Editor’s note: Beginning today, Will Harlan’s “Wild Life” column will become a regular feature in The Smoky Mountain News. Harlan is an Emory graduate who likes to write about his experiences in the outdoors, which include skydiving, whitewater paddling, adventure racing, hang gliding, rock climbing and running. He wrote for Atlanta’s Creative Loafing before relocating to Western North Carolina and currently writes for Blue Ridge Press.

I was hanging upside-down underwater, trapped in a flipped-over kayak. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. And I certainly couldn’t remember how to roll. The cold current was spinning me further downriver where another foaming rapid bared its rocky teeth.

So I did what any other air-breathing animal would do: I panicked. I bailed out on my paddle and started flailing my arms in a desperate attempt to get above water. When that didn’t work, I pulled the release strap on my kayak skirt and wiggled out of the boat. I popped to the surface moments later, blue-faced and foggy-headed, and grabbed onto my friend Gene’s kayak to catch my breath.

I was trying to Eskimo roll on the Nantahala, a loud, hard-flowing whitewater river west of Bryson City. For the past few weeks, Gene — a world-class kayaker — had been talking me through the roll. It sounded so easy above water: tuck your body forward, cut your paddle, snap your hips. But every time I flipped, the words fell out of my head and washed downstream, and all I could do was flounder in the freezing flow until Gene rescued me.

“Stay relaxed out there,” he suggested. “Next time you flip, clear your head and count to three.”
On shore, I knocked the water out of my ears, which were still ringing with the underwater sound of the river. Then I climbed back into my kayak and paddled out into the current — determined this time not to swim.

Veils of morning mist still shrouded the river. In the gray gauze, Gene and I eddy-hopped through Patton’s Run — a bouncy rapid with a 90-degree bend — and played in the splashy wave train below Jaws, a fin-shaped rock in the middle of the river. Just passed the quarry, we haystacked over large tongues of whitewater. My head still felt cloudy, but it was starting to shake loose.

Next up was Whirlpool — a sudsy, squirrelly rapid with a great surfing wave. Gene demonstrated a few Eskimo rolls in the rapid, then asked me to give it a try.

The wave knocked me over instantly, and my mind was swallowed up again in the underwater surround-sound — a dull, low-pitched ringing that drowned out my thoughts. It reminded me of lying on my back in a bathtub and trying to listen to a radio in the other room. Only this time, the radio was my own muffled brainwork. Nothing was getting through the river’s garbled static. I frantically flapped around underwater  like a hooked fish fighting the line — then squirmed out of the kayak again.

Usually, after I wet-exited, Gene tried to come up with something positive and encouraging to make me feel better: “You almost had it ... You’re getting closer ... Your set-up looked really good ....” But this time, he told it to me straight:

“You’re scared.”

It took a few seconds to sink in. He was right, dammit. I was scared to death. I wasn’t trying to roll — I was trying not to drown.

We paddled silently downstream for awhile. Steep granite cliffs blocked all but a sliver of sky. Ahead, I could hear the churning, crashing sounds of Nantahala Falls — a class III rapid with swirling suckholes and skull-cracking rock ledges.

Gene whirled his index finger in circles signalling me to eddy out above the rapid. I ferried across the river and paddled toward the pocket of calm water when suddenly my kayak skimmed a rock and flipped. It caught me completely off guard. I didn’t have time to get scared. One second I was talking to Gene, the next I was blowing bubbles.

The hollow hum of river water clogged my ears. I started to reach for the release strap, then stopped myself. I counted one ... two ... three ... and there, in the river’s voice, I heard my own. It said: tuck, cut, snap.

Keeping my body close to the boat, I twisted my paddle and flicked my hips toward the surface. I felt the kayak rotate. I remembered to keep my head down against my shoulder. And the next thing I knew the river was below me again.

Gene pumped his fist and shouted — a deep, throat-scorching screech that sounded strangely like the ring of the river. We high-fived our paddles and slapped them against the water. Not even the noisy Nanny Falls could drown out our hoots and howls.

We finished our run down the Falls, snaking smoothly along a seam of current and splatting onto the frothy foam below. The sun had burned off the mist, glossing the water with white light. I was no longer afraid. And for the first time all morning, my mind was as calm and clear as the river below me.

(Harlan can be reached at wharlan@hotmail.com)

 

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