How was your Fourtha July? Mine was nice. Took the family adventuring on a river.
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Posts Tagged Ocoee
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It’s interesting, trying to go home again, especially when we’ve been told by whatever very famous writer is was that we can’t go home again. Fair enough, but it sure is fun trying. My friends and I used to go to the Ocoee river all the time. Since then, there’s been kids born, careers changed, marriages ended, lives lost to the eternal tide, and more. And still, when we see one another, we always say we need to do another ‘Old Timer’s Trip’. We laughingly call it that, even though we don’t think of ourselves, or one another, as old.
Then again, I was twenty eight when we started kayaking the Ocoee.
Now, we return every few years. It’s a long drive, going back to being twenty eight. And I get lost on the way of course. But it’s gotta be tried.
I do another comic strip, The Buckets, that’s sort of about getting old and becoming your parents. I made the point in it once that while it’s not fair that a kid can’t wait to be 18, but what’s REALLY not fair is that now I can’t wait to be 18 either, and it’s never going to happen.
But there’s still the occasional Old Timer’s Trip. And that may be good enough.
Let's see... That's Jason at the far left, then Jaden, then Mac in the yellow helmet, Gideon in the purple, Cory in the blue helmet, Dr.Sonny in the white shirt, and Jonah making the 'fun!' face
Took the kids to my favorite river a few weeks ago. They got to raft The Ocoee River, and we were there for our Old Timer’s Kayak Trip. The kids can’t conceive it, of course, but their moms and dads used to go to this river every second or third weekend to kayak. Now, we’re all older and the kids’ schedules (not to mention all the other stuff that the years lay at your feet) dictate that we can’t just run off to the river all the time. It’s a seven hour drive, after all. At my peak driving capabilities, that was nothin’. And, if my plans work out and I attend a few conventions with my Hubris Roadshow, then my driving skills will again be honed to a fine edge. Oh, the places that life takes us… or returns us to. With our kids.
So the new thing these days seems to be Ziplines. Went back to the Ocoee river a week or so ago. New Zipline place. My buddy, he says the Scout Camp an hour or two farther East has ziplines, not to mention the Nantahala Outdoor Center’s zipline park I heard a rumor about or saw an ad or something. Zip parks goin’ up all over the place. Like this one in Florida I went to last weekend:
This is my oldest kid on the practice line. Zip. I didn’t get photos of the big line- it was raining, and I just don’t know how much of that my phone is likely to put up with, even with my nice Mophie case. I may have to do a product review of the ol’ Mophie case.
So- If you happen to find yourself in the Florida panhandle and need a good zipline experience, there’s Adventures Unlimited to visit. They also have canoes and kayaks and tubing and all. Good looking grounds, nice staff, pleasant office. Our guides were Kevin and Desiree. Good guides. You’ll be lucky if they’re your guides. They’re pleasant and efficient and don’t seem as though they’re bored out of their minds with this zip course, which they might be, considering how many times they must have done it. It rained on us, which kept things nice and cool for a bit, and made the final zip pretty fast and the braking a little iffy (I used both hands) We didn’t do the massive 5-hour trip, which clocks in at $129 a head, but we plan to save up our pennies and do that one next time. We did ‘Taste Of The Tours’ this time for $89 a head, and it was good, but you come away thinking that you’ve still got some ziplining left in ya, and you’d like to do more.
I was lumbered with a string backpack as we were told we might want water while we were out. We did want water, but there was also a hose strategically run up one of the towers for that. We took snacks and all sorts of stuff. Don’t do that. It’s entirely possible that if we hadn’t been rained on, we would have really, really been glad to have a few water bottles on us, but the ‘Taste Of The Tours’ trip isn’t long enough to panic about such stuff. Clip a bottle to your belt. Stick a small soda in your pocket or something. It’s not that I noticed that I had the pack on, or that it caused problems, it’s just that when we got back to the car, I wondered why I bothered. The pack is a cute souvenir, I guess, but it’s going into a pile of daypacks and various too-small-to-be-of-much-use bags.
My wife wanted to see more wildlife on the trip. The traffic through the treetops made the local squirrels change their home trees, so we didn’t go zipping past any startled treerats. We did see a lovely blue-tailed skink while waiting for the guides to come and start our trip, though. Fast little devil. No photos, sorry. I don’t know if anyone else ever sees any animal life on this run, but it’s bound to be fun if they do. Skimming over the heads of armadillos or skunk apes or whatever they have down there sounds entertaining.
On the way back to the condo, we speculated that as more and more zip parks show up, competition and familiarity will thin the crowds and cause the prices to come down. I assume that like Bungee Jumping, or the trampoline pits that had a vogue back in the early 1970s (and also seem to be resurging now), that ziplines will wax and wane in popularity. For now, Adventures Unlimited is a good solid one. It gets a Hubris Thumbs Up.
I never made it to the Ocoee with the ancient boat. The Ocoee was a river I was perfectly happy in. Even on a bad day, I knew what to watch out for and where I could fudge the run. I’ve been nearly drowned there, and I’ve done some of my most controlled paddling there, and everything…EVERYTHING… in between.
So, I wasn’t going to learn anything there about paddling unfamiliar water in my long, obsolete creekboat. I’ll say now that it was a Savage Gravity. Savage was the brand name- and it wasn’t the only Savage boat I ever owned, just my least favorite. The model was called ‘Gravity’. It was a pumped-up version of their whitewater playboat, the Scorpion.
I don’t recall how I got it, to tell you the truth. I did a couple of deals here and there over the years for boats- some Dagger work in trade for one of their canoes, for instance; and I recall having worked on some Tshirt designs for Savage, though I don’t remember how the deals came about, and I don’t remember any of the shirts ever being produced. Also, there may have been some logo work done with Mike that went haywire. Anyhow, back then I was young, the economy was booming for advertising illustrators like me, and I didn’t yet have kids… so I had the time AND money to collect boats and weird stories about how they’d been got.
To get on unfamiliar water, I went to a river called the Cheoah with Mike, taking only the old creekboat so that I’d have no choice but to paddle it. I should have taken my reluctance to paddle the thing as a subconscious prompting that I just wasn’t happy with it. It nagged at the back of my mind all the way to the river. The Cheoah is one of Mike’s favorite rivers now. It was opened to recreational kayakers only a couple of years ago after its bed had been dry for decades. Mike was very complimentary about the run, and got me excited at the idea too, finally.
So. The Cheoah. It’s not the smooth, wide run of the Ocoee. The rocks in it are sharp and formidable. There’s a waterfall. It’s not Western Whitewater, like the Grand Canyon would be, but it wasn’t what I was used to, so it would serve a good purpose. Before we go farther, I should point out that the purpose it would serve would be to unman me, make me worry that I’d die either on the Cheoah, or in the Grand Canyon, and lead me to do something that would make Mike really, really mad at me. Looking back, I can’t decide how bad an idea it was; whether it was a truly horrible idea, or just a crappy idea that was just what I needed anyhow.
Fred and Kathy joined us for the run, and so did Drew Armstrong, one of the most amazingly competent men I ever hope to meet. He once pronounced that he knew of a dozen or so ways to start a fire without matches or a lighter, then went on to demonstrate six or seven, even allowing the rest of us to give it an unsuccessful shot. You’d think that the fun and camaraderie would calm my nerves about my old creekboat. Nah.
This old boat was long and straight, tippy side to side, and made to keep your knees low for a sleek profile. It was awful. It was so old, and the intervening years had seen boats with higher knee placement, much more volume, and shorter length come into style. The new boats were much more stable and yet easy to turn.
For a forty two year old like me, the low knees placements were murderous. In fact, I suppose they turned out slightly less than murderous, because I lived.
The run was a cramped, uncomfortable, unstable mess from the beginning. This thing was fast in a straight run, but there’s very little room for that on the Cheoah. What there is room for is ducking and dodging between things and sprints to nearby eddies where the length of the boat worked against me badly. I brought the boat to see if it was the sort of thing I could sit in for sixteen straight days out West. I discovered that I couldn’t sit comfortably in it for a single run down a new river.
The discomfort of the boat and my estrangement from kayaking resulted in panic upstream of the waterfall. The waterfall has a tricky lead-up to it, too. That didn’t help. Nor did the fact that I had to be lead down some sneak routes coming into the waterfall area. When I finally worked and sweated my way to the set up point, I guess I felt I had a handle on things. You were supposed to run toward the fall, aiming at a jutting rock. The water rushed across the rock and would sweep you to the right as you dropped over. That’s not as tricky as it sounds, and I could visualize it. Of course, I can visualize flapping my arms and flying around, too. I ran at the rock and instead of shooting nearly straight over it, pushed only slightly to the right by the force of water, I shot sideways to the right and plunged down where I didn’t want to be. I landed badly, fought for control, and lost it. I’d flipped the boat, panicked, bailed out, and swam for shore before good sense kicked in.
A lot of other people worked very hard to retrieve my boat for me. I lost a new water bottle, lost my pride and lost every bit of self-confidence I had. That was probably a good thing. I had become pretty complacent about the Grand Canyon run. Old memories of competence on unfamiliar water led me to think I could weather whatever I needed to. Not so. I vowed not to take my old creek boat, even though the cost of a new boat was out of my reach and I was so out of touch with kayaking that I had no idea what boat might suit me anyway.
Mike, as usual, came to the rescue. He loaned me a wonderful Dagger brand boat called a Mamba. I wanted to get back on the Cheoah and shake the fear I had of it now. So the next day I ran it in the Mamba, not entirely upright, but always in the boat. Rolling the Mamba the next day above a narrow run, I felt some control return. I was thinking while I was upside down, not just panicking. I rolled the boat and went on. That was what I needed: to learn that I could panic, and to learn that I could keep from panicking. My choice. I wasn’t ready to run off to the Grand Canyon, but it was as close as I was going to get.
Mike wanted to borrow the Savage Scorpion for a race during Memphis In May. I was glad to agree. In a fit of pique at the miserable, awful boat, though, I went ahead and listed it on Craigslist. I figured it would take a month or two to sell and by that time Mike would have raced it and that’d be that. It sold within hours. And another boat I had. Mike was rightly ticked off. I’d agreed to loan him the boat and then sold it. In my defense, I can’t think that Mike would have done very well with it. It was a wretched thing altogether. After letting me know I’d been a thoughtless (insert favorite rude name here) Mike forgave me, and I gave him the money from my two boat sales for the Dagger Mamba he’d loaned me on the Cheoah. I should have charged more for the boats… obviously they sold too quickly to be priced well, and if I’d gotten more money for them I could have afforded a camera to take on the trip with me. But I was now out of discretionary funds and it was time to pack.
Way back in 2002, I got to do this illustration for Dagger Kayaks. They had a deal going with Subaru, and every year would put some kind of entertaining graphic on a spiffy new car. This was one for 2003, I guess. I was at the Ocoee river a bunch that year, and expected to see it on the hood of a Subaru, but never saw it in person. If you saw it, let me know.
