What's For SUPper?

         "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...