Kim Trevathan is Compass’ outdoors columnist. He is the author of several books and a 2019 inductee into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, and a retired professor of writing and communication at Maryville College. 

Beth and I got to our launch at Riverside Park in Elizabethton earlier than the rest of the group from the Appalachian Paddling Enthusiasts (APEs). The Watauga flowed fast and cold from a two-generator release at Wilbur Dam. 

The group leader's advice for runs through big water: Keep paddling.

A much more experienced and skilled whitewater paddler than me, Beth admitted she was anxious about running this river.

“You nervous?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nope. Not at all.” Lying dog.

A family of boaters came in for a landing at our put-in led by a man with a long gray beard. He grazed the bank with his bow, reached out and tore off a handful of grass, and then capsized. He got his footing, waist deep, but some of his stuff floated downstream — a dry bag and some shoes. He was gasping from the shock of the cold water, unable to swim after his belongings.

One of the APEs, Baron, jumped in and retrieved everything but the man’s handkerchief.

A Fishing Trip Gone Wrong

The spill reminded me of my history with the Watauga, a fishing trip three years earlier. 

In the last mile of that float, I followed my friends Charles and Erik, who were in a canoe, toward a ledge that extended across the entire river. Approaching it, we could not see the bottom of it, only the horizon. It was impossible to scout it on the fly.

Charles and Erik disappeared over the dropoff and bounced below, upright. I hit the same spot on the ledge, paddle flailing, suspended in the air for a moment, enough time to realize that I was going to land on a rock at the base of the falls and go for an unplanned swim.

I swam one-armed, with paddle and dry bag, in deep fast current that pushed me away from the flat left bank, where I needed to go. Once I got to the bank, I sank in knee-deep mud and struggled to reclaim my shoes as I extracted myself. It was as if the Watauga didn’t want to let me go.

It had claimed my rod and reel.

Around the campfire that night, we all laughed about the spill, with references to my supposed expertise on water and allusions to the definitive movie about falling out of boats, Deliverance. 

“It’s Drew! He’s been shot!” Charles quipped.

Bewildered: Where Is the Dropoff?

I’d told Beth the story of my unscheduled swim in the Watauga (and other rivers), but I hadn’t revealed how the memory of it was haunting me and undermining my confidence, so important for someone with limited whitewater skills piloting a clunky sit-on-top with thigh straps, a kind of novelty boat.

I really didn’t know where the ledge was or at what point we would jump it this trip. What I did know: I did not want a rematch with it.

Debbie, the group leader, had been paddling the Watauga since the mid-90s. She didn’t know about the ledge with the five-foot drop that haunted me. 

Her reassurance about the splashy Class II wave trains and the absence of rocks to dodge did nothing to lighten my dread. I was convinced that I was headed for my Waterloo. Getting through it, intact, would be a major victory, but the chances of that, in my mind, were not high.

Deb, who had a tiny playboat, gave a talk to the group — six of us — before we launched. “If you turn over,” she said, “do not let go of your paddle. And try to hang onto your boat.” She called out two friends who were talking. “Listen up,” she said. She raised her voice and delivered this slowly: “Whatever you do, do not try to stand up in the river.”

She said some other stuff. I just listened to the falling out of the boat things. I was starting to resign myself to it. Thinking of the water’s power and its temperature, I flinched at the thought of my upcoming trauma in front of mostly strangers. 

Just Keep Paddling

It helped to get on the river and receive our first watery greetings from the river, slaps in the face and chest. Each of the first few runs were just as Deb advertised, big waves that you powered through. Keep paddling and you should be fine, she’d said. 

Following an expert paddler who knew the river made a big difference. She told us what to avoid and the best lines to take. Maybe, I thought, she’d know the best way over this ledge, even though she’d denied knowing about it.

She warned us about “squirrely water” that looked calm but swirled with malintent. One rapid was called Sneak Up, more turbulent than it appeared.

Deb didn’t instruct us before every run. On one of them Beth and I were following an APEs member who took the far left on a wave train that curved right. Deb appeared a few yards to my right. She was mouthing something. 

I got closer to her, my hand over my ear. “Do not follow her,” she stage-whispered. She took the far right. In an eddy looking back on the run, we waited for the far left paddlers.

One of them got hung sideways on a strainer, a fallen tree caught mid river. The powerful current was working to tilt her boat and fill it with water.          Another paddler came around downstream of the strainer and pulled her off of it. Disaster averted. 

Cow Patty Ahead

After two hours on the river, we splashed through a wave train with deep troughs and ferried far left to a put-in for a rest. It looked vaguely familiar.

At this point, I was thinking I might have somehow escaped the ledge. And then somebody said we had a Class III coming up, a more difficult challenge than what we’d seen so far. They called it “Cow Patty.”

Fantastic. My Waterloo would be full of shit. I didn’t remember any cows from the last spill, but flailing in the water, I wasn’t exactly admiring the scenery. 

Nobody announced Cow Patty. I don’t think Deb said much about how to run it, but we followed her. And just like that, we arrived at the takeout. I was greatly relieved. The burden of the memory had been lifted, dread overcome. 

A Different River

As group members talked of another run later in the month, a part of me wondered about my ledge. Was it still lurking somewhere? How could I have missed it?

A call to Charles confirmed what I began to figure out on the drive home. Waterloo Ledge (my name) was underwater. It was Sycamore Shoals, where we had stopped for a break on this more recent trip. 

On our trip three years ago, the dam was releasing water to turn the turbines of one generator. That’s why Deb didn’t understand what I was talking about. She’d probably never run the bony river on one generator, always at least two — bigger water, fewer rocks.

It was an auspicious place, Sycamore Shoals. In 1775 Richard Henderson purchased 20 million acres from the Cherokee. Daniel Boone helped negotiate this purchase for Henderson’s private firm, the Transylvania Company. It made possible the Wilderness Road, the way into Kentucky through the threshold at Cumberland Gap.

One of many chiefs in attendance, Dragging Canoe, opposed the deal. He recognized a swindle and its repercussions. And he said that the land purchased, which amounted to half of what would become Kentucky, would be a dark and bloody ground.

Maybe I could blame the dark place for my spill three years earlier, forces of history churning beneath the surface, leading me to the wrong threshold through the barrier.

A part of me is happy that I made the more recent run in ignorance, that I could splash over the famous shoals without palpable fear. 

Still, I feel a little cheated that the release of water from Wilbur Dam submerged the bony, exposed version of the shoals. It makes me want to go back and find the best passage on my own. Or not.