Across Serene Lakes ... & Down Rough Rapids : Romping by raft on an upcoming Olympics site, Tennessee’s Ocoee River
When is a river not a river?
When it’s not scheduled to be one, and for the Ocoee, that’s 249 days a year.
On those days, this waterway in southeastern Tennessee is no more than a trickle threading through a bed of boulders, a spot to wiggle toes in cool water while basking on a hot rock in the sun.
But signs along the riverbank warn that such hanging out can be hazardous the other 116 days of year, because on those days the Tennessee Valley Authority allows a section of the Ocoee to revert to form. And by nature, it turns out, this river is not so laid back--which will become obvious with the upcoming Olympics.
At mid-morning on the days designated, some wizard upstream flips a switch, and the Ocoee’s waters, instead of being diverted for power generation, run free between Dam No. 3 and Powerhouse No. 2. The result is that within about an hour and a half, the formerly benign burble is transformed into nearly five miles of foaming rapids, tricky shoals and boat-sucking eddies.
Good reason to stay ashore if you don’t like your water white. For the species of thrill seekers known as the “river rat,” however, the Ocoee taking its natural course means it’s time to raft, or--in the case of kayakers--roll. These paddlers faithfully mark the Ocoee’s Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations on their calendars. The river probably won’t become a stream of consciousness for the general public, though, until the latter part of July. That’s when the Ocoee will make its splash as the site of Olympic kayaking and canoeing slalom competition, standing in for white-water-less Atlanta, 120 miles to the south.
And then will come my moment to say: “Been there. Seen it. Rode the rapids.”
All technically true. I did see the Olympic course, and I ran rapids--it’s just that they weren’t one and the same. A good thing too, otherwise I would have been in way over my head.
Before my trip to the Ocoee, the only paddling I was familiar with was of the dog variety. The friend I recruited for the trip, Aldra, was in the same boat. However, the outfitter, Ocoee Outdoors, required no experience and took all comers as long as they were at least 12. How risky could it be?
“Obviously, not very” was my conclusion, and my confidence never wavered until after I had flown to Tennessee, met Aldra at the Chattanooga airport, rented a car for the hour’s drive to the Ocoee, stayed the night in a cabin in the Cherokee National Forest and arrived early enough at the outfitter to browse through the company store. Only then, when fanning through a booklet called “Taking the Ocoee Challenge,” did I hesitate.
The “Ocoee Challenge,” the booklet explained, was a two-hour trip through almost 20 Class II, Class III and a Class IV rapids; the higher the number, the greater the difficulty. Unlike most rafting trips, which start on smooth waters and give people padding practice before hitting the first rapid, ours, about 30 seconds into its maiden voyage on the Ocoee, would take us to meet Grumpy.
Grumpy was a Class IV--”long,” “difficult” and “very turbulent.” Conditions also would “make rescue difficult.” I was not terrifically comforted to read that a guide with a rope would be on the bank in case anyone experienced “involuntary ejection.”
Before I could get into the gruesome details of Broken Nose (Class IV), Flipper (III) or Diamond Splitter (IV), the 30 or so of us who had signed up to run the river that morning were called to assemble around a raft on the outfitter’s deck, where a guide named John discussed positioning for paddles and posteriors.
The best place to sit was on the spot where the rim of the raft meets the seats, though the timid could retire to the inside positions. I figured to be among that number after hearing about MOBs (man overboard).
To rescue one: Insert hands under shoulders of life jacket and yank.
If one: Swim for raft if it’s near.
Then we adjourned to pick up life jackets, helmets and paddles before boarding the bus for the ride upstream to the launch site. All this talk about MOBs made the advice we had seen posted outside a country church that morning grimly apropos:
“If you don’t want the fruits of sin, stay out of the devil’s orchard.”
And here I’d signed us up to go apple picking.
When I had imagined white-water rafting, I had pictured running the river alone, like “The River Wild,” minus the death-defying parts. Reality bore a closer resemblance to Raging Waters, minus the water slides.
In the parking lot at Dam No. 2 that morning, half a dozen buses bearing the logos of competing outfitters were disgorging passengers in brightly colored helmets and life jackets. Guides, mostly young, lean and tan, swarmed over trailers and bus roofs to unload stacks of equally colorful rafts.
Perhaps 100 paddlers were sitting in a score of rafts lining the parking lot, waiting for their turn to run the rapids. More were practicing in the still waters above the dam. Every few minutes, a raft would be called to take its place in the procession leading to the put-in spot, and its crew would hoist their boat overhead and disappear down an incline.
On de-busing, Aldra and I were greeted by our guide, Chuck (They-Call-Me-Pappy) Briere. Our boat, Barney, turned out to be the only grape-colored craft in a flotilla of yellow, red, gray and blue.
While the guides around us conducted dry runs--making people pretend-paddle and yelling out orders such as, “Give me three. Back! Back!”--Chuck, a retired military man who estimated he had been down the river 2,000 times, gave us brief and nonchalant advice.
At the put-in spot, the air was wet with spray and noisy with the pounding of captive water being released. Kayakers hovered in the wake of the dam like dragonflies as every minute or so another raft swirled off in water that was turbulent even before the first rapid.
When our turn came, Chuck motioned me and a taciturn fellow to the front of the boat. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to sit there--the front was the thrill zone, I had been told--but what, me a wimp? I clambered into the seat and wedged my foot firmly in a crack. Aldra, more concerned about her neck than her image, wisely took a back seat, close to Chuck at the tiller.
We were barely all aboard before our boat was skimming down the river toward the first rapid.
“Give me one,” Chuck said as we headed into the rapid. I not very effectively dragged my paddle through the water, then managed to nab a piece of the rope looped around the raft.
Barney hit the first of the white water and abruptly began to convulse. I bounced--repeatedly, clear out of my seat a couple of times. It would have been a case of premature ejection if I hadn’t had that white-knuckle grip on the rope.
The river suddenly seemed to be making a shocking racket. Barney lurched across a series of smallish ledges, then plunged down a big one, rearing like a rodeo horse as he tried to recover his balance.
At that point, a portion of the river flung itself full force in our faces. There was a collective gasp at the drenching, followed by a colorful diversity of exclamations.
Moments later, Grumpy was history, and Chuck was steering us into calm water by the riverbank. We were all giddy--with relief as much as excitement.
Next would be Gonzo Shoals, a Class II (“clear channels that are obvious”), and running it was like taking a series of parking lot speed bumps at 20 mph.
The Class III and IV rapids came in rapid succession--Broken Nose, Slice and Dice, Moon Shoot, Doublesuck. Chuck piloted us through “wave trains,” “whoosh waves,” “washboard waves” and a “rock garden.” He took us through a spin cycle in Washing Machine Hole and flirted with flipping us out on Teeter-Totter Rock. He seldom called upon our suspect paddling prowess, although other guides seemed to give their crew lots of strokes.
*
Between rapids, Chuck filled us in on the river. He solved the mystery of the box, for one thing.
Even before he had pointed it out, I had been wondering about the green, rectangular wooden structure that ran along the left bank of the river, elevated on trestles. It looked about the right size to hold a railway, but Chuck said it was a flume, built in 1913 and later taken over by the TVA.
For 63 years, the flume carried all the water that was in the river between the No. 2 and No. 3 powerhouses, leaving this part of the river dry. Then in 1976, the box began to leak, badly, and the TVA was forced to shut it down for repairs. The Ocoee was freed from its bondage.
It took seven years to fix the flume, and in that interim, white-water enthusiasts had the run of the river. So when the TVA planned to turn off the tap permanently in 1983, they appealed to Lamar Alexander, then governor of Tennessee, who helped broker the present deal for an on-again, off-again Ocoee. On days when the river is run for recreation, outfitters pay the TVA $2 for every person they take rafting.
Fourteen thousand people a day are expected to travel to Tennessee to view the rapids on July 26, 27 and 29 of the 1996 Summer Olympics.
*
Meanwhile, as we approached a Class III rapid of our own, Chuck had a bonus for us. “Eagles,” he said, pointing upstream at some treetops.
In unison, we craned skyward. As we squinted, trying to spot the big birds, Chuck dumped Barney backward over a ledge, tumbling us around like dice. River rat humor.
Not that Chuck wasn’t considerate. Before we ran into Double Trouble (Class III), for example, he rotated the seating so that three new people were up front. He had the woman in the middle pass her paddle back to Aldra. That was the considerate part, because then, when he stood Barney on end in the middle of Double Trouble and sent the woman skyward, no one got conked with her paddle when she tumbled back into the raft.
The woman, not hurt but all shook up, gave our next adventure a pass--the opportunity to jump in the river and ride the current before grabbing a line and hand-over-handing it back to safety.
“I get paid by the hour,” Chuck claimed as we tied up at Jump Rock while other rafting companies kept on going.
Aldra and I gamely bobbled across the flotilla of rafts tied together in the lee of the rock and scrambled onto the mid-river boulder.
With life jackets on, how scary could voluntary ejection be, I thought as I checked river traffic before taking my turn. Not very, I concluded before hitting the water and being swept away like a gum wrapper. I barely made the rope.
Then it was back into Barney: nine rapids to go. Chuck coaxed Aldra into the front for a couple of the churning snaggle-rocked passages, though he didn’t try to upend her. He saved that for me and our big finish at Hell’s Hole (Class IV) and Bubba Home Free (ditto).
Knowing what Chuck was up to when he asked me to move to the front and pass back my paddle, I braced my arms and wedged my feet as best I could. I took a calming breath. The river was cranking up the volume to a roar.
Ahead of us, the Ocoee was narrow and spanned by a bridge lined with people leaning over the rail to watch the wild action under them. The river was coming to a boil there--right next to a concrete bridge abutment. It would be a grave mistake to slam into that stanchion, I thought fleetingly as we whooshed toward it.
An aptly named rapid was Hell’s Hole, a caldron of wildly churning water about six feet lower than the river at its rim. Barney took a running start and did a belly-flop right into the middle of it, leaving me behind, high and momentarily dry. I had an airborne nanosecond to worry about where I was going to land before being flipped backward, into the boat and not the river. Sprawled on the bottom of Barney, I could see my feet stuck awkwardly in the air, a madly whirling sky, cascades of falling water and a flash of concrete as we hurtled past the abutment.
And so we came to the end of our rapid romp. If value can be measured in cc’s of adrenaline, it had been a bargain. In terms of boasting rights, too, the Ocoee had been a good deal. Not only would I be able to claim that I’ve run the river when the Olympics roll around, I’ll also be able to say I’ve survived a real hell hole.
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GUIDEBOOK: Rapids Transit on the Ocoee
Getting there: American, Delta, Northwest and USAir offer connecting service to Chattanooga from LAX, with restricted fares beginning at $348 round trip.
Most of the major car rental agencies have outlets at the Chattanooga airport. I rented a subcompact from National Car Rental using my AAA discount for about $20 a day. From Atlanta, site of the 1996 Olympic Games, the drive is about 120 miles.
Rafting companies: Ocoee Outdoors (P.O. Box 72, Ocoee, TN 37361, telephone [800] 533-7767 or [423] 338-2438) offers rafting trips from March through November on water-release days, which are weekends in spring and fall and every day, except Tuesday and Wednesday, during the summer. Children must be 12 or older for the Ocoee, but younger children may participate on milder trips (Class II rapids) on the Hiwassee and Pigeon rivers. Prices for these trips vary according to month, day and the week, but range from $31 to $46 per person.
Others offering trips down the Ocoee include: Cherokee Rafting, tel. (800) 451-7238 or (423) 338-5124; Hiwassee Outfitters, tel. (800) 338-8133 or (423) 338-8115; Nantahala Outdoor Center, tel. (800) 232-7238; Outdoor Adventures, tel. (800) 627-7636 or (423) 338-5746 (spring and summer); Outland Expeditions, tel. (800) 827-1442 or (423) 478-1442; Sunburst, tel. (800) 247-8388 or (423) 338-8388.
Where to stay: During the Olympics, accommodations in the area are likely to be scarce. We used Mountain Cabin Rental (tel. [423] 338-5345 in Greasy Creek (no discernible town), about five miles from the outfitter in the Cherokee National Forest. Our cabin, which was up a steep gravel drive in the woods, had a kind of out-of-kilter charm that included a loft with a stuffed fox, a china chicken in a basket, hokey Indian art and a green plastic TV that received only one channel. The price, though, was almost as steep as the driveway--$135 a night. We stayed another night in Chattanooga at the Fairfield Inn (tel. [423] 499-3800), a moderately priced ($57.95) and unremarkable motel. Cleveland, which is about 12 miles from the rafting area, offers a handful of middle-priced and budget chains.
For more information: Tennessee Department of Tourist Development, P.O. Box 2310, Nashville, TN 37202, tel. (800) 836-6200 or (615) 741-2158, fax (615) 741-7225.
--M.J.M.