Nice canoes...where you from? How far you going? Have you run this river before? It was a one-way conversation. Like a dog staring at a ceiling fan, the canoers didn't know what to make of us.
Who were we to question their vision? After all, none of us were any wiser than the proverbial blind men figuring out an elephant. Their approach was just a bit more "traditional" than our avant-garde, seat-of-the-pants approach. We exchanged pleasantries and wished them well.
"Thanks…OK," they mustered. We left it at that and said we hoped to see them downstream-shaking our heads in disbelief.
Not ten minutes later we noticed an apple and an orange floating by. Before we could snag them, an upside-down canoe followed by a cowboy-hatted head gasping for breath appeared, surrounded by all sorts of stuff too numerous to notice individually. The Deliverance Boys had ended their portage prematurely among the upwellings and eddies below the Falls. Turbulent water had grappled one of their canoes.
While Norton and Joyce towed the canoe and a totally-out-of-it hanger-on to shore, Chuck and I gathered as much of the floating gear as we could muster. Back on land, with the other canoe, its occupants, and the fourth canoer-now walking, having reached shore safely-we helped them regroup. They were shaken and stirred but seemed ok. After a decent interval filled with reassuring banter, it was time for us to part. Still-and against Chuck's better judgment-we offered advice:
"There's a serious rapid up ahead. The entire river crashes into the right bank creating a tubular wave that bites back on itself and will swallow a boat whole. You can cheat it on the left. Trouble is, the recon is on the right and there's no place to land on the left. If you stop on the right to recon it, you'll never make it left to cheat it."
At Voodoo, the above-mentioned rapid, we stopped to recon on the right. While discussing our strategy, we caught a glimpse of the canoers half-a-mile upstream, approaching left. Totally engrossed in our deliberations, the canoers became a footnote in our minds. It was the last we saw of them.
The giant, tubular curler wave funneled left. The 'normal' run, on the left, required paddling like hell leftward, fighting the current's draw to the right-an inelegant, desperate thrash full of rocks and flooded trees in shallowing water: the raft's route. At the prospect, Norton shook like a dog shitting apricot pits. Chuck gave him another courage pep-talk and off he went, executing a perfect run.
For the kayaks however, Chuck proposed something different. He declared we should go right down the middle of the entry tongue, where all the flow channeled (without so much as a single paddle stroke), hitting the curler wave dead-on sideways and, just at the point of contact, throwing a paddle brace into its gut and surfing the tunnel to its exit.
We'd talked about such theoretically possible maneuvers, but they required such precision, strength, agility, and timing in the midst of such gut-wrenching danger that I wasn't going to be the guinea pig. Chuck just said, "Watch me." And off he went, pulling the run with Cirque du Soleil precision. Then it was my turn. What followed wasn't pretty.