me. Each of us chasing our fantasies though an ever changing dream. It had a sort of surreal mysticism about it. Topography, hydrology, geology, gradient, velocity, humanity... all thrown into a giant morphological blender... like a stack of crayons melting in the sun, unpredictable! This is where you come to become one with the river. There is no test here. No place for a Palooka. If you see this mighty river as your enemy and set out to defeat it, you crash and burn. The river fights back and is much stronger than you. The purpose is not to conquer it but to become one with it and so, it lifts you up and washes you along with its rhythm.

I was out in front of the others and on the leading edge of the wave as we came into the approach to one of my favorite places in the universe, Table Saw Rapid! Whoever defined the seven wonders led a sheltered life! I flew in and out of eddies that came and went, held hands with holes, and danced with waves. Aleman left with the eddy on the left. Aleman right with the eddy on the right. Do-se-do with a boulder or two. Promenade with a curler past the saw and blast into a river-right eddy.

I ferried cross-river to the micro-eddy on river-left ten yards from the end of the tune and looked back in time. My God, the site was breathtaking! Awesome! Nirvana! In the foreground my gaze landed on an egg-shaped boulder... the saw... the soul of the rooster tail that was the rapid's namesake. The boulder was like a giant buzz-saw throwing sparkling diamonds dancing high up into the crisp, morning air as the surge, like a giant redwood tree, crashed into it. Every phenomenon of hydrology was happening everywhere and ever changing by a faucet turned on somewhere. Panacea on a panoptic stage lit by a sun that had just strolled in the door at the upper end of the canyon. All this and the paddlers three: Conner, Creswell, and Simmons, each on a roll in the sunlit dance before me. It was poetry. Ballet. Disco. Waltz. Classical. Rock N Roll. Jimi Hendrix, Mozart, and Beethoven rolled over.

I knew how they felt because all of a sudden something was missing. The feeling started in the pit where the coffee and the fear used to be and exploded into an aura of emptiness. Had I missed some irony in my exuberance? Then, just as suddenly, the aura was gone. Chased away by a blur in the eye of my imagination... purplish at first then, Blue Hole burgundy. As it peeled out and ferry-surfed the entrance diagonal toward the eddy on river left, a turquoise lifejacketed figure, capped off by a white helmet with a bearded smile in the face of it, appeared. On a precision tuned, off-side high brace it sank into the eddy. Gone? Gone in an Interstate 575, low-boy trailer instant.

As the micro washed out from under me the image washed from my mind and I drifted along toward Diamond Splitter left to pick up the pieces of a shattered vision. The wonders of life's magic and the image of a dear friend two weeks gone... could it have been real? A line from Harold Kushner's "When Everything You Ever Wanted Isn't Enough" came to mind; "...like most of the important dimensions of life: faith, love, loyalty, hope, are all rooted in a vast dark irrational area where reason cannot reach and the intellect cannot venture." In the context of the moment it was easy to include fear, magic, euphoria, the Surge, the image of a white helmet with a mischievous grin in it paddling a very familiar burgundy canoe. And yes, even death!

I glanced downstream toward Witches Hole coming into view. Wait! Who is that side-surfing on a downstream grin and a hand brace?

......

Two single droplets of water, so much one like the other they would be the same except for their separateness, hold hands as they fall side by side in a soft rainstorm up on the Cumberland Plateau and light on a morphological Mason-Dixon Line where some mysterious law of genetic justice in the balance of nature claims them as victims of its fate for a fleeting moment before the forces of gradient and gravity garnish their destinies and one is pulled off northward toward the Big South Fork River of the Cumberland watershed and eventually the Ohio while the other is pulled southward toward Clear Creek Canyon of the Emory-Obed System and the Tennessee Valley.

"See you in Paducah" echoes softly through the wetness as they wave a fading farewell. The Dixie droplet doubles and doubles again and again it doubles again as if bound with others of common persuasion by some magical, hydrological magnet to form a fresheted, fizzgigged column of white water that crashes down through a fissure known as Wooten's Folly... where inevitability lives!

I know! I've been there...! Several times!!

Drop off the entrance ledge just off the right shoulder of the first pourover. But be sure to have the bow pointed a little to the left so as to catch the left portion of the tongue when it is split by the next pourover 15 yards beyond the first. Then, book it through all the standing wave stuff past the third pourover and toward the right side of the huge convergence hole at the bottom and sneak in between it and the big, house-sized, potentially lethal, undercut boulder on river right. If all has gone well and the adrenalin dam is about to explode, you might try catching the river-right downstream corner of the hole with an offside high brace and power-surf into the eddy on river-left and, if the timing is just right, an explosive splash from the backwash wave at the bottom left corner of the hole will end up in your face. Do that last part just right and its sort of like slingshoting around third base and sliding into home head first.

Creative visualization! Shakti Gawain would be proud of me even in my embarrassment. I don't know why but something is wrong with "the plan" at the entrance ledge. I can't really explain it except that it's more of a feeling than anything else and everything goes to hell in a handbasket and the resultant swim is always sort of... well, inevitable. If this is IT, just take me home Sweet Jesus!

......

The sound of Tellico water drifts through me and is suddenly swallowed by the demon that lurks under Reeder's Rock, one of the most notoriously heinous undercut rocks in the southeast. In all my life I've never heard another sound quite like the sound of water being swallowed up by that rock. Even at 35,000 feet and the roar of jet engines I can hear it as clear as a Kennedy killing.

But I still go there every year to paddle in the fall because this gorge has to be where God created color. And under that rock is where I almost lost my life one innocent Sunday afternoon a few autumns ago. Curiosity has more than one face. Strange how a place so terrifyingly threatening can be so profoundly peaceful all at the same time.

.....

The Nantahala comes to mind. How the Cherokee found one word to describe something that beautiful is a wonder to me. It takes five English words, "Land Of The Noonday Sun", just to translate it! Anyone from anywhere in the world who has ever brushed a boat with anybody in the paddling community has heard of the Nantahala.

An international paddling festival was held there recently. A competition born in the icy waters of Siberia that now promotes the spirit of world peace with the simple idea that people working together toward a common cause such as navigating a whitewater river together can transcend their differences and recognize their commonality.

You know, I'm always amazed how one idea leads to another and so on in such a way that when I look back I can begin to see the semblance of real value in what I do today. If I have enough time and I'm determined enough for long enough I can see how everything and everyone is all connected up together in some sort of mysterious and magical fashion. There are all sorts of tangible and metaphorical expressions of this such as that awesomeness I feel about the global water cycle and how water moves from the atmosphere to the land and across or through the lands and its peoples and back to the atmosphere again in a never ending, ever changing, curious fashion and so; how easily possible it could be that some of the same water that carried the competitors down the Chuya River in Siberia could conceivably have gotten connected up with water in the Nantahala, right here in my own back yard, and carried those same people along a whole year later and I even wonder how many of my brothers and sisters that same water may have nourished in between festivals. Its a curious thought indeed.

And so, for me anyway, the water cycle is a metaphor. Tangible evidence. Knowledge by association that helps clear the path and open space for me to connect on the idea that I'm connected to all of you and it is on the wings of this connectedness that the energies of the universe sing. Anytime I can move through fear and prejudice and pretense I FEEL this sense of connectedness and I've come to wonder in the wake of all that has been happening around the globe these past few months if this sense of commonality and equality isn't the very essence of the human spirit... the candle glowing in the darkness. The sound of freedom rings 'round the world as the chains of oppression fall and with every victory I actually feel freer. We still have a long way to go but already the whole atmosphere of life itself has taken on the aura of a justice that seems to transcend time and distance and fear and prejudice and pretense. What greater oppression is there than the repression of self? The greatest gift we can give one another is the freedom to be free and until that day all the world walks in chains. To quote the words of Kris Kristofferson, the self-proclaimed Third World Warrior, "there ain't no chain as strong as the will to be free." Today deliverance from the bondage of one human being over another has become more than just something for the dreamers.

I've come to believe that life isn't worth a damn anymore if I can't find some value in it on a day to day basis and just believing in the hope that it'll all be okay tomorrow is dealing myself a short deck in the only game in town! I've lived my share of that kind of bondage.

Things like 300 folks from around the globe, some of which I've been taught all my life to be my enemy (albeit against some inner feeling of saner judgment), paddling together in rafts cast upon the same water that carried them along in a different river a year earlier, half a world away... well, somehow I find value in that sentiment! Next time I go paddling I'll think a little different about the water under me... next time it rains... next time I take a drink of water...

.....

All this and more is collected up and fed nicely into that main artery down there. As we flew along over Paducah the Ohio came into view and then it's confluences, first with the Cumberland then, just 12 miles downstream, the Tennessee. From my vantage point I could barely make out the separation. Fantastic fantasy food!

I looked away from the window and my mind wanders back to a time when I stood on a bridge watching some no-name river disappear around a bend downstream and I wondered, "what's around that bend?" Curiosity came to visit that day and we went shopping. I look back out the window at the Ohio wandering off east-by-northeast toward the sunrise and the Tennessee wandering off east-by-southeast toward where I just came from and before either one of them can get to wherever it is they're going, they both disappear over the same bend that is the curvature of the earth itself.

Fantasy food indeed, except I actually floated along on some of that water under me and my boat that curiosity and I found while shopping one day.

"Way up on my pony on my boat," Lyle Lovett sang.

Jumped into the boat and sloshed right along with me, some of that water did! Splashed me in the face even. Swam in it too, albeit inevitably. Disappeared around a bend together....

Tom Robbins once wrote a love story about a princess and a character he called the Woodpecker that took place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes and in that story he wondered, "what makes love stay?" I used to wonder about that too. Now I wonder if Tom Robbins ever stood on a bridge and looked downstream....

The voice of the captain came on the p. a. system. "welcome aboard flight... we've leveled off at 39,000 feet... the temperature in Minneapolis is 29 degrees and they have snow falling... we'll be landing..."

I could tell which passengers were headed home by the glow that came over them. "Its snowing," they cooed back and forth to one another.

Burrrr, I thought. What a way to treat water!

My seat companion was one of them. I asked her about the snow. "I could live anywhere," she said, "but I like the change of seasons. It satisfies a certain curiosity and it's really more about the feeling I get with it rather than something I can explain."

My mind drifted back to a river disappearing around a downstream bend and I understood.