On Rivers and Roads

You’ll only see a blur of the grass at that embankment on Interstate 68. I saw every dew-heavy blade in a single glimpse of green before the horizon tilted. Then squeezing darkness and tumbling terror.

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The purple Plymouth Voyager idled in the driveway, exhaling into the swollen fragrance of fall. We’d cinched down three multicolored kayaks hard against the wooden roof racks, but they still stood tall like a full-bellied sail. Greedily, the van had gobbled to bursting all the extra tarps and trail mix and maps and even a two-gallon can of kerosene. We contorted our bodies around sleeping pads and paddles that slanted across seats and resisted the urge to roll our eyes as our parents crammed their last reminders into the car. Keep an eye on gas. Wear seat belts. Then we slid the side door shut before anything could leap back out.

Within an hour, we were in amongst the hills and soon began climbing the Cumberland Plateau. One year too young for a license, I made myself useful as the entertainment, prattling on and playing reggae as we rolled. I dutifully read the road signs, “Steep grade,” “Fog area,” and “Falling rock.” But other signs I missed, as one does. A little orange light lit up on the dash, but Bob Marley was wailing “I don't wanna wait in vain,” while a badly tied strap cuffed off-tempo against the boats on the roof. We descended a hill amongst sassafras and red spruce and ran out of gas.

The engine stalled and the car coasted along the saddle between hills. Luke’s long sinewy fingers gripped the steering wheel tightly, showing bony and white. The rush of trees slowed and stood one beside the next. Chris, who had acquired a driver’s license just one month before, stretched forward from the back seat, as far as his lap belt would allow. His baggy t-shirt hung slack—his mouth, too, frozen between what he was saying and words not yet formed. Transfixed as he was, he might have been receiving extrasensory signals, or sending them, somehow willing the tank back to full. 

As the van lost speed, Luke automatically reached out his right hand to grasp the stick-shift of his pickup truck, only to paw the emptiness of the van’s center console for a few moments until he found the gearshift on the steering column. His left leg wagged back and forth like a denim metronome as he guided the car in neutral, and his bony, buzzed skull angled out from a faded red hoodie. His lanky seventeen-year-old frame would fill out soon and there would be kayaking posters of him tacked up in teenage girls’ bedrooms. But now, long-limbed and a little lost, he steered the van off onto the shoulder where the stench of skunk slammed us back against our seats.

Chris blanched, making his summer-blond hair look almost brown. “What are we going to do?” he asked. He was always speaking in questions. Luke and I held our breaths—skunked—wondering how to hitchhike with the stink. Chris slid from his seat and rolled the side door open before Luke and I could protest. Had he failed to register the smell?! There was no ignoring it now. The odor blasted in as life jackets and helmets and sleeping bags leapt out. I kicked out from my door and shoved Chris back into the van, bulldozing him with an unstuffed sleeping bag to the chest, driven by the rotting skunk dying a few feet away and the suddenly wail of "It's my love that you're running from" as Luke’s elbow caught the volume dial. We forgot ourselves in the pandemonium, forgot why we’d even stopped there. Luke started the van as though we’d just taken a break. As we climbed the hill ahead, Chris blurted, “Aren’t we out of gas?” But we just went on.

Gas can settle towards the fuel intake, especially on a gentle rise, and squeeze out several extra ounces. We stalled and restarted three times before we finally rolled right up an exit ramp and into a gas station. Soon, Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake lay dark blue and ringed by woods to our left. A light drizzle began to play across its surface as Luke turned and took us down a dirt trail. The valley echoed with the pulsing roar of waterfalls. 

We seemed to fall from the van directly into our kayaking gear, ready and running barefoot along a narrow trail, while the van’s cooling fan still whirred. We pushed past mountain laurel branches to Swallow and Swallowtail Falls, where the steep creeks of West Virginia sneak into Western Maryland. The two falls appear unprovoked from flatwater, carving a gorge through shelves of sandstone and shale, slick and shaded by pine boughs. Steady rain began as we set our boats beside Swallow Falls. Chris walked down along the bank with a throw-rope for safety, and I thought how silly it would be to throw a rope to someone swimming in the calm pool below the waterfall. Chris cringed away from the falls, but I was bolder. 

Luke launched first, cruising along the far-left eddyline and vaulting himself over. He disappeared from sight, and I didn’t see him land. I didn’t even hear a splash, only the incessant throbbing of the falls. I made the approach, feeling the deep purchase of the paddle in the water, plunging and pulling like teeth into a cold, juicy fruit. I pulled my last stroke from below the lip, throwing my feet and the boat out away from the rocks. My eyes closed—WHY?—and I waited for my feet to drive down into the waiting pool. A perfect swooping dive. All the things I dreaded doing wrong I didn’t. So, down we went to the next.

From above Swallowtail Falls, I watched Chris scrambling along the bank, his bright red helmet bobbing like a Will-o’-the-Wisp’s lantern leading hapless souls astray. By the time I’d put on my sprayskirt to seal the boat against the water, Luke had gone. Keep your eyes open and enjoy the fall, I coached. Watch the water rise up to meet you. I lined up just to the left of my marker, an odd little rock, launched, and for a moment felt the rush of weightlessness. Then, I looked down for the landing, but there was no water rising up to meet me. Instead I struck a boulder halfway down the drop and tipped backwards into the hydraulic. Immediately rolling up, I could see Luke and Chris in front of me in the flatwater. But the hole had me. It rolled me again and again, even as I tried to pull myself away from the falls. I was battered from all directions. Bubbles rose and sank and I couldn’t tell which way was up. I pulled my spray skirt and the boat filled with water, sinking me away from the falls. Then everything stopped in the dark water, and as I came up swimming, a rope was uncoiling above me.

Chris pulled me onto the rain splattered bank. “What happened?” he asked. Looking upstream, I could see my odd little rock now sitting four feet farther to the right of where I’d been. I walked back bewildered and scared. Chris fancied himself a hero, but I swear I had sensed mischief deeper in the murky depths.

After a kerosene-fueled campfire, meager dinner, and even poorer sleep, we rolled out to find a Denny’s. By late morning, we hitched a ride from the Jenkinsburg Bridge take-out of Lower Big Sandy Creek with a grizzled guy in plaid who, throughout the drive upstream, seemed to be trying to plug the gaps of his missing teeth with Winston Full Flavor Reds. We slid our boats into the creek and played our way down to Wonder Falls at the end of the first mile.

There are no photos, but I have a mental snapshot—a mid-boof freeze frame—of me halfway down the horseshoe falls, water droplets glistening in sunlight above the blue-green translucent currents. The boils below made the landing pillow-soft. Chris followed Luke down and both bounced perfectly into the eddy beside me. 

Luke and I craved another wallop of Wonder, so we fought our way foolishly up the river-right bank through entangling rhododendrons. Sticky with sap, coated in muck, and exhausted, we pulled on our sprayskirts. Back in our familiar river-running rhythm, we approached the falls in tight formation, side by side like a pair of Blue Angels. I gave him a little extra space because his boat, the Savage Scorpion, had sharp edges and a fierce point. Our paddles pulled in sync but as I jumped left, I saw Luke suddenly catch his edge and roll over to the right. I turned as I landed to see his boat cartwheel out of the water without him. His paddle popped up beside me in the aerated water, then his boat surfaced so I went for that. Finally, I saw Luke swimming free of the hole. I dropped everything to scoop him onto my bow and help him get to shore. When he turned to climb onto the riverbank, I could see blood leaking down the back of his bony head onto his lifejacket. 

He sat ghost-white and red staring at the falls, wondering, like I had, how things had so suddenly flipped on their head. Heavy clouds gathered above and Luke’s swollen wound—a Scorpion sting just below his helmet—leaked and grew sticky in the breeze of the coming storm. He could hardly wear his helmet for all the swelling. Four miles and four more big rapids lay ahead. We spoke little through the class III boogie water between rapids.

Luke led, charging left into Zoom Flume, bypassing the curling wave and bouncing safely over the cheese-grater slide. Left again at Little Splat to avoid the ledge hole then we climbed out on river left above Big Splat. The light was fading and a chill set in. My stomach turned just looking at Luke’s leaking blood, and I chose to walk the slick rocks around the waterfall, which tumbled splat! onto a river-right rock. Luke felt too unsteady on his legs to walk, insisting that paddling would be easier. He eased back in his boat and seemed to pull smoothly left as the water fell. He landed perfectly but dizzily braced in the flatwater over and over while we watched. We reached the final stretch of flatwater in semi-darkness, somehow failing to notice we had passed the final big rapid. The surface of the water pitted everywhere around us, biting up at big invisible rain droplets.

Back at the ice-cold van, Luke held a T-shirt against his skull, while Chris drove barefoot and sand-covered into Albright. The liquor store man at the edge of town looked us over through yellow-stained glasses thick as bottles of Jack Daniel’s. “They got a clinic down in Kingwood,” he said. “Preston Memorial. You boys been fightin’?” 

We sloshed back to the van through the now-thick torrents and crawled down the road into Kingwood. “Under eighteen? No insurance card?” the receptionist barked at us, seemingly unimpressed by Luke’s bloody compress. From the clinic parking lot, we used a pay phone to call Luke’s parents and give them the clinic’s number. Back inside, I squinted against the brightness, the ranting receptionist, and finally the five stitches in the back of Luke’s head. Holding a plastic bag against his head, he trudged through the rainy parking lot to the van and fell asleep in the back.

The van splashed back into our campsite beside the Cheat River well after midnight. Chris tilted his seat back and stayed in the car with Luke, who lay snoring under the mountain of fleece I’d piled over him. I wormed into my tent, holding my muddy legs out while the rain rinsed them clean. By 1:00 a.m., I had stored my shoes beneath the rain fly and climbed into my sleeping bag. The tent sagged through the night and at least once every hour I was woken by the van’s engine starting up to run the heat.

The next morning, we stood shoulder to shoulder watching the Cheat River surge fast and flood-brown beneath an old railroad bridge. I imagined the water surging onto its iron sides to splash at the message painted there in square, bold letters. You may remember the slogan from West Virginia state tourism ads. “Wild and Wonderful,” I read aloud. Luke traced his fingers over his stitches.

Luke fell asleep across the back seat as Chris steered us onto I-68 East. As we left West Virginia, Toots and the Maytals crooned, “Almost heaven, West Jamaica / True ridge mountains, shining down the river.” A sign pointed south to Accident, Maryland but we continued eastward.

I closed my eyes to the sun glaring off the highway as Jimmy Cliff testified, “Oh, the river gets deeper / The hills get steeper.” The rivers and roads had taken it out of me, so I settled back into the passenger seat, letting the seatbelt support my head. The van felt warm and the song’s chorus seemed to repeat endlessly. “I've got a hard road to travel / And a rough rough way to go.”

A sudden lurch and my eyes flicked open. The grassy corner of the highway embankment swelled towards the windshield at sixty miles per hour. The left tire rose up and the horizon tilted. I tucked, throwing my arms over my head, squeezing my eyes shut. For a moment, I felt the rush of weightlessness. Then the ground slammed against my window, caught the roof edge, and we rolled to the right again and again. The van was battered from all directions. Glass pellets peppered my closed eyelids, and I couldn’t tell which way was up. 

Then everything stopped. I opened my eyes to see the kerosene can from the trunk wedged between my legs and felt the roof pressing against my shoulder blades. I saw Chris’s hands unbuckling his seatbelt and reached for mine, too. Then, I shoved my door but it didn’t budge. Swiveling in the seat, I kicked out at the door savagely and it creaked open. I landed in the grass already yanking at the sliding door. Luke came bursting out, and we sprinted across the highway as cars veered onto the shoulder. 

I heard a man’s voice from an open window, a clunky mobile phone held to his mustached mouth.  “I thought I was going to be pulling dead bodies out of there,” he said. Please help, I thought, but didn’t know what help I needed. I felt bruised but nothing was broken. Someone spotted blood, but it was only Luke’s lightly leaking stitches. Across the road, I saw the roof of the glassless van pressed down against the dashboard. Thirty yards back, I spotted the boats, still tied securely to the racks. 

A tow truck arrived and the bystanders drifted away. The driver, all beard, belly, and overalls, sauntered over. “Fell asleep at the wheel, eh?” he said to Chris. “You boys are lucky.” God yes, I agreed silently as the adrenaline waned. I sat up front in the tow truck, staring at my hands as he loaded the van onto the truck bed. As we wheeled back onto the highway, I watched the green embankment blur out of sight through the driver’s window.

Near Flintstone, the truck pulled into a whitewashed gas station behind which a steep hill rose up on three sides. Half a dozen immense sycamores heaved huge brown, baseball-glove-sized leaves down to Earth. I sat watching, head tilted back, beside two pumps and a pale blue pay phone. The leaves—as the memories on these rivers and roads—drifted down through the endless autumn sky.

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Twenty-nine years later, I paddled the Cheat River for the first time, helping lead a training trip for aspiring Cheat Festival racers. For the last 12 years, correlating perhaps with the birth of my daughter, I have been able to sleep, if only fitfully, in cars when someone else is driving. I paddled with Luke Hopkins only a handful of times after this, following the diverging paths we’d discussed earlier that summer on the banks of the Ottawa River: I dove into slalom as he focused on freestyle kayaking. He started the community focused LocalPaddler.com site and went on to win silver medals in the 2002 and 2003 Freestyle World Championships in single canoe (C-1). Later, he pioneered designs in stand up paddleboarding, founding Stride Stand Up Paddleboards and later teaming up with BadFish SUP and Body Glove. I never saw Chris again. This May, I’ll race the Cheat River, and I hope to revisit Lower Big Sandy Creek for a personal first descent of Big Splat.

That's me in the middle in a blue helmet, a head taller than everyone else (it's the CHEAT River after all). Credit Ashley McEwan.