It was early in my paddling career. I was paddling solo for the first time in my life. I felt strong but just a bit on edge. The canoe I was in was not much more than a squirt boat, and I found myself at the top of the steepest creek I had been on to date.
The eddy at the top was durbulent, mushrooming boils were billowing up out of the currents. A distinct horizon line lay before me, I felt as an Indian must have felt like running his birchbark canoe down a pitch that had never been run by man. Certainly noone had been where I was about to go. The creek must have been rising as the eddy seemed to surge, boils sloshing up on the banks of boulders. Both sides of the stream were awash. I was sure that I would die, but there was no way out with all that turbulance and the wirlpools that had developed in the eddy now.
I inched my way toward the precipice and when I was within 10 feet I blasted a few forward strokes for some speed once I saw what looked like an eddy to the right of the first of many boofs. Geesus the drop was strong, I almost got sucked back into the fold of the hole infront of a pillowed boulder. It turned out not to be an eddy, just a slight calm in the maelstrom of a rapid that lay before me. The banks were sloshing masses of death eddies so I strocked back out into the center of the creek and prayed for the best. It is amazing to how alert you can become even after a 9 hour drive to the river. No body else had showed up. I didn't care when I put in, knowing this was only a class III-IV river. What I didn't know was that there had been flash flooding upstream 11 hours and some 45 river miles that early morning.
So I find myself in the middle of this raging cauldron of a creek, sheesh it was only 120 feet per mile. I knew behind one of these boulders or horizon lines lay a killer of a hole. The tree canopy was overhanging, blocking out light from a dim overcast sky. I begin to see white up ahead and get this sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. Holy freakin shoot, it is exactly what I have been dreading. It looks completely white as far as I can see. I start paddling for all I am worth. Speed is life, I remember to lean forward and brace for something I have never seen before. One last powerful boof stroke and I launch through the air for all I am worth.
As I come to the surface after this rush of a rapid, I hear myself screaming at the top of my lungs. Someone down there at the bottom of that drop reaches out and grabs me. I was floundering and needed a life gaurd at that point. I was exhausted. It was December 19th 1957, the day of my birth.
The best boof I was ever paddled for
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Louie