Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  Now a sewer line was projected to run upstream beside the river to fresh subdivisions that would bloom beyond the city’s perimeter highway. The sewer would not actually be in the water, but, unless it could be tunnelled or not built at all, it would cause the clear-cutting of every tree in a sixty-foot swath many miles long. A segment of the sewer was already under construction. The Georgia Natural Areas Council was among the leadership in an effort to put down this specific project and at the same time to urge a bill through the legislature that would protect permanently the river and its overview. Sam had asked Jimmy Carter to come get into a canoe and shoot the metropolitan rapids and see for himself the value and the vulnerability of the river. Carter was willing. So, in three canoes, six of us put in under the perimeter highway, I-285, and paddled into Atlanta.

  Sam had Carter in his bow. Carter might be governor of Georgia but not of Sam’s canoe. Carol and I had the second canoe. In the third was a state trooper, who had a pistol on his hip that could have sunk a frigate. In the stern was James Morrison, of the federal government, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation’s man in Atlanta. He wore wet-suit bootees and rubber kneepads and seemed to be ready to go down the Colorado in an acorn.

  The current was strong. The canoes moved smartly downstream. Carter was a lithe man, an athletic man in his forties—at home, obviously enough, in boats. He was wearing a tan windbreaker, khaki trousers, and white basketball shoes. He had a shock of wind-tossed sandy hair. In the course of the day, he mentioned that he had grown up in Archery, Georgia, by a swamp of the Kinchafoonee and the Choctawhatchee. He and his friend A. D. Davis, who was black, had built a twelve-foot bateau. “When it rained and we couldn’t work in the fields, we went down to the creek and set out set hooks for catfish and eels, and we drifted downstream in the bateau hunting ducks with a shotgun. We fished for bass and red-bellies, and we waded for jack. The bateau weighed eighty pounds. I could pick it up.” Archery was three miles west of Plains, a crossroads with a short row of stores and less than a thousand people. Sam, Carol, and I had passed through Plains—in fifteen seconds—on our way north. An enormous red-lettered sign over the stores said, “PLAINS, GEORGIA, HOME OF JIMMY CARTER.” Carter had played basketball at Plains High School, had gone on to Annapolis and into nuclear submarines, and had come back to Plains in 1953 to farm peanuts and to market them for himself and others, businesses he continued as he went on into the legislature and upward to become governor. The career of his boyhood friend had been quite different. The last Carter had heard of A. D. Davis, Davis was in jail for manslaughter.

  Now, on the Chattahoochee, the Governor said, “We’re lucky here in Georgia that the environment thing has risen nationally, because Georgia is less developed than some states and still has much to save.” With that, he and Sam went into the largest set of rapids in the city of Atlanta. The rip was about a hundred yards long, full of Vs confusing to the choice, broad ledges, haystacks, eddies, and tumbling water. They were good rapids, noisy and alive, and strong enough to slip a canoe that might hit a rock and swing broadside.

  In the shadow of a two-hundred-foot bluff, we pulled out on a small island to survey the scene. Carol said the bluff was a gneiss and was full of garnets. The Governor had binoculars. With them, he discovered a muskrat far out in the river. The muskrat was gnawing on a branch that had been stopped by a boulder. “He’s sniffin’ around that little old limb on top of that rock,” Carter said. “Maybe he’s eating the lichens off it. Look, there’s another. Who owns the land here?”

  “Various people,” Morrison said. “Some are speculators. A lot of it is owned by Alfred Kennedy.”

  “Kennedy?”

  “A director of the First National Bank,” Carol said.

  “Is he a good guy, so far as conservancy goes?”

  “From what I hear, he’s too busy making money.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to slip up on people like that,” Carter told her. “Rather than make an issue of it right away.” He spoke in a low voice, almost shyly. There was a touch of melancholy in his face that disappeared, as it did frequently, when he grinned. A trillium caught his eye. He asked her what it was, and she told him. “And what’s that?” he said.

  “Dog hobble,” Carol said. “Leucothoë. Look here.” She pointed at the ground. “A coon track.”

  The canoes moved on, and the next stop was a visit with a fisherman who was casting from the bank. He was middle-aged and weathered, a classical, prototype fisherman, many years on the river. He was wreathed in smiles at sight of the Governor. I looked hard at Sam, but nothing in his face indicated that he had planted the man there. The fisherman, Ron Sturdevant, showed the Governor a Kodacolor print of a twenty-three-inch rainbow he had recently caught right here under this bluff. “I guess I’m glad I met you,” Sturdevant said. “I’m glad you’re taking this trip. I’m worried about the river.”

  “I hope we can keep it this way,” Carter said.

  We climbed from the river through a deep wood of oaks and big pines to a cave in which families of Cherokees had once lived. It was about a hundred feet up. The view swept the river, no structures visible. “Who owns this place?”

  Sam said, “Alfred Kennedy.”

  “And he hasn’t even slept here,” said Carol.

  “Have you slept here, Carol?” the Governor asked her.

  “Many times,” she told him. “With a dog named Catfish.”

  Morrison said, “There’s gold here, around the Indian cave. It’s never been mined.”

  “That would be a good way to keep this place undisturbed,” Carter said. “To announce that there was gold up here.”

  Back on the river, he used his binoculars while Sam paddled. He saw four more muskrats and an automobile, upside down in the water, near the far bank. He also saw a turtle.

  “What kind is it?” Carol asked him.

  “If I knew what kind it was, I could tell you.” He handed the binoculars across to her, too late.

  “I’ve been down through here and seen fifteen turtles with bullet holes in their shells,” Carol told him.

  “What kind?” Carter said.

  “Cooters and sliders.”

  There was a racket of engines. Out of nowhere came two motorcyclists riding in the river. A mile or so later, we took out, beside an iron bridge. Carol said she had washed her hair any number of times under that bridge.

  The Governor invited us home for lunch. The mansion was new—a million-dollar neo-Palladian Xanadu, formal as a wedding cake, and exquisitely landscaped. Carol and Sam and I were ropy from a thousand miles of mountains, rivers, and swamps. None of us had changed clothes in nearly a week, but we would soon be eating grilled cheese sandwiches at a twenty-foot table under a crystal chandelier, The Governor, for that matter, did not look laundered anymore—mud on his trousers, mud on his basketball shoes. We parked in back of the mansion. A backboard, hoop, and net were mounted there. A ball sat on the pavement. Before going in, we shot baskets for a while.

  “The river is just great,” the Governor said, laying one in. “And it ought to be kept the way it is. It’s almost heartbreaking to feel that the river is in danger of destruction. I guess I’ll write a letter to all the landowners and say, ‘If you’ll use some self-restraint, it’ll decrease the amount of legal restraint put on you in the future.’ I don’t think people want to incur the permanent wrath of the governor or the legislature.”

  “I’ve tried to talk to property owners,” Carol said. “To get them to register their land with the Natural Areas Council. But they wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  The Governor said, “To be blunt about it, Carol, why would they?”

  The Governor had the ball and was dribbling in place, as if contemplating a property owner in front of him, one-on-one. He went to the basket, shot, and missed. Carol got the rebound and fed the ball to Sam. He shot. He missed, too.

  Reading the River

  UNTIL RECENTLY, the word “canoe” put an image in my mind of
a light water craft with up-turned ends, open as a pod, and pointing symmetrically in two directions. I once knew every part of a canoe—ribs, half ribs, planking, bang plates, open gunwales, center thwart, stern thwart, stern quarter-thwart, and so on, until the whole boat was verbally disassembled and rebuilt. I more or less grew up in canoes—in summers, anyway—and slept under them, and capsized them for pleasure, rolling in still water and breathing the air that is trapped in them when they are upside down. There was an insurance factor in these games. I once turned over in wild water in a gorge on Otter Creek, in Vermont; one of my legs was caught by a thwart, and I survived by pulling my head up into the air space and riding out the rapid. The canoes I knew were E. M. Whites and Old Towns, keeled and keel-less, covered with canvas, and alive with a timbre of their own. Among them—hanging from rafters in a place called Keewaydin, and almost never used, because of its fragility and symbolic value—was a canoe covered with birch bark. This was the ingenious original from which the generations of Whites and Old Towns had come, and, in more recent times, despite hollow reverberations and general yarelessness, the Grumman aluminums as well. I had been long out of touch with developments in canoeing, and, with the exception of a few descents in rented Grummans, had completely lost touch with white water. Meanwhile, that Indian birch remained for me the template, the standard, the prototype canoe, with its apparently inevitable design, conceived in the wilderness who knows how many hundreds of years ago and valid into the technological present. I thought of it as a basic shape, like a cone or a cube, immutable, inviolable, and I would never have thought to, or tried to, alter it, not even with written permission from Hiawatha. I go into this only to suggest the extent to which the rafters of my mind were shaken, although the birch-bark canoe still hangs there, when I went in early spring to the mountains of West Virginia with a friend of mine from the National Park Service to observe the Potomac Highland and Middle States Wildwater canoeing championships.

  Beginnings of the Potomac come off the slopes of Spruce Knob, just under five thousand feet high, and then the river descends northward, eventually flowing almost to the Pennsylvania line before turning south toward Washington, which is two hundred and eighty-five miles downriver from the source. Near the headwaters, between Mouth of Seneca and Smoke Hole Cavern (two West Virginia hamlets), run fourteen miles of white water of varying degrees of difficulty, and in one stretch these rapids drop through a narrow cut called Hopeville Canyon, the climactic segment of the racecourse. As we looked over the river on the day before the races began, small vessels came shooting out of the lower end of this defile, so snug to the water that the men paddling them appeared to be kneeling in the river, and I asked my friend what they were. “Canoes,” he said. “Modern canoes. That’s what they look like now.”

  Canoes? They were small, Fiberglas, modified cigars, streamline-rounded at the gunwales and almost completely closed over, the only opening, in the singles category, being a small hole amidships in which the canoeman knelt. They were virtually watertight. A plastic spray skirt—drawn firm with rubber cords to the canoeman’s waist and the cockpit combing—enabled the canoe to roll over without taking in water. When a canoeman became overheated from the vigor of the canyon, he would stop, in slow water, and lean over into the river until the entire upper half of his body was submerged and the canoe was all but upside down. Then he would flip upright again, soaking-cool, and move on downstream. When he got out of the river, he picked up his canoe in one hand, put it on his shoulder like a ski, and walked away.

  I learned soon enough that these canoemen were pretty sensitive if someone suggested that what they were really paddling were kayaks. Kayaks were something else again, by their standards, and, in fact, there would be a complete and separate range of kayak races among the championship events. As for the antique canoes of my own experience, they would not even be permitted on the river in the major races. The rules required that all canoes be completely decked over.

  The new canoes were developed in Europe—principally in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—and only since the middle nineteen-sixties have they been brought to American rivers to replace the canoes the Indians invented here. Organized white-water racing is fairly new in the world. The first international championships were held in 1950, in Czechoslovakia, and the first American championships came in 1958—in open canoes that were decked over with sheets of plastic. Unencumbered by Indian lore, the Europeans modified the canoe in the direction of the kayak to the point where the differences now are subtle and come in the form of regulated measurements. Canoes are a few inches shorter and a few inches wider, and, however unemphatically, the ends of canoes must be higher than the middles. But the real differences are these: a single-bladed paddle is used with a canoe, double with a kayak; paddlers sit with their legs forward in kayaks, but kneel in canoes. These differences do retain the essence of traditional American canoeing. The basic moves are much the same, but the craft—in both senses—is novel.

  I once had a vision of an early canoeman that went with my vision of the archetypal canoe. He was a sinewy man with clear eyes, and he smoked a pipe as he sat in the stern of a twenty-four-foot canoe that was bulging with beaver skins and pemmican in packs under lashed-down canvas. He wore checked wool, and he worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, leaning hard on his long Canadian paddle as he steered his canoe down foaming white rapids where the spray curled up like smoke. Never mind that what he really wanted was a desk job at Company headquarters in Montreal. He was my man, and he was a far, far cry from these canoemen, in their little fourteen-foot tubes, in West Virginia. These little canoes wouldn’t hold a beaver’s sideburns. The men who paddle them wear plastic crash helmets, like hockey players or motorcyclists. When they flip over and inconveniently crack their heads on submerged rocks, they come right back up. They are, nonetheless, serious canoemen. They wear wet-suits and go out and break ice on pools at the edge of the river to get into the fast water in winter. They read the journal of the American Whitewater Affiliation. To them, a lake is not a lake but “flat water.” They make their own canoes. First they fashion a wooden plug, as they call it, and from this model cast Fiberglas molds—a deck mold and a hull mold. Bolts of Fiberglas—whose manufacturers thought they were making draperies—are then spread into the molds, layer upon layer, with liquid resin painted between. The result, conjoined, is ordinarily a “Czech” or a “Yugo”—referring to the wellspring nationalities of the two basic designs, which differ only slightly and have experienced so much crossbreeding that varieties are micro-millimetrically infinite. In much the way that wallet cards can be sealed between layers of plastic, paper or fabric designs are often included between the deck laminations of the canoes, and one that I saw had a deck of beer-can labels, another appeared to be made of bricks, another was a garden of permanent blossoming flowers, and still another had a deck of red-and-yellow Paisley print, so that its owner appeared to be paddling a wet necktie. A man within one of these canoes is so fused with the river—in the compactness of the craft around him—that he almost appears to be standing waist-deep in the water rather than kneeling in a boat. An observer expects the canoeman to come walking out of the river with the canoe around his waist and thus to reveal it for what it really is, an epic codpiece, ventral and dorsal.

  As many as five modern canoes will fit on top of a car, even a bug Volkswagen—singles canoes, doubles canoes, slalom canoes. All along a road that winds in and out of sight of the river, canoe- and kayak-covered vehicles clustered. They were so predominant in the traffic in the area that cars without boats on them attracted attention. License plates were from all over the East, South, and Middle West, from Wisconsin and Connecticut to Georgia. One Ford Econoline van had come, with three canoes on it, from California. Rigged up for sleeping and cooking, it was occupied by a nineteen-year-old with clear-rimmed, dark-brown eyeglasses and a full beard in two shades of brown. His name was John Evans. The word was that the C-1 (singles canoe) Middle States Wildwat
er championship race would be a question of beating John Evans, and that his principal competitor would be a hippily long-haired fellow, aged twenty-six, named Bob Waldrop, who learned his first strokes in Vermont, had been down the Canoe River in British Columbia, and worked in the District of Columbia as a representative of the Sierra Club. The canoemen, for the most part, were lean and not particularly tall, lightness and wiry strength being advantages in the sport. They spread in age from the teens to the forties, and they were not a forceful-looking group, but on the eve of the races they collected in a large schoolroom and watched with obvious pleasure movies of frail craft pounding across standing waves and smacking through walls of water, sometimes plunging into souse holes and cartwheeling end over end.

  In a corridor outside the schoolroom, a man who makes and sells white-water canoes and equipment had set up a display of his wares. One of the doubles canoes he had had been built on order for my Park Service friend, John Kauffmann, who had come to West Virginia to pick it up. While Kauffmann was looking over his new boat, or C-2, Waldrop walked up and said to the salesman, “I need a new sixty-four/eight.” Waldrop soon had in his hand a paddle in a style I had not seen before that day. Made of latticed and laminated Canadian spruce, it had a T-shaped grip and a blade that was square-tipped, like an oar. Its over-all length was sixty-four inches. The blade was enormous—eight inches wide and some two feet long. There is so much air in white water that a big blade is needed to find sufficient traction. The square tip gets a maximum bite in low water. Waldrop, rangy and loose, his hair flopping, walked away with his new paddle. Kauffmann’s new canoe—which bore the trade name Berrigan—was not strictly a racer, having been designed to combine the streamlined advantages of the modern wild-water canoe with some storage space for tripping duffel, but Kauffmann had noticed that something called the Potomac Highland Wildwater C-2 championship race was in a non-expert category, open to all, so we had figured what the hell, and decided to enter. Trying to look rangy and loose, I asked the salesman if he happened to have a sixty/eight. “Fourteen dollars and twenty cents,” he said, and I walked away with my first white-water paddle.