Saluda Sodality:

Like many others, the thought of going on the Great American River Adventure had crossed his mind.

With the coming of Chris Jordan was what I would say was the start of life in the canoe. When I met him, I was swiftly heading for a breakup that I don’t really care to talk about. Chris was skinny fat then, had chestnut dreadlocks, and tended to break even on the amount of trouble he talked himself out of as he talked himself into. He was wearing maroon cutoff shorts, and I had thought I’d seen everything. After several beers and a shot or two, he mentioned that he had recently traded some doodad from a scrapyard for an unsellable canoe, and that’s when it hit me. “Hey, would you want to canoe to Charleston? Think of it as a way for me to see how you get on with the water, and we can talk about that sailboat stuff along the way.” I could see the line of thoughts ricocheting around in his head, and it drew constellations of campfires by the riverside and then, much later, schooners in Fiji. Like many others, the thought of going on the Great American River Adventure had crossed his mind. For Chris, though, this opportunity was only the start of something bigger. After he connected his dots, he blurted out, “I’m in!” I smiled, looked down, and said, “Only if you wear those horrible shorts.”

Now, there isn’t a better way to see the state of South Carolina than by river. The Saluda River, the US Army Corps of Engineers says, meanders 180 miles from the base of Sassafras Mountain, the highest point in The Palmetto State, down to Columbia. None of those miles are navigable for commercial interests, which makes this tranquil waterway especially suited for the Great American River Adventure. If you continue past the capital, through the Congaree Swamp, and down the Cooper River, then you will have experienced the entire natural and historical spectrums of South Carolina, ranging from the Appalachian Mountains to the marshy wetlands, and from the textile country to bourgie Charleston, respectively. And that’s what we intended to do.

We got a late start on that first day, with getting up to the state line and all. When we did settle into the river, you might have laughed when you noticed that our aspirations didn’t quite match our current reality. Wading through ankle-deep water, Chris and I spent the whole first day dragging that sixteen-foot green canoe over old stone dams, shallow rock beds, and sandbanks. As canoes go, this beast was the Cadillac El Dorado of rivers, and weighed as much as one, too. We only covered a miserable five miles that day, and I still remember the pangs of embarrassment when he asked, “How much longer is it going to be like this?” The truth is that, at that time, I did not know. I reminded Chris, however, of the often excluded part of the axiom that goes, “Half of life is showing up.” “The other half is dealing with what you’ve just signed yourself up for,” I said as a teachable moment to him and a bitter reminder to myself. That night, Chris and I slept at the confluence of the North and South Saluda Rivers, eager to get this canoe trip going.

After the journey’s start left me with a small hangover, Chris and I approached the boiling waters of Blythe Shoals the next morning, which American Whitewater classifies as a Class III-IV rapid. The problem we had here, you see, was not that we lacked the requisite experience to run such a challenging piece of water. Rather, the problem we had at this rapid was the cantankerous-old-person type. Specifically, we had an “Old White Person” problem. As we were scouting out the line, this disagreeable old man comes hobbling up the shore, telling us he's going to call the cops if we don’t leave immediately. That he owns land on both sides of the river, and we’re currently trespassing. Now, I had heard about this guy on kayaking forums in the middle of my research, but I always thought of him more as the troll under the bridge, a sort of tall tale, if you will. The way I saw it was: we’d zip through shoals, and this troll would be none the wiser. I also thought it to be rather ignoble to get cantankerous over something that cannot be truly owned by one individual - a river. What the old man didn’t know was that I had an ace up my sleeve, though.

In the short time that I had known Chris Jordan, I had learned that he had the gift of the gab. I had seen him finesse his way around the nightlife in downtown Greenville. He had even talked a cop out of a traffic infraction that I was plenty guilty of. I said, “Chris, why don’t you see if you can’t talk him into calming down a little bit?” I give it about fifteen minutes that they talked down on the shore. I saw them shake hands amicably, and I knew things had worked out. Chris came back up the hill, and we launched ourselves into the steady pool of water just before the churning rapids began. Looking over the edge, I began thinking that getting that surly old man off our backs might have been the easiest part to this whole Blythe Shoals thing. Like this whole journey before us, like any other adventure in life at all, we just decided to stick our necks out there and see what happens.

Now, perhaps, a sixteen-foot canoe, built for comfort not for speed, was not the best vessel for this section of the river. Further down? Definitely. The place where we got stuck and had raging water swamping the boat, possibly turtling and sending us to our riparian graves? Absolutely not. In a panic, I stuck my right foot out and almost lost it when the boat broke free from the rocks, and then we took off like a scalded cat. At the bottom of the rapid, that lumbering canoe was halfway foundering. We waved to that old man as we passed his house. I said, “Chris, what’d you even say to that guy?” “I just told him we weren’t just out here fucking around. That we were going all the way to Charleston. Hell or highwater.” Somehow that convinced the old man. Was it the idea that the adventure is bigger than us all? That his hostility wasn't going to stop us anyway? Who knows? All I do know is that old, white man must have thought we were a ship of fools, plenty certain that we were going to die on our way south, as we bailed out a bathtub full of water going past his front porch.

Google Earth: https://earth.google.com/earth/d/1ed7nH0enwHq7vS6xMBHG2yKeeK_4exsl?usp=sharing