There must be a thousand eddies on the Chattooga River
between the bridge and Woodall Shoals, and after work
when the trips we guided were soggy memories, we’d catch
all of them, boof every angled, sloping ledge — frontwards,
backwards, edgewards, upside-downwards; we’d surf every wave,
from the least dimple to the pulsing monsters that formed
at highwater, when the Chattooga’s amaretto ran whitecapped
and fast, eroding banks, tossing deadfall as if carrots
in a giant’s mouth. Fiends for breathing that galax-pungent
escarpment air, we’d put-on with haste, always ferrying
across to the South Carolina-side, first, to check the gauge,
and then do a couple of rolls, a couple of pivot turns
if the boat was low volume, making sure the skirt fit right,
that it wouldn’t pop on the first ender at Surfing Rapid.
Sometimes there’d be old-timers in the shallows, turning
over rocks for jackdogs — catfish bait — & they’d look at us
the way shopkeepers look at skateboarders who are surfing
the sidewalk in front of their store — techno weenies
no matter how hard we tried to be retro, in our snazzy
lifevests, our pink brain buckets. A curious hunger
drove our play — part-obsession, part-adrenaline,
part-longing to connect with gravity, time, water,
earth; but mostly just each other, ourselves. There
was no garbage down there, no roads and no homes,
only lines, new & old, and depending on the water level
and what sort of boat you wore, and how long you’d been
wearing it, & some coefficient between where you wanted
it to go and how well you visualized it getting there, you were
on line, or off; at Surfing Rapid, S-Turn, Highwater Hole;
at Rock Jumble, Woodall, Screaming Left Hand Turn; lines,
eddy hops, elevator moves, backferries into sidesurfs,
screw-ups, three-sixties, pirouettes. “Hey, follow me,”
one of us always said, already getting momentum,
ninjastroking the little plastic casket, about to slice
into the meat of some frothing curler, some uniform pourover,
or tripped-out creekslot; and we did, of course, every time
and gladly, like disciples, hungry for salvation, we followed.
