That’s the way I remember the spot.  Just a little hunk of embankment where we went over.  The browning grass sprawls out there, more than in any other spot, and the artificial hill is set back.  It’s a place that you’ll always see from a distance – a place I wish I’d never seen up close.  I stand back now and see in the same tunnel vision what I saw then.  A little corner of grassy embankment and then nothing but the blackness behind my lids and the riot of my fear.

●    ●    ●

We waited by a pay phone where the hills grow steep.  It’s important to consider the things you remember, because they have defined the moment in your memory.  I remember only a few things about the waiting.  I remember the outside of a small, rural gas station dwarfed by fall.  The gas station lay at the foot of a hill that rose up behind the two pumps and small convenience store.  Immense sycamores scattered brown, baseball-glove leaves that took an eternity to fall.  And that is what I remember most clearly: not the whitewashed garage, or the black earpiece and silver cable of the payphone.  I remember how the evening sky, rolling down all the shades of blue, was full of falling leaves.

BEFORE

    We had sandwiched two boats and strapped the third one on the side.  The wooden racks stood high off the purple Plymouth Voyager like a sail against the wind.  We’d packed tight but couldn’t bring ourselves to refuse our parents.  An extra tarp.  Bags of trail mix with the M&M’s that aren’t for picking out.  Keep an eye on gas.  Another map.  Wear your seat belt.  The engine idled in the driveway, and the exhaust ran out into the last bits of summer.  We crammed sleeping bags under paddles, contorted our legs around dry bags and life jackets, and rolled the side door shut before anything leapt back out.

 

    I can tell about the driving and I know what the trip is like.  I’ve since driven through these places on my own, cautious and curious along that strip of road.  But then, I was the permanent passenger, the kid too young for a license.  I was the talker keeping everyone awake.  And I was the watcher, missing the signs and letting time go on.  Somehow, we don’t always watch the right things.  Then and now, we head on into trouble.

 

    We got in among the hills then so that for most of the drive – the going down parts at least – we could not see where we were going.  The stereo played reggae as we rolled.  A little orange light lit up on the dash, and we had Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain.”  A badly tied strap on the roof cuffed against the boats in the wind, rushed and off-tempo.  We crested a hill among sassafras and evergreens and ran out of gas.

Jay’s long sinewy fingers gripped the steering wheel tightly, showing bony and white.  As the van lost speed along the hilltop, he reached out his right hand out to grasp the stick-shift.  He pawed the air for a few moments until he found the gearshift on the steering column.  His left leg moved back and forth under the column in short, choppy sweeps, and he guided the car in neutral down the long backside of the hill.  Jay’s jeans and a red, hooded sweatshirt were both well worn and color-softened under grass streaks and dust.  His neighborhood lawn mowing service had left clippings in the roll-ups of his jeans and on the toes of his boots.  With his hair shaved short, his skull bones pushed sharp against his scalp.  In a few years they would soften and his muscles would fill out and there would be posters of him tacked up in teenage girls’ bedrooms and hidden embarrassedly on closet doors in the bedrooms of grown women.  But now he was just a kid, long-limbed and a little lost.  We coasted to a stop just at the base of the next uphill and pulled off onto brown, windswept pine needles.

A strong skunk odor settled on the van as we stopped.  We were lucky to have borrowed his father’s van, but with Chris’ month-old driver’s license and an empty gas tank, it was unlikely that we would get it again.  Chris’ pale skin had blanched so that it made even his blond hair look darkened.  I turned back around towards Jay to see him watching Chris.  “What are we going to do?” Chris asked.  He was always speaking in questions.

    Jay and I sat silent, thinking hitchhiking strategies.  Chris slid out of his seat and rolled the side door open before Jay and I could protest.  I suppose he was so caught up in the empty gas tank scenario that his brain hadn’t registered the smell.  Now there was no ignoring it.  The stink blasted in as our gear leapt out.

I could tell about the yelling and the gagging smell and about forcing Chris back into the van with the unstuffed sleeping bag against his chest and about the skunk’s rotting body just yards away and the skipping CD blaring suddenly as Jay’s elbow caught the volume dial, but what matters is the way we forgot ourselves in the stench.  We slammed the doors, and Jay 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.

    Stopping to let the gasoline settle in a tank can get sometimes squeeze out an extra couple ounces.  I think we found almost a quart by the time we were done.  We stalled and restarted three times before we finally rolled down a hill, then right up onto an exit ramp and into a gas station.  I didn’t think gas stations got so close to the highway.  We filled up with Chris’ cash and went on again.

    We found Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake lying dark blue among quiet woods to our left.  A light drizzle begin to play across its surface.  Jay turned right and took us downhill on a dirt trail.  Outside the van, the valley echoed with the sound of waterfalls: rhythmic white noise.  The river below coursed autumn-cold from the lake.  Turning leaves and dark pines.  We pulled our gear out and on and the paddles too and wow we were efficient and down along the narrow trail with our boats on our shoulders, pushing evergreen and mountain laurel branches aside and barefoot on the rocks.

Swallow Falls and Swallowtail Falls at once keep the Top Youghiogeny River in kayakers’ minds and off their “I want to paddle it” lists.  This is where the steep creeks of West Virginia sneak into Western Maryland and keep the water rough.  The two falls leap unprovoked from a flatwater section that continues afterward like liquid glass for over four miles.  They plunge 15 and 8 feet respectively into significant recirculating hydraulics with little margin for error.  They make the banks around grow up tall and steep and slippery to keep home-builders away and fishermen cautious.  They’ve carved a gorge where there might have been only flatwater.

    The black rocks and deep pine roots keep the water dark.  In the cool drizzle of evening, the gorge grew close around us and seemed to press down from above.  We set our boats on the bank by Swallow Falls and looked across the jump.  Chris left his boat among the rocks and walked down along the bank with a throw rope for safety.  I remember thinking how silly it would be to throw a rope to someone in the pool at the base of a waterfall.  I remember how strong I felt knowing that I stood up to a challenge that Chris cringed away from.  I remember knowing only the rush of weightlessness.

    Jay and I eased into our boats and slid tentatively into the calm water of the eddy.  Then Jay ran first, cruising along the far-left eddyline and vaulting himself over.  He disappeared from sight almost instantly, 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.  As you drive your paddle down and scoop it through, you grab a solid, wet chunk of river like taking a full bite from a cold, ripe fruit.  I pull over the edge, throwing my feet and the boat out away from the rocks.  My eyes close – WHY? – and I wait for my feet to drive down into the waiting pool.  And then I’m down and all the things that could have gone wrong didn’t.  So we went on down to the next.

    We climbed out above Swallowtail Falls and found where to launch and where to land.  I could see Chris scrambling down the bank like a bright red beacon along the shoreline.  And then there was Jay, a teal blur against the spruce in his matching boat, helmet, and life jacket.  So Jay was blending in and Chris was standing out.  And I was like a Potomac River creature transported: back home I blended with the sandy beaches and gray cliffs, but here I stood out – too light against the dark vegetation.

Chris pulled me in and sat me down on the muddy bank.  The world had grown much larger and the sound of the falls more precise.  The oddly shaped rock above Swallowtail Falls was triangular and four feet farther to the right.  The pine needles underfoot were slick and clumping up and the rocks were sharp and too steep and I walked back scared.  Jay couldn’t see the gorge properly and didn’t feel the deep power of the river.  And Chris thought he was a hero.  And neither one knew the rhythm of the river that I’d found and heard below the surface.  “I am not some other river that you know.  This is the rhythm of my gorge and of no other.”

 

    I can’t tell about it yet but I feel the panic of our trying to get out.  Just beyond the middle here and I’m racing for the end.  The glass bits and the kerosene.  The man on the other side of the road.  The going over and over and the coming out all right.  

    

Going South on 26 into Albright, West Virginia, we backtracked to a campsite near the Cheat River.  Jay brought out a giant can of kerosene to get a fire started with wet wood.  I brought back armfuls of rotting chunks.  The evening went the way most beginner camping trips go.  The bonfire gets started first and is the real highlight.  Dinner takes too long to prepare, you fall asleep after only a few mouthfuls, and you are awake and hungry by five a.m.  You force yourself back to sleep – your first real sleep of the night – and are startled awake at 7:30 by your own cold saliva against your cheek.  You are not ready to get up.  You think about preparing something in that silly, Bunsen-burner stove that fits inside your boot, but instead you roll out and find a Denny’s.

    We arrived charged up at the take-out: a new state, another creek, another chance.  We hitched a ride upstream and left our van at the end of the run.  Our driver was just some guy in grizzled plaid who, throughout the ride upstream, seemed to be trying to fill the gaps of his missing teeth with cigarettes.  We slid into Big Sandy Creek and rode the first few rapids, playing on every tiny wave we could find.  We tried to own that creek from the start.

Before the end of the first mile, we reached Wonderfalls.  This is the big confidence-booster falls: you run it straight down the middle and jump out away from the edge.  I ran first and if you could freeze frame mid-boof, you’d see me about halfway down, my boat driving out perpendicular to the falls.  You’d see the sun strike the water droplets that clung to and stretched away from my paddle; the horseshoe shape of the falls with blue-green translucent currents.  And it was all okay.  The boils below softened my landing, and I swung around to the calm eddy on the right.

Jay came down and Chris behind him.  We climbed out to boof the falls again and tried to force a thousand rhododendrons out of the way.  And then the rhododendrons began to fight back and time began to rush.  You see their shield of green, oval leaves but cannot image the network of branches just beyond.  The more we fought through, the more entangled we became; we could feel it wear us down.  The woods can take it out of you when you go against the grain.  I submitted at last to crawling beneath the lowest branches with my chest against the mud.  I dragged my boat along behind, and it filled with sticky rhododendron sap and rotting leaves.

Jay found an opening at last that dropped down onto a flat rock by the water.  He and I struggled down to it and set our boats one beside the other.  As we pulled our spray skirts on simultaneously, we fell into our old rhythm.  We made the approach to the falls side by side to launch together—to boof and fall in tight formation.  I tried to give him extra space because his boat, the Scorpion, had sharp edges and a fierce point.  Our paddles whirled and pulled, and our movements felt familiar.  As I jumped left, I saw Jay suddenly catch the edge and roll over to the right.  I landed softly and turned to see his boat cartwheel out of the water without him.  The paddle rose up beside me from the foam, and I grabbed it.  The boat surfaced, and I dropped the paddle to grab that.  And there was Jay swimming free of the hole so I dropped the boat to scoop Jay onto my bow and help him kick to shore.  His face had grown as pale as Chris’s.  When he turned away from me to climb the bank, I could see the water-hurried blood running down from the back of his head onto his lifejacket.  He rested there in the mud, staring at the falls.  Hearing, not seeing.  Were the bubbles diving downward?

A combination of circumstances to contend with through two miles more of steep creek and gathering clouds, an ice cold van at the take-out to look forward to, and we rode the rapids down.  Jay’s swollen wound grew sticky in the breeze of the coming storm.  He could hardly wear his helmet for all the swelling.  Then two more rapids to the end: Big Splat and Little Splat.  As if we hadn’t had our share of crashes.  The water went off the falls towards the right, splatting onto rocks.  Approach it from the flatwater and jump left away from the rocks.

Look—the sun is going down and the falls are loud and the water is cold and the rocks down below are flat and hard, and my stomach is doing turns just looking at Jay’s blood.  I’ll walk around the waterfalls.  Jay looks at the hike over smooth boulders and feels unsteady on his legs.  He climbs back in his boat and runs the falls—paddle to the water, leaping left.  Longing for the landing.  His line is nearly perfect, but he feels so dizzy that he thinks he had landed off balance.  He braces himself in the flatwater again and again while we watch.  Chris and I stand in long sleeve paddling jackets and shorts, shivering like snails without their shells.  We stand pruning up, uninjured but chicken.  It starts to drizzle as we hit the final stretch of flatwater.  Now it has grown so dark that we don’t see the rain falling.  But the creek’s surface looks alive with the droplets jumping up to bite at the sky.

We changed in the rain and sand beside the van.  Chris drove barefoot into Albright and Jay held a T-shirt to his head.  In Albright, the liquor store man stared with glasses thick and yellow-tinted like bottles of Jack Daniel’s.  “They got a clinic down in Kingwood.  Preston Memorial.  You boys been fightin’?”  Kayaking is a foreign word.  We waded back to the car through the thick torrents like swimming blind through a bamboo forest.  The car crawled on down to Kingwood.

I remember a police station and a library, then the clinic at the edge of town.  Under eighteen with no insurance card and they make you sit and wait.  We made contact with home from a pay phone by the parking lot and gave Jay’s parents the phone number of the clinic.  The wet silver cord gleamed from the clinic flood light, and we were blinded on the way back inside.  My memory in there flashes like a strobe light, from the bright white tiles and icy chrome.  A loud receptionist.  Stitches and a butterfly bandage.  He held a plastic bag to his head on the way through the parking lot to the van and fell asleep in the back.

We oozed the van through thick mud to the campsite.  Chris stayed in the car with Jay, who lay snoring under a mountain of fleece and a sleeping bag.  I commando-rolled into the tent and kept my muddy legs sticking out the open flap.  I held them up off the ground and the rain rinsed them clean.  It was one in the morning when I finally stored my shoes beneath the rain fly and climbed into my sleeping bag.  The fabric of the tent began to bead up and sag, but I stayed dry because I never touched the sides.  At least once every hour I heard Chris start the engine and run the heat for several minutes.  Those noises reached me like shouts from behind the curtain of a waterfall.  I fell asleep because I couldn’t hear my thoughts.

The next morning, the Cheat River surged fast and loud.  A night’s worth of heavy rain still clung to the tent at six-thirty.  Just downstream, an old, railroad-type bridge spanned the river, supported on brown, concrete pylons that disappeared beneath the current.  The bridge surface had been paved over for car traffic, and its sides were iron and tall enough to hide a pickup.  What I saw there in many ways sums up what we’d found on this trip.  On the upstream side, a message had been painted in square, bold letters.  You may remember the slogan from state tourism brochures, but my first encounter with the words was unforgettable.  We stood together as I read aloud, “West Virginia, Wild and Wonderful.”  And then the raging, brown current rose up over those vivid, white letters.  Now more than eight years later, I’m told that what I saw is not possible.  I don’t care.  I’m stuck with this problematic image that has highlighted for me the unknown, even unknowable, powers of Nature.  I’ll keep my memory of that morning and the way it hurried me homeward.

The sudden lurch.  Half-opened eyes.  Tunnel vision.  Sixty miles per hour.  That corner of embankment.  Tucking down by instinct, arms around my head.  The launch.  The rush of weightlessness.  Sliding and the ground against my window.  Catching an edge and rolling to the right.  Again and again.  Glass bits striking closed eyelids.  Landing upright.  Chris is.  Jay is too—how?  The kerosene can between my legs.  A stuck door.  Do cars explode?  Kicking the door open.  Yanking the sliding door.  We’re out and running across the highway.  A car on the other side.  A man, a phone, a voice.  Please.  The sound is coming on.  “I thought I was going to be pulling dead bodies out of there.”  Suddenly an ambulance is parked.  Only bruises—how?  Blood—fresh stitches.  Boats on the rack, 50 yards from the van.  Roof pressed against the dashboard.  Tow truck.  “Fell asleep at the wheel?  You boys are lucky.”  Yes.  Yes.  God, yes.  Turning around to Flintstone.  Watching the yellowing grass wheel by out of focus, I began to lose the sense of the place.  (Looking back eight years and not able to fall asleep in a moving car since).  The images in my head and the world went on in a slow reverse.  I tried to turn my thoughts and train them on the present but the tow truck lulled and rocked us back into the places that we’d been.  And then it slowed again and I stopped rewinding.  The world came into focus and I let the new images rush over me like a flood.  And then I began a new story to replace the old.  A pay phone at a whitewashed gas station.  Waiting, hollowed out.  And watching wide sycamore leaves floating in an every-blue sky.