What's For SUPper?

Naked Man's Rock      The short run from Hopper to Caldwell is difficult for late May in the West Virginia hills due to an unseasonably low flow. There are several ledges on this two-mile stretch where the lone negotiable sluice only becomes visible as one frantically veers into a single inverted V.      A first lesson in canoeing 101 is to miss the point of the V where an underwater rock lurks and head instead into the open top for an unobstructed path. I fail even that practical exam on the one rapid of this trip, Naked Man's Rock.      In higher water, the channel past these twin tanning boulders is broad, but it shrinks in summer to a narrow chute shooting past the jutting jaw of the larger slab. I'm angling for a photo on the approach and miss a split in the current. Before I can raise the paddle to steer right, I'm careening from rock to rock in a jarring descent to the left of the open flow.       I pull out of the ...

Entering the Cat Hole       My first real Greenbrier River journey, on the four miles from Renick to Spring Creek and back again on the adjacent trail, came with many other paddleboard firsts, from position changes to standing strokes, rapids reading to boulder dodging, SUP trekking to a first boating accident.       The winding mountain stream consisting of long, clear pools interspersed with riffles and ledges puts the new skill set to the test. Standing paddling is splashy in the first slow stretch, chasing a bald eagle and a kingfisher  downstream  from tree-to-tree, but soon settles into strong vertical strokes using postural shifts as I focus on getting past the last houses.        The next slow-moving section is the Cat Hole where hippy homesteaders from the surrounding communes still meet to celebrate high summer, but now joined by their children and grandchildren. An elderly caver once told me about wading downstr...

         "That thang hard to steer?" shouts a ragged-bearded man in torn cargo pants from the Caldwell boat ramp. His thick eyebrows are raised under a forage cap, one hand dangling a cigarette, the other tugged by a miniature pinscher toward a nearby grassy bank.      Both my hands are twenty-five feet away and frantically attempting a first outward sweep from the kneeling position to miss a submerged tree trunk. It's my test run on the Greenbrier, a wild and undammed river tumbling south out of the Alleghenies for a hundred-sixty-two miles before dumping into the New River at Hinton, West Virginia.      The ridges east of this highland stream mark the divide between waters flowing into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, my river's ultimate destination. From the Greenbrier's source in mountainous Pocahontas County, the watershed is shaped like a long-tailed letter N written backwards, first roughly south, then northwest on ...

       I wait a week to open the Red Paddle crate.       The heavy box had sat upright just inside the garage, a sentinel to the coming boating season on the Greenbrier. Each passing of this picket brought images of sliding in at Spring Creek Depot, skirting the riffles at Capsize Rock, or dropping over the ledge below Anthony Creek. I saw myself bouncing past Naked Rock, upright on the long pool at Camp Allegheny, or gliding onto the Caldwell ramp. It was six days of nodding to the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner:  "Anticipation of a pleasure is a pleasure in itself."      Then a spare hour arrives and I unpack to find a bewildering array of straps, hooks, wires, patches, and tubes. A huge hand pump rolls out as the flattened boat unfurls. There are stays to insert if over one-hundred-sixty-five pounds, but only after inflation to one PSI. Other instructions are nowhere in sight, and there also goes my imagined simplicit...

     Today this soon to be sixty-five year-old ordered an inflatable stand-up paddle board.       The Red Paddle Company twelve-footer has already gotten me through a hard winter of family illnesses, work disappointments, and friend losses. On many cold, dark days it was the image of riding that SUP down the wild Greenbrier River and carrying it back to the car on the River Trail that was my reason for continuing to be.      Having a "raison d'etre" is important for everyone, but particularly so with aging. A little motivation to keep moving goes a long way to keeping a Medicare-ready, post-Covid body moving: More kneeling in morning yoga; Step squats with dumbbells; Daily walks to work and back with weighted messenger bag. Ten-thousand steps a day approximate the five miles between river put-ins and take-outs.      Still, standing up on a narrow, four-inch thick board gliding down a swift mountain river is a daunti...