Flutterby™! : Whitewater Wars

I guided my last commercial trip, on the Ocoee, sometime in late June of 1995. I went as a customer sometime in 1988, I think, and in the spring of 1989 walked up to Chris at a table full of High Country flyers, and asked "how do you become a guide?" Several intense weekends later I "checked out", and started running commercial trips as the sole guide in the boat, and even up to a year or two later I'd wake up in a cold sweat with dreams of swimming in that area from Broken Nose down to Slice-n-Dice.

Polk County was a strange place then, but obviously in transition to modernity: You could still find flyers on the general store bulletin board for barter, moonshine for whatever of value you could bring, the locals had started to accept that the rafters and whitewater paddlers were bringing enough money to compensate for being long-haired freaks, the Benton fireworks disaster was 6 years past, and the fight over the flume line was further back than that. You could buy beer, although not on Sunday, but liquor required a trip back down to Chattanooga.

A few years ago I read Elizabeth Dulemba's "A Bird on Water Street", a fictional tale of that area in the mid '80s, and, of course, recognized all the quirks of the area in transition, but just recently picked up David Brown's "The Whitewater Wars: The Rafters and the River Trip that Saved the Ocoee & The Gauley River Battle" and was taken right back to it: An out-of-control Federal agency, TVA, taking land through eminent domain for a thousand or two an acre, and reselling it for hundreds of thousands an acre, a rural Sheriff who didn't think the law was that relevant, and the rough-and-tumble culture of the early rafters that was maturing out of the scene in the time I was guiding there.

This may be a book of limited interest, but it took me right back to those days of midnight runs, trying to sneak a bright yellow raft under the searchlight scanning across the river that we were sure was the Sheriff, going back and re-running the bottom half at 20k+CFS because there was no way we were gonna let a Ranger scare us off the river, and added new depth of what came before and made some of those shenanigans possible.

And I've run a couple of fun trips on the Gauley, back when it had that monster put-in with the huge eddy-line, screaming "all forward" over the earth-shaking rumble of the discharge pipes, an experience which apparently is no longer, and the read-through of the political maneuverings that made that possible was also entertaining.

An enjoyable quick read on the recent history of two amazing rivers.