The Potomac Death Wave

rakkity

About a month before hurricane Flora hit the Chesapeake, Dave Berman and I had laid plans to run Mather Gorge in Great Falls Park, and there was always the concern in the back of our minds that the remnants of Flora were still flowing down from the VA and WV highlands, keeping the Potomac too high to run. For 3 weekends in a row, I checked out the river from various vantage points upstream and down, and the level seemed to be falling fast, even though a half inch of rain fell one day. But what the heck, the rocks were all covered, so it was only white water, right? Maybe it would be too easy.

On Sunday, October 13, I loaded my canoe on my station wagon, then picked up Dave at his home, and we headed off to meet his friend Bill Calhoun. The weather was fine—a great October morning with blue skies and the promise of a warm afternoon. We met Bill near the take-out point on the Virginia side of the river, and stashed his car at the head of a Potomac Appalachian Club trail that winds down through the suburban woods to the bottom of the American Legion Bridge.

We discussed the possible difficulties of cadging the canoe through the trees up the steep trail on our way out. But I had no worries. Dave looked like a ex-college football linebacker. Bill was smaller, but was a fitness consultant who could bench press 2 1/2 times his own weight. On the carryout, I’d lead the way out, and they could do the carrying. Naturally, such power guys are also power eaters, so I had packed a big cooler full of ham, cheese and turkey sandwiches for the trip.

As we drove across the bridge again, and up the Maryland side towards our put-in at Great Falls, we discussed the estimated time of arrival, possible stopping points, and the condition of the river. At Great Falls, we trekked the canoe and lunches down the C&O Canal towpath. We were shocked by the destruction caused by the hurricane. A few hundred yards along, we turned down a trail into the woods, and set the canoe down in a small lagoon near the beginning of Mather Gorge.

Just for practice, we paddled around in a few circles in the lagoon, Dave in the bow, Bill in the middle, and me in the stern. Our plan was to paddle on out of the lagoon through a narrow inlet into the main channel of the river, but this plan wasn’t so simple as we had expected. I could swear that the last time I paddled this inlet, the flow in the inlet channel had been in the opposite direction. At that time, it was really low water, so there was only a gentle downhill flow into the river. But now, the current was into the lagoon from the river, and it was too powerful for us to paddle against. So we docked in an eddy next to the inlet and climbed up on the rocks for a view of Mather Gorge and the main stream.

The river over there looked pretty darn powerful, and it was really ripping along. No rocks, but lots of roaring white waves splashing at high speed. We finally worked out a strategy for getting out into the current using eddies and Bill’s hauling strength, first on the bow line from one set of inlet rocks, and then on the stern line from another set of rocks. Now we were poised like a javelin above the current, and our plan was to paddle like crazy right into the main tongue of the flow, and just keep on going.

We glanced over at the climbers on the dihedrals of the cliffs across the river. The hikers and fisherman behind us and a few tourists the other side may have been watching us, but we sure weren’t studying them. Our attention was on the white waves off the foward bow. Over the roar of the rapids I shouted, “Let’s go!” and we were off. In seconds, we were in mid current, paddling like demons on the surf. Then we saw those giant standing waves ahead of us, and we went over the first crest. The canoe pointed obediently down the wave into the green boil below the crest. It all seemed very familiar to me. Flashbacks of such boils played in my mind’s eye from our family raft trip on the Snake river two months earlier. But this was no raft—this was an open canoe.

In a fraction of a second, we plowed into the downstream wave and the canoe filled with water. I saw Bill leaning right, and the canoe leaned that way. In that quarter second I thought maybe I should lean left to rebalance the canoe, but by then we were all in the soup.

During the Vietnam war, Bill had been in the Gulf of Tonkin on a boat that got blown out of the water. He and several other guys flew through the air, each of them laden down with 70 lbs of ammunition, backpacks and weapons. He’s a great swimmer, or he’d never have made it out alive. He says that his reaction in the Potomac now was similar to his reaction then: “Survive!”

(Continued in tomorrow’s edition of the blog)