A Westie in West Virginia
I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
I am bumping along an Appalachian country road in a lemon-colored school bus. The diesel groans and gears grind as we rattle past white cottages and sagging mobile homes plunked down in grassy clearings in the forest. It is my first day in West Virginia. At the urging of my friend and fellow guide Heather Mills, who is now sitting beside me, I have traversed the American heartland in order to guide rafts down the Gauley River. A guide at the front of the bus is explaining the dangers of rafting—something about snake bites and rescue ropes and the possibility of paralysis—but nobody can hear him over the engine.
On the next bench two young, drawling, bearded fellows spit tobacco juice into a cup. I learn that these two grew up in the same trailer park in Parkersburg, not far from here, and that like me they’re looking for work.
“Me and my buddy Blaine,” says the one called Jeremy, “back when we was still young and ignorant, we decided to float the New River. So we went to K-Mart and bought one of them ten-dollar blow-up rafts.”
“We didn’t know about life jackets back then,” adds Blaine.
“Hey, where’s my can?” says Jeremy.
“If it was in your ass you’d know it.”
Just then the bus shivers as the road narrows to one lane and snakes down into a steep gorge. Heather, who’s been here before, is grinning like a loon, and despite the idyllic setting and the bright Labor Day sunshine, I am beginning to worry.
“Hold on tight!” she says with a giggle. The driver hits the gas and whips the bus around a curve. He works the steering wheel like he’s drilling for oil, leaning in and cranking with both hands while a damp t-shirt clings to his biceps. It’s a long, steep tumble from here to the river. I look for something to hold onto. The driver spits into a walkie-talkie in something that resembles English.
"Rivermen allalone at heelter skeelter, commin in."
A fuzzy holler crackled from the speaker.
"Class six times thray, up-n-owt, up-n-owt, cominatcha."
"Copydat class six goahayd."
We swerve onto the dirt shoulder and my stomach drops. Three buses scream toward us, wheels in the opposite ditch, blasting by with six inches to spare.
“By God,” says Blaine. “That was fun.”
“All clare,” crackles the radio. “Seeyon the nex treep.”
Jeremy notices my hands clenched on the seat before me.
“You know what you are?” he says. “A Westie.”
“A god-damned Westie,” Blaine corrects him.
“But it ain’t your fault.”
“Welcome to West By-God,” says Blaine. “Wanna dip?”
I was one of two-thousand river guides who’d migrated that September to work the six weekends known as Gauley Season, when the dam-controlled river is turned on like a faucet and its steep rocky bed swells miraculously with whitewater and rafts. It’s the most frenetic and lucrative 24 days of whitewater rafting in the world, and we’d all converged in Fayetteville, West Virginia, for a piece of the adventure. We came from the canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers in southern Utah, from the bony Rio Grande in New Mexico, and from the Arkansas Valley in Colorado: Pine Creek and the Numbers and the Royal Gorge. Some came from Idaho's Salmon and Snake and Payette, others from the Ocooee in Tennessee, the Nantahala in Georgia, the Penobscot in Maine.
But as members of a social class that lived in cars and ate mostly peanut butter, we understood that our own dirtbag lives—debt, dental needs, and a mutt leashed to a pickup outside the bar—were in themselves not valuable enough to be worth risking. No, in order to make a go of the high adventure we sought, we’d have to risk the lives of unwitting innocents—our customers. Our quest wasn’t simply to brave the famous Class V rapids, we also sought one-hundred-a-day plus tips for doing it.
That’s what I was doing there. How I’d ended up there is another story. For four years previous I’d drifted through Utah, working as a line cook, housebuilder, and river guide in the slickrock desert, squatting in tents, cars, a double-wide trailer and an abandoned pigfarm. The desert could be harsh, and I stayed there because I hoped it would improve me. I landed a job as an instructor for an outdoor school whose mission speaks of enhancing character and promoting self-discovery by impelling young people into difficult and adventurous experiences. Experience! Isn’t that what wilderness is all about? We made sure the food was mushy and the portions small, and the desert did the rest: heat and rocks, sandstorms and scorpions, springs without water and a staunch upstream wind. If we ever wanted respite from the hardship, we could gaze up at the red walls of sandstone and the soaring bald eagles, soak up the hot emptiness and still solitude. Any fun to be had was purely incidental.
But one day, prodding teenagers down the wind-swept flatwater of Desolation Canyon for fifty-two dollars a day, it occurred to me that I was a citizen of the wealthiest and most indulgent nation in the history of civilization, and here I was eating burnt oatmeal with tomato powder and sipping warm quarts of iodized riverwater. Heather Mills had made the Gauley pilgrimage before and told of non-stop rapids and hundred-dollar tips and beer on the bus. We got thirsty just thinking about it. Enough of this character-building: these were the nineties, and if everyone else was having fun, I deserved some, too.
So as summer wound down on the Colorado, I jumped in my truck with an address scribbled on a paper scrap and vague plans to reconvene with my friends that side of the Ohio River. The skies were clear, the highways smooth, and gas cost seventy-five cents a gallon.
I know now that I wasn't ready for fun, West Virginia-style. I was a Westie, which not only meant I was from the West but, as I eventually learned, that perhaps I took my job a bit too seriously.
That day as the lemon-colored bus rolled into the Cunard boatramp, I was dismayed, even a bit offended, that nobody was listening to the Safety Talk. In my training, the Safety Talk was a semi-religious event, delivered at river’s edge in a solemn circle with ample eye contact and hands-on demonstrations. But on the bus, the clients’ interest in safety was lost to their longing for a restroom. As the guide said a few final words about strainers and undercut rocks, they gazed out the window at the well-queued toiletplex . Blaine told me that it was “self-composting,” and had cost the taxpayers a pretty penny. Then the guide concluded, “Don’t worry, y’all, it’ll be fun, and as the passengers plodded down the aisle toward freedom he thrust a sheet of paper at them, an acknowledgment that they were likely to perish on the Noon Express. They all signed.
“That’s our million-dollar toilet,” Jeremy called after them, “so you’d better take a thousand-dollar crap!”
The customers looked back with half-smiles of alarm and embarrassment. Blaine was giggling while he rolled a cigarette.
“Gimmee the lighter, dickbiter.”
Before the run on the toilets was through, the guides had inflated the boats with electric blowers and dragged them to the water. I should mention that that day, my cross-country pilgrimage to reach the Gauley notwithstanding, the famous river hadn’t been turned on yet. So instead we were on the New River, a Class IV stretch that is heavily run during the spring and summer. I still had to wait another week for the Gauley.
If the fare-payers were expecting a thorough paddling lesson like was the custom out West, they would be disappointed. “GIT IN! GIT IN!” bellowed Robert Seay, the lead guide, sprawled shirtless and barefoot on his boat. Like frightened cattle the people boarded the raft, and he pushed off without a word.
“PAYADUL! PAYADUL!”
Heather and I launched our raft and Blaine and Jeremy shoved off in kayaks. It was the first time I had seen the bottom of a river. Unlike the muddy Colorado, the water on the New was clear and green. With the whirring of insects in the sticky air and the wet jungle hanging over the banks, the place felt foreign.
As we eased through the first couple rapids, I learned that Robert Seay was an expert boater, and that Blaine and Jeremy were not. Robert maneuvered the boat by himself. Now and then he’d yell at his passengers to paddle, but he didn’t seem to care if they actually did it. I would later learn that many consider him the best boatman in the state. Meanwhile, Blaine, clad in a mountaineer’s helmet, flipped upside-down for a practice roll, failed three times, then released himself. He swam to our boat to drain his boat and get back in.
“I’m still working on that roll,” he said, apparently undaunted by the whitewater below. As we floated, Heather reviewed local customs. First off, all guides must smoke cigarettes. I obliged. Next, customers were required to wear helmets at all times, but guides generally paddled bareheaded into any rapid easier than Class V. I decided to keep mine on. And then as we lined up above a dome pouring into a frothy hole twice as wide as the boat, I learned the most fundamental rule of West Virginia boating:
We were supposed to flip.
Heather and I stowed our paddles and plunged over the falls. The boat clamped shut like a trap and I was chucked to the floor, smack up against her helmet, and as the boat stood on end I was swept out into the river and held under. I popped up and sucked in a breath and grabbed the chicken-line. Once I had pulled myself in, gasping for air and clinging to life, I heard totally unexpected: people were cheering.
Over in the eddy a dozen rafts were lined up to paddle back into the hole. The crowd hooted as we blew water out our noses and paddled to shore. As a Westie, I associated flipped boats with disaster: lost gear, broken oars, days’ worth of food soaked and ruined. But now in West Virginia they did it on purpose. Robert Seay steered his rafts into the ledge holes barking PAYADUL! PAYADUL! as they were spun and swamped. The paddlers squealed. "Flip it!" someone shouted. The boat rode up on end and the crew clung to the high-side like rats on a sinking ship. A few paddlers were sucked into the froth, then the boat flopped back down, with everybody gone except for Robert.
“GIT IN!” he growled. “GIT IN!”
Robert Seay paddled to pick up the coughing swimmers. A few people clapped politely like at a tennis match, and another boat paddled into the whole. Blaine and Jeremy, who had promptly exited their kayaks and swam to the eddy for rescue, explained that cutting in line was not allowed. Local legend says that the last guide who cut in front of Robert Seay was hunted down at the boathouse after work and given the choice between unemployment and a good country ass-whupping. He never guided in these parts again.
Finally we got what we wanted: a raft tipped up on its side, dumped its crew and flipped. We whooped like warriors. It was fun. It was more fun than I was used to. There was no end to the fun. As the next boat paddled out, I let out a rapid yell: "Flip the damn boat!"
In Utah, a river trip ends with the return to the tin boat shed, dusty yard, and a sober office. But here in Appalachia, the fun continued at the compound of campgrounds, cantina and volleyball courts, even something called a Video Deck. On the ride home we’d broken open a cooler of beer and I skipped the shower and went straight to the bar.
“The Old Red & White,” said Blaine, crumpling an empty Budweiser can and tossing it on the lawn. “Out here in West By-God we call that a trailmarker.”
The Video Deck was spacious, dim, and empty, a roofed patio of log walls and unfinished wooden bars. The freshly scrubbed glossless floors, the 30-gallon Rubbermaid drums, the towers of plastic cups rising from the counters and the perfume of stale beer and Lysol hinted of kegs soon to be drunk. A few guys clutched cups of beer, pinned to the plywood by blasts of jock-rock thumping from fridge-sized speakers. I got a beer for half-price by saying I was a new employee, and carried it to one of the long cafeteria tables. All the seats faced the blank big-screen TVs suspended from the ceiling. I felt like I had stepped into a fraternity house an hour before the party.
The room filled with pink-faced Midwesterners. They brought brimming beer cups from the bar and gathered around the tables. A group in pre-faded denim, baseball caps and Purdue sweatshirts congregated near me. A big blonde guy pumped my hand and announced that he was Trevor, from Indianapolis, “in sales.” He’d rented a mini-van and they drove out Friday after work. When I told him who I was he slapped the tabletop and shouted, "Gang, this is one of the guides!" prompting a volley of first names, then handshakes all around.
"Had to drag this one out of the office," he said, draping his hand on the shoulder of a thin, pretty girl with excellent teeth.
"Here’s to Dee Gee Class of ’92," chirped the girl, and we all held up the enormous plastic cups and smushed them together.
Just then the music died and the show began. Each of the day's trips had its own video with slo-mo special effects and pulsing techno-rock. The customers barked and high-fived each other. The speaker announced that the videotapes were on sale for forty bucks.
Then the TVs went black and the party began. A disco whistle shrieked. Bass boomed. Blond heads bathed in beer and sweat bobbed in sloppy rhythm as Club App exploded into a spectacle of fun. The Purdue crowd stripped down to tank-tops and did the dance where everyone stands in a circle and waves a beer cup overhead. The floorboards bounced beneath the thump of their white sneakers. A motorcycle gang arrived and kicked across the floor with their dates in a frightening do-se-doe, and just as macarena was imminent, I decided to see what was happening over in the guide village. I lit down the staircase and sank into the forest.
In Shantytown it was easy to tell the Westies from the West Virginians. The locals had had all summer to stake out prime real estate in this muddy glen between a chain link fence and a wet ditch. One end was blocked by broke-down buses and overflowing dumpsters, the other by a cluster of shacks. The more industrious guides had built lean-tos of plywood, pallets, and blue plastic tarps, and some of the fancier hooches, like the one Blaine and Jeremy lived in, were even framed up with real glass windows and locking doors. The envy of all was Heather’s boyfriend who resided in a treehouse plastiminium in the low branches of an oak with orange extension cords snaking off the deck into the muddy slough.
The West Virginians who lived in vehicles had, at the very least, claimed the high ground. A green school bus had been overhauled into a massive flat-bed, its engine long since removed. A stove chimney protruded from the cab and a giant teepee was pitched on the bed. There were camp trailers, motor homes, hammered old Volkswagens and Ford Econolines with curtains in the windows. Everything was draped in the ubiquitous, decaying, blue plastic. I sensed there would be rain unlike anything I had known out West.
We transient Westies were not so deluxe. We homesteaded the leftovers, which generally meant a tent bogged in mud or a truck stuck in the ditch. That night the migration was in full swing. As I walked into Shantytown, I met another convoy of Westies I knew from the desert. The trucks had Colorado and New Mexico plates, and were heralded by yapping cow dogs and the cling-clang of empty beer bottles rolling beneath the seats. Westie pickups converged around campfires like covered wagons, filled the parking spaces and spilled into the schoolbus boneyard.
The place looked like pictures I’d seen of the coalminers’ camps that dotted Appalachia in the early 1900s. West Virginia’s motto is Montani Semper Liberi—Mountain Men Are Always Free—and its history is rich with root
less men and women who journeyed to the hills to earn a poor living in some dangerous pursuit like mining or logging or dam-building. Sort of like us. And with a mix of dismay and pride, I realized something about my new home: it didn’t just look like a labor camp, it was a labor camp.
In the last open space, a bonfire was lit. One hundred drunken boatmen whooped as the flames rose twenty feet and licked the limbs of a birch tree. They pried lumber from the nearest hooch and burned it. They flung on pallets and plywood and plastic lawn chairs and foam mattresses. Someone stripped to shorts and sandals and with a running start leapt howling through the fire. A parade of firewalkers dodged beer bottles lobbed from the sidelines.
I was learning that in these parts Budweiser was an elixir of truth, and that a case of the stuff presented to Blaine and Jeremy could quickly reveal the secrets of Appalachian culture.
“In my family there’s only two things I needed to do to prove I was a man,” said Jeremy, thwapping his thumb against his Copenhagen. “One was to properly pack a tin of chew, and the other was to grow a beard.”
“By God,” concurred Blaine.
“My family is comprised of one half rednecks, and the other half hillbillies.”
I sensed that I was about to learn the difference.
“A redneck is mean, and he likes to get drunk on whiskey, shoot guns, and ride ATV’s. A hillbilly also likes to get drunk, shoot guns, and ride ATV’s, but he’s nice, and he likes to smoke weed.”
Finally all the liquids were drunk and all the solids burned. The bonfire flattened into a red glow. I negotiated the web of clotheslines and tentstakes back to the camper-truck. Worming into my home I banged my head on the ceiling. It was soft and comfortable in there, like in a coffin.
Frogs and crickets sang. A breeze blew. Out the windows in the gaps of the jungle canopy, stars shone through a thin sheet of mist, and I drifted to sleep to the occasional yelps of neighbors tripping on tarp-lines and the whiz of them pissing into the shallow gutters dug between dwellings.
As if to welcome Westies to the Gauley, Hurricane Fran climbed up off the Carolina coast into Appalachia. It had been hot and muggy all week; now it began to rain. There were no gales or cloudbursts or thunderclaps: just good, steady, wet rain, with no sign of letting up. We scurried into the forest to stow things away. A brown creek flowed through Shantytown. A box of envelopes sealed shut in my truck.
All Westies, no matter what our background, had to be trained. Some had made many commercial descents of Class V rivers like Cherry Creek in California or Gore Canyon in Colorado. Others, like me, had never been on Class V water, much less guided it. So river guide training is generally as much an audition as it is a training, in which the trainees are competing for a job.
When my watch beeped the first morning of training, the sky was dark and the rain still falling. Water had seeped in through the joints in the camper shell, and the wet curtains had pulled the Velcro fasteners off the wall. I wiggled out of my sleeping bag and into my wet raincoat. Up in the woods I heard a car door slam, someone coughing. I pulled on soggy long johns and balled up my wetsuit in a mesh bag.
Two dozen trainees waited in the rain. A few people hadn’t made it out of their tents, but no one went to fetch them. A flatbed Ford roared to life and we climbed under the canvas tent. The driver called, Everybody on, and someone slapped the back of the cab and shouted Go.
We rumbled through the darkness, crowded like soldiers on the waterlogged bench. Nobody spoke. The engine droned on as the truck grinded into gear. The smell of diesel filled the compartment. Cigarettes burned and the smoke rings floated down instead of up. Rain spattered down, puddled atop the canvas and seeped through in fat drops, and when someone poked the ceiling with a paddle, a sheet of water bounced off the tent and splatted on the highway.
“Welp,” said Jeremy. “Fuck a nut.”
“By God.”
Just as the night brightened into gray, we passed a hand-painted billboard announcing "Largest Earthen Dam East of the Mississippi." We inflated our boats and carried them along a path to the dam, and as we took a first look at the legendary Gauley, something was terrifically strange:
There was no water in this river.
I already knew that the Gauley was dam-controlled, but it wasn't until now that I saw what this meant. From the giant steel culverts that poked out of the dam, water drizzled with a meager splash. The forest was quiet and misty. We set down our boats and looked at our watches.
Although the dam’s original purpose was to prevent flooding, river-runners discovered early-on that during a good release, the Upper Gauley was some of the best whitewater in the country. River-runners bought highway property, put up signs and started taking people down the river. The problem was that the dam was unpredictable. Outfitters never knew when water would be released, so they couldn't book trips in advance.
Eventually the outfitters and the engineers made a deal. Since Summersville Lake was historically drained in the fall to accommodate winter rains, why not drain it during daylight hours, on the weekends, and confirm the dates a year in advance? And so was born Gauley Season, the phenomenon that had beckoned us all to the base of the dam this drizzling September morning.
A foghorn blasted. Spooked songbirds fluttered from the tree-tops. Somewhere, somebody pushed a button, flipped a switch, threw a lever. The limp waterfall from the tubes gathered mass and momentum. I could hear it rumble. The stream got thicker, more rigid. People whistled and clapped. Two massive shafts of water, wreathed in mist and spray, rocketed through the air and plunged into the river's first pool.
My training that day was of dubious value. The boatman had run the river hundreds of times. He could captain the Class V rapids without using the crew or getting his cigarette wet. Unlike in the desert canyons, in West Virginia a guide never pulls off the river to scout rapids. He’s expected to know them by heart.
"Watch how I do this,” the trainer say on the verge of some impossibly dangerous rock garden. “If you have swimmers here, they're gonna get hurt.”
The boat drifted into the channel and pivoted around rocks as is on a track.
”See there. Nothing to it."
We Westies looked at our paddles.
“As a policy, you will never take passengers on this run I'm showing you now,” our trainer warned us. Then after some thought he added, “Unless you're certain you can pull it off."
The Rivermen—the company at which I was training—had a glut of Westies, and the prospects of paid work were slim. I went poking around the other companies. Since the raft trips were identical, outfitters built their reputations not on what they sold, but on whom they sold it to. Rivermen attracted work-hard/play-hard under-30 professionals. An outfit which housed Fayetteville's rowdiest tavern sold cheap raft trips to the beer-guzzling Winnebego crowd. .38 Special played a concert there, and I was told it was a good place to get beat up. Wildwater Adventures offered a no-frills river trip and boasted the most years experience on the Gauley. Employees understood that working there was a privilege. In other words, first year guides did not expect to get paid.
Class VI, with its sprawling estate overlooking the New River Gorge, catered to the aspiring elite. There was a manicured garden and courtyard enclosed by elegant varnished-log cabins whose aesthetic could be charitably described as nouveau Daniel Boone. In the fancy sit-down restaurant hung framed and signed photos of celebrities and Kennedys, and tastefully matted articles from Smithsonian and Sunset.
North American River Runners in Hico fancied itself a complete outdoor adventure center, with mountain bike tours, a ropes course, and refereed jungle paintball wars. An outfitter's shop stocked all the right merchandise, and a "four-star restaurant" served post-adventure goodies. The manager walked me through the guide room. There were couches, payphone, showers, a kitchenette and even television. It seemed luxurious.
Some guides at North American roomed in the huts behind the guide room, but most lived in Trenchtown. Down a steep slope from the office, behind a fenced septic pond, a muddy creek drained into a bog. Stuck there in the mud were schoolbuses, campervans, and an Airstream trailer. I considered Trenchtown a step up from Shantytown. If the ramshackle ghetto sprawled out behind the Rivermen reflected their cavalier and bare-knuckled can-do, then the secluded, planned and weatherproof neighborhood in the North American forest showed earthy practicality. Tents were pitched on wide, flat platforms of planks and studs, high enough so that the September floods could flow underneath. Enormous tarps were stretched taut between tall trees, shedding the rain but letting the breeze flow below. Hibachis, lawn chairs, and ice chests set neatly on the porches.
These people knew how to squat.
So I left Fayetteville for Hico--short for High Country—a town consisting of a highway overpass and a single bar on whose front door was permanently pinned a card advertising “Dozer for Hire.” Hico used to be the tallest mountain around, and after being strip-mined down to the level of the surrounding terrain, the residents apparently hadn’t the heart to change the name to Loco, or Midco.
I was having some doubts about my career path. I knew that the Upper Gauley was pretty damn difficult, and in spots dangerous, too. I wasn’t sure I was good enough. When I asked the boss if I could start out on the Class IV Lower Gauley, he said he already had enough staff down there. Westies were expected to work the Upper. He told me to take a few more practice runs.
If anybody besides me had concerns about the danger of the river, you couldn’t have guessed it on opening day. The boat ramp was a carnival. Purple and red buses sputtered between aisles of automobiles and rows of port-a-potties. Human figures in life vests and booties and canary helmets marched like columns of ants, colliding, reversing. Growling tractor trailers and flat-bed trucks arrived with stacks of seventy-five pancaked rafts. Generators whined. I hopped out of the bus, trying to look like I knew what I was doing. I climbed the stack and inserted the plastic tentacles, and as the raft ballooned, we shoved it off and inflated the next.
I landed on a raft guided by a Westie named Kim. Bedecked in sleek synthetic fabrics with Velcro closures on the wrists and ankles, she cut a radically different profile from barefoot Robert Seay, who could be heard hollering across the ramp: “GIT IN! PAYADUL!” With seven passengers we hoisted a boat to shoulders, but before we could get in the river we had to get in line: fifty rafts were nose to nose on the trail, inching toward the ominous roar of the Tubes.
Kim spent the first few rapids teaching paddling strokes and practicing ferry angles and catching eddies. Above each Class V rapid (there are five, total), while the boats waited their turn in the eddy, she counseled the clients about her intended line and advised them on what do if they flipped, or swam, or wrapped. She told them that she could not run the boat alone, and that if they didn’t paddle correctly, we’d all be in trouble. Through Insignificant and Lost Paddle we slipped into narrow chutes while Kim barked out specific commands for left and right turns. The paddlers were intent and focused as we sunk deeper into the jungle. She had us practice loading the high-side before we dropped into Pillow Rock, where we surfed up the side of the huge boulder, then were flushed past it.
At Sweet Falls, the final Class V rapid, Kim told us that we’d have to thread a fourteen-foot waterfall or else bang into Dildo Rock and get chucked over the bow, probably with a broken ankle. After that we’d be in the clear. But first, we had to wait in line. Two dozen boats bumped in the eddy, waiting their turn. To add to the anxiety, we could hear a crowd below. Outfitters have built wooden docks leading to earthy picnic patios, and from above, though I couldn’t see the drop, I could see hundreds of gawkers dangling their feet off the downstream decks or squatting in unzipped wetsuits on the surrounding boulders. The entire Upper Gauley can be run in a couple of hours, and the paddlers below had finished before lunchtime. They munched sandwiches and slurped soda, waiting for the next contestant to drop over the falls. Smoke rose off a barbecue. Each time a boat dropped off the horizon, the crowd let out a bloodthirsty cheer.
"Those people down there will be shouting commands," said Kim. "Don't listen to them. Listen to me. They want to see us upside-down. I want us to stay upright."
I smelled burgers grilling below. I heard a whimper from our boat.
"This is a Roman circus," she said. The customers wore frightened faces of bunny rabbits beneath the mallet. "We are the Christians, the river is the lion, the people on the banks are the Romans.”
“Will they help us?” asked someone. “If we get in trouble?”
Kim contemplated this for a moment then shrugged.
“The Romans are rooting for the lion, not for the Christians."
And when our turn came, Kim steered us perfectly into the drop and called, “Hit the floor!” at which point we all tucked our paddles and ducked into the bilge, and with a sudden whump we were safely below the falls, the crowd whistling and readying for the next. One of the paddlers crawled out of his bunker, blinked, looked around.
“Was that it?” he said, disappointed. “I didn’t even get wet.”
On the last day of opening weekend, a kayaker drowned on the Meadow River, a tributary of the Gauley. In the guide room people spoke in low voices. Have you heard?
The drowned man had guided many seasons on the Gauley. He flipped his kayak in a Class VI chute and then disappeared. The rest of his party pulled to shore but saw no sign. It took four hours to locate the boat and the body, wedged between rocks on the bottom of the river, and pull them to the surface.
I listened to the guides tell stories in the awkward past tense. He was a good boater, he'd done that stretch a dozen times, I just talked to him last week. This is supposed to happen to the weekenders, they said, not to the locals. He lived here. He was one of us.
At least he went out doing what he loved, someone said brightly.
Let's go boating, said someone else.
When my first day of paid work arrived, I pitied the customers filing out of the bus. They had no way of knowing how to choose the right guide. They could have gotten on a boat with Kim who’d run the Gauley dozens of times, or with Robert Seay who could guide it with a blindfold, or maybe they’d get stuck with me.
Of course I didn’t tell them it was my first trip. I only knew the names of the major rapids, so when someone asked where we were, I practiced the guide’s time-honored tradition of making stuff up.
“This one’s called Big Rock Rapid, and the next one is, um, Death Fang Falls.”
And I was reminded of one reason I like working on rivers: the customer is not always right. In fact, unless he is in complete agreement with his guide, the customer is most assuredly wrong.
By the time we reached Sweet Falls, with the boat upright and everyone still in it, the customers thought I was a regular pro. As we crested over the chute, a gust of wind blew us sideways, and instead of trying to fight it with a left turn, I called a right turn and we ran the falls backward. The move positioned us perfectly to paddle hard away from Postage Stamp Rock and the Mail Box, places you definitely don’t want to be, and later that day the lead guide complimented me on my run. I pretended that I had planned it all along.
I worked a total of four days on the Gauley. I left West Virginia with two weekends remaining in the season, even though I was on the schedule. My reasons for skipping town were several. Partly, it seemed I should quit while I was ahead: I’d earned enough money to pay for gas, and I hadn’t hurt myself or anyone else. I could exit gracefully. Partly, the monotony of slogging around wet Shantytown for five days seemed to outweigh the thrill of two days work. But mostly, I left early simply because I’d done what I’d come here to do: I’d guided the Upper Gauley.
But before I could leave, I had one more mission.
“Listen here, cockknocker,” Blaine told me one rainy afternoon as we lounged in his leaky hooch drinking a cooler of beer some customers had forgotten in their campsite that weekend. “If you damn Westies want a real adventure, you need to take a ride with Five Dollar Frank.”
Frank was a local codger who’d take you on a scenic flight for five bucks. I drove out the narrow highway to a lopsided tin hangar and a single airstrip with weeds sprouting through the blacktop. The morning was clear and sunny and I was the only customer. Frank was tinkering under the hood of his Cessna in a blue monkey suit and after failing to get his attention in a normal speaking voice I hollered, "Hey there!" and he turned around. He limped toward me with dark glasses and a greasy cap and I wondered about entrusting my life to him. He was muttering something about the goddamn gub’ment.
"Normally I only go with a minimum three people but I say I'll do it for five dollars and that's what I'll do. So get in."
We drove the four-seater to the gas pump, fueled up, and bumped down the runway. The propeller buzzed and the windows rattled and then with an effortless hop upward we were flying. We zoomed over the highway. The trailers and fast-food restaurants were dots in the green. Frank told me he had bet a thousand dollars that Bob Dole would beat Clinton in the upcoming election.
"I always bet Republican,” he boasted. “And I always win."
As we approached the New River Gorge Frank told me that he was born nearby, the youngest of seven children, and his father died early. Frank’s brothers and sisters were great successes but he, because he was deaf, was the worst student in high school. He may have flunked out, but was vague explaining that point. So he had learned to fly airplanes. He couldn’t join the Air Force because of his ears, but after Pearl Harbor, the Army hired him as a flight instructor.
"Back then they had more planes than pilots to fly them," he shouted. “Before the bureaucrats took over.”
That was my last day in West Virginia. Since then Gauley Season has changed. The boat ramp has been moved downstream to accommodate a hydroelectric plant, so you no longer get to launch directly into the tubes. Shantytown was bulldozed by order of the local magistrate. According to Blaine the new crop of Westies are a bunch of clean-cut goddamned do-gooders. And last year Five-Dollar Frank died; his successor charges fifteen.
But that day, Frank and I soared over the bridge and up the winding New River as if we would both live forever. The steep green gorge was speckled with red, and rafts shimmered like tin cans on the water. It’s tempting to lament the transformation of Appalachia, from a backwoods of coalminers and moonshiners and lumberjacks to a destination hub of commercial sport and organized fun; but that autumn day, flying with Frank, there seemed not an incongruity, but a continuum, between the coal and timber and whitewater that through the decades have drawn adventurers into these hills, and I had a feeling that, above all, what distinguished West Virginia from other places was that, here, no matter how far down the social ladder a person dwells, he still does more or less whatever the hell he wants.
Frank asked me what I did, and I told him I was a river guide.
“What are your intentions in life?”
“Maybe I’ll write a book someday.”
"A writer?” Frank barked. “Do you like poems?”
“Sure.”
Raising his raspy drawl over the engine's whine, Five-Dollar Frank shouted, "There are strange things done in the midnight sun, but the strangest I ever did see," and in the pause I cut in, "Was the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge, I cremated Sam McGee!"
Frank whooped and the sunlight flashed off his glasses like a glint in his eye, and after another lap around the New River Gorge, we floated back down to the West Virginia hills.
Posted by Mark Sundeen on June 24, 2004 02:29 PM