Here’s the thing about the McKenzie River; there is a panoply of white water rapids, some easy, some mildly terrifying and all the many in between. Personally, my favorite stretch of river is from Blue River landing down to Silver Creek. This run of river holds seven “class two” rapids. For my money, seven class two’s make for many opportunities for some good rocking, rolling, and copious drops of cold water over the side, as well as some tricky maneuvering. There’s enough work in each so it is a separate challenge to set up for every rapid, and a challenge to keep the boat under control during every ride through. Yet the challenges the class two’s represent rarely rise to a level which threatening life and limb. It isn’t crazy as bungee jumping, yet there are certainly more than a few that will inject a bucket of adrenaline into the blood stream, and water over the bow of the boat.
The next downriver “run” of rapids offer many fun class one’s, almost no class two’s and two class three’s. The first rapid of the two “class three’s” is “Brown’s Hole.” It is a single event, a brief single wave, hiding great big suck hole. Scouting it from the bank doesn’t tell a boater much about the rapid. From the bank, it looks like a frothy spot in the river. Not much more. It makes a rather pedestrian presence.
I’m not sure if it is fair to call Brown’s a rapid in the true sense. I normally think the value of running rapids in a riverboat is to run through them, not avoiding them. The fun is in the ‘set up’ for a rapid, then negotiating the toils and snares on the way through. A splash of wet over the handrails never hurts, as chilly evidence of the experience.
See, the object of “running” Brown’s isn’t to run through it. It is NOT running through it. Not running “Brown’s” is not easy. The river flow wants to drive your boat right into the suck hole. You need strong arms and great effort to avoid it, just to go around it. I’d like to describe the idea of not going through it as sorta like….. proving a negative. I’m probably wrong. It just seems a shame to burn perfectly good ink, telling how I…., “missed” Brown’s Hole. Can you see the contradiction?
Since I’ve always preferred to float the stretch higher up the river, I have only limited experience going around Brown’s. I am a competent rower, however, so I have the skills necessary to row around it. It’s a pretty good “pull,” on the oars, but with a McKenzie boat it should be doable every time. The hardness of the hull transferring the energy of the oar stroke to the water, and the lightness of the craft all help, compared to, say, an inflatable raft.
A white water raft can do it too. It can pass through it, or go around. It simply takes more heft. More power. Going through it in a raft is far wetter. Many like wet. I don’t especially like wet. I prefer running Brown’s in my McKenzie drift boat. I prefer dry. Going through Brown’s in a raft risks the unwanted and involuntary lesson; how to count the bubbles underneath the boat. Many love the thrill of counting bubbles. No surprise; yet given the choice, I don’t like counting bubbles near the bottom of the river, wondering what comes next. An obituary….?
One day the call came. The church youth leader needed a raft driver to guide a half a dozen Middle School girls on a McKenzie white water float trip. In my world, being associated with an inflatable raft on “my” river is antithetical. In my ‘hard boat’ world, we call the rafters “splash and giggle.” While we “hard boaters” are searching for serenity through casting a fly line to a wary trout, the heat of summer brings the ‘hatch’ of inflatables, their drivers in little or no control over them. They are all over the river, with water buckets and water pumps. It is the shotgun effect of silliness. There is often an ice chest full of ‘Bud,’ trailing along behind the locus of polypropylene. Many will wave at us. They ask, “Catching any?….belch…. What kind of bait are ya use’in?” That day I will be among them. I can’t believe it. I wanted to wear a grocery bag over my head. Maybe even a plastic one.
Longtime river guide Wally Lewis counseled me how to survive paddle rafting. Since the raft was configured to be a paddle raft, each paddler straddles a side tube and paddles according to the commands of the captain. Me. My role is to steer and command from the very back. Wally said; “Make sure you have a rope in the back of the raft so you can hang on to something connected to the boat after you get thrown out in bumpy water.”
So that’s just what I did; I hung on just like Wally said as the raft dove its nose into Brown’s Hole. In the wink of an eye, I was levered out of the back of the boat and found myself counting bubbles, wondering that same old question, what’s next? Someone reading about me in an obituary? My whit knuckles still the rope.
I had commanded the girls to paddle with all their might, and all the might of their ancestors, away from the suck hole. There just wasn’t enough girl-power to do the job.
At the end of major rapids, there is often a slow flat spot where the rafting party can re-organize. I climbed out of the river, then back into the positions of command, and sent us on down river. It was a hot day, so at least I was dry for the start of our ride through Marten’s, lying an hour down river. Marten’s is a much longer rapid, so when I was thrown out for a second time at the top of it I got to count several more bubbles than in Brown’s. This time, bubble counting all the way through it, top to end, wondering again, “what happens next?”
First time rowing Marten’s
“Killer Fang.” “Widow maker.” “The Green Wall.” “The Room of Doom.” These are names of whitewater rapids that chill the souls of the rowers who ply them. Those names, though, mean nothing to us on this summer day in 1981. Those are names of infamous river rapids from other rivers, other places. On this day, the river is the McKenzie and our object is Marten's Rapid. While no name to strike fear in those not baptized into its legend, we know its legend. Thus, we fear. On this day, the reckoning of our wooden McKenzie drift boat and Marten's Rapid lies before us, my friend Charleton and me. After today, our names will be added to the rolls of those whose boat just missed the kiss of the big rock at the entrance and dropped into the roily cauldron.
Fishermen began floating the McKenzie around the turn of the last century in rowboats. Records show Milo Thompson and others guided fishing trips as early as the ‘teens. Herbert Hoover fished the McKenzie many times in these boats. Through time, the rowboat shape changed to accommodate the waves that the river served up. Gradually, the wide transoms, which faced down stream, grew taller. Fishing clients (“dudes”) could now be drier than they were in the old rowboats.
I had gone through Marten’s once in Eric Walton's boatas a passenger. The river was nearly at flood stage. The rapid was ‘blown out’ that day, a ‘freeway’ at high water, so I couldn't get much sense of it. The ferocity of a river rapid changes at each level of water flow. At a high-water level, Marten’s doesn’t have much of a personality. At normal flow, and especially at its lowest flows, it is the most dangerous rapid in the McKenzie.
Today we’ll take our turn at running it, my first time through using my own hands, pushing and pulling my own personal oar handles. A used car dealer once said; “everybody drives a used car.” That phrase somehow reminds me that there was always a first time for every boat-man (or woman) to run Marten’s. Like many things dangerous done for the first time, once it’s over with, another boatman has earned the badge, has punctured that anxiety that goes with “pre Marten’s. But we were upriver, scared. Until today, we talked only bravado.
The prospect of adventure now becomes real. The craft floats out from Blue River landing towards the current, the glassy stream of water that will move under us. This liquid is always ready to catch whoever comes to it and takes them on their way. So this morning’s water calls us out to queue up for our turn in line. The boat easily floats on the clear medium. The water is so gin clear, it’s as though it isn’t there at all. It’s a different reality to think the boat is floating on a thin film of nothing. We seem elevated on this gradual flow of air-like clarity, dropping its way gradually down the river ahead of us, the unknowns waiting to meet us this particular day. It has done so long before we’ve come for our ride; the river relentless through its frequent roaring rapids for unknown centuries. Of those rapids, Marten’s is the patriarch of such thrills on this river.
Both of us had heard about it many times. We had discussed it frequently over a beer, laughing at how cheap talk was. Among the group of river runners we hung out with, we had leveraged the legend of the thing to a near god-like worship.
Earlier that day, Charleton and I scouted it in person, wading across the small stream of water between the shore and the small mid-river island next to the rapid. This bit of dry earth shields the view of Marten's from the shoreline of the main river. Both of us were feeling the effects of this element of secrecy the island dealt us. It masked a normal view from the riverbank, violating a sense of fairness, a sense of full disclosure. It was saying we could not completely prepare for it. We had to run it to fully know it.
We climbed the big boulder overlooking the noisy mass of water on the other side. From there, we could see the ‘Big Wave.’ The ‘boat eater’ of rare return. The Big Wave is ultimate destination within the rapid; it marks the bottom, the end of the rapid. It is the rambunctious finish line, so it is the focus of the ride. It will consume all our thoughts through the day upriver of Marten’s until the job is done.
This rapid is a ‘class three’ out of the commonly accepted scale of one through six. A class three means dangerous passage, requiring experience and skill. That first trip, I had neither. Many call Marten’s a class four, meaning big waves and/or holes combined with technical maneuvering. Five’s mean significant danger to life and limb. Six’s are Niagara Falls; have a large life insurance policy in place and paid up current. Your heirs will certainly use it, so buy a lot. They’ll have a nice wake for you.
All the twists, turns and oar pulls of the boat help avoid a visit to this place, Marten’s, this final hell spot. It is, in river language, a huge suck hole, like Brown’s above it, a “reversal,” where a large volume of water flows over a rock, turns down toward the center of the earth, finally curling back along the river bottom, back upstream. This fellow truly is regular ‘boat eater.’ But standing on the shore, it really didn't look that deep. Or that difficult.
Is it denial? Or ignorance? I asked my co-conspirator;
“Hell, I don't know. Wha'd ya think, Charleton?"
My friend is from the Southern coast of Mississippi, here to earn his master's in architecture at the University of Oregon. Charleton, pausing for a time in contemplation, looking out over the noisy froth, uttered;
"Did my mamma raise a fool?"
I replied, without much commitment in my voice;
"They say these things never look the same from the side as they do from up river, or actually going through them. If we set up between those two large boulders at the top, it looks like we just need to stay in the chute. Piece 'a cake. The Big Wave doesn't look that bad."
"Beer Dog (my nickname), this is only the 2nd time you've ever rowed a drift boat!” (The first time was in a lake)
"I've rafted down the river a couple of times"
"But not this far up." He was right. We were forty miles upriver from the much calmer lower river. "Let get out of here before I change my mind." From that time, until post-suck hole, Marten's ceased to become a topic of conversation. Neither of us wanted to risk any negative effect that might happen by simply mentioning the name.
We drove up to Blue River landing, where we pushed the boat off the trailer. “Blue River” has three launching ramps. It is a busy spot on weekends, yet not today, so we had our pick. We chose the middle one. The boat clunked down on the concrete ramp, then made a loud scraping complaint as we pulled it down the concrete into the water. We were planning to ‘take out’ at Leaburg Lake, a small reservoir roughly six river hours downstream. I had purchased a book with a few cryptic instructions on how to navigate the larger rapids. I grieve that poor tree, cut down to produce it, as it proved worthless.
Martin's messy whitewater is about half way from our launch point at Blue River Landing and the lake. I had been rowing for about three hours without serious problems, but for a whack and a bump here and there. I felt like I was learning quickly. I became relaxed with my continuing familiarity with the oars, rowing in a flowing river, through moderate rapids, and I was feeling secure with the boat. There are seven class two’s ahead in the first few miles. But I felt I had command of our craft and the oars.
That false sense of security soon began to deteriorate.
We rounded a turn in the river, finding ourselves at the upriver end of a long glassy stretch of water before us. Peaceful. Flat and slow. We were creeping along like Huckleberry Finn. Far away, we could hear some noise, and could see a few tiny fingers of back-lit white water splashing up into the air.
The names of Rapids come into being from tradition and lore. I don’t really know how. No one ever seems to remember how each got its name. Perhaps it’s simply by consensus of folks living on the river as well as those who have rowed it hundreds of times. It’s often good for some things to remain legendary without the ability to verify every little detail. The river is a mystery, and legend helps keep it that way. It’s the way it should be. We know too much for certain abut life anyhow. Or we think we do.
Well known as they are to the experienced rower, there are still no signposts for the uninitiated and untutored. During our journey, after running a particular rapid, we always asked ourselves if that particular rapid was Marten’s. I now realize that Marten’s is one of these rapids that, if you have to ask; “Is this Marten’s?” It isn’t.
At this distance, our intuition told us this time, this was it, at the far end of the slow water. Watching it come towards us was like watching a canon ball coming our way in slow motion. There is simply too much time to think. We certainly did a lot of thinking, yet neither of us mentioned the name Marten’s. So Marten’s came, but we kept quiet about it. There was nothing more to say or plan. All our anticipation, legend telling, preparation became moot. Our task now is to watch it come at us. Then survive it.
Our place change in the water lying from the turn in the river to the head of Marten's is smooth and slow. The other side of the stone pillars we scouted earlier lay waiting for us, stoic in their indifference to our feigned indifference. The Big Wait for the Big Wave. Our conversation is light, neither of us yet uttering a word about what our eyes clearly behold ahead. Charleton is fidgeting in the passenger’s seat. The conversation is "normal." Charlton’s words become dog eared, erring towards his Mississippi accent. He must be nervous.
I try some light conversation; "Charleton, what does Pinky think about all the time you spend in Lawrence Hall?" Pinky is Charleton's wife, a tall, slender redhead from California. Lawrence Hall is home to the architecture department at the University.
"Well, Beer Dog, ..."
I'm not listening. The hoped for distraction of conversation doesn't work. It doesn't stop our creeping on down river as we continue on at an even pace. The river itself is becoming shallow and the boat is just elevated over the gravel that passes under the plywood bottom. The gravel is very clean, reflecting a variety of hues. The water looks fishy, but I see none. I am sure the trout are wise enough to our pending predicament as to not fear us. The question occurs to me;“Do fish laugh?” They must know we are soon to be an argument for hilarity. Perhaps they will soon be counting the same bubbles.
We're now getting closer, perhaps thirty yards from the head of the rapid. We shift our weight in the boat, preparing, hoping that we are centered properly for the first ‘pour off’ at the top of the drop. Charleton spreads his feet out to brace himself.
Braced for a graceful entry, the boat suddenly jolts to an abrupt stop. Unprepared, we are both knocked out of our seats. Bodies, arms and legs seem spread out all over the inside of the boat.
The water is very shallow at this point. It is also moving so slowly that small rocks make no imprint on the surface of the water moving over them, making them difficult to ‘read’ their location from any kind of distance. In faster current, a telltale bump of water flowing over a rock will reveal the location of the sub surface rock. There are many hidden here. There is normally some warning, yet not here. Until we get to the first ‘pour-off,’ It becomes pot luck, finding a path between them.
My hold on the oar handles tighten my knuckles to a whiter hue. Now an oar tip is stuck in the gravel on the river bottom. The mass of the boat is moving sideways down river, causing the oar tip to dig deeper into it. The boat continues to move, getting closer to where the oar tip is stuck. The oar begins climbing through the oarlock into the boat, something I hadn’t experienced before.
I didn’t know what was happening for a moment. I managed to twist the oar tip and break it free. The boat pivots on another submerged rock, situating us out of position to set up for the narrow entrance. The boat stops its swing on now a third rock, making for another jolt, taking us broadside to the current. Here we sit.
My desire is to totally focused on the rapid ahead of us, yet I am continually distracted.
"Mercy!," Charleton says in his wonderful southern accent, who’s genesis is rooted in the slow pace of hot, humid Mississippi. It is calming, allowing us to let the events of the last few minutes to catch up to us.
"You OK?" I ask.
"Other than we're grounded ten feet from the worst rapids on the McKenzie River, how could life be any better?"
After a channeling a little boat yoga ‘centering,’ some deep breathing, we prepare to restart the drama. Charleton grabs our third oar (a necessity on the river) and begins to fend us back into position. I now have my two oars free, ready to navigate once we get under way. We rock the boat in unison, breaking free again. floating on to the point of no return. We are committed. The blind leading the blind. No one to hear us if we scream.
Despite our chaotic sequence and recovery, little do we know the real drama is beginning. The cheap guide book said to pass as close to the big boulder as we could, on it's right side, then "simply" hold the boat straight for the rest of the rapid on our way to the Big Wave. At the outset, I unknowingly turn both my oar paddles horizontal, so when I try to push down on the handles to bring them up out of the water for another oar stroke, they don't move.
We are accelerating and the boat is rocking so wildly through the waves, that I can't seem to find the presence of mind to rotate the oars so they could easily be lifted out of the water. Reaction born in inexperience is always worse than action born from inexperience. A commander in battle would say; “We are losing the initiative.” The oar tips are again hitting the bottom, throwing my knuckles, in their death grip on the handles, into Charleton's plywood seat back. I feel pain, but ignore it. They draw blood.
We are out of control, heading right for the Big Suck Hole. The boat is traveling on its own; oblivious of my effort to control it. It is rocking up and down in the waves, about 45 degrees off center. Charleton is truly blessed at this point. His gaze is frozen forward, having no idea his oarsman is now a wild man, completely out of control of the boat. This ridiculous state of affairs continues as we hit the Big Wave. Through the thrashing, I am calmly resigned to our fate;
“We're gonna go in. We are going to sink the boat in Marten’s Rapid. Both of us will be counting bubbles, wondering what comes next.”
The Big Wave as always, is ready to greet us. We could feel it saying;
Hi, boys! Nice of you to…….drop in…”
It reaches out and wraps its great big, white, frothy arms around us. We are still out of alignment. There is no noise but loud roaring. There is nothing left for us to do at this point, but be victims. Helpless.
In a split second, the bow (front) of the boat rises straight up. It pauses there for what seemed like an eternity, water pouring over the rails. In that eternity it is deciding whether to slip backwards, back into the morass, or move forward. I just take it all in, patiently waiting for the decision to be made. “It won’t be long now.”
Somehow, incredibly, the bow began to move forward and begin to drop. It began to inch itself out of the hole. I don't know why, but those big arms let us go. We continued moving out of the froth, the Suck Hole deciding to send us on down river. By all rights we are both blessed. Riding the whole way through Marten’s with no one at the wheel, entering the worst of it willy nilly, at an odd angle, would normally sink a boat. The purposeful way to run the hole is to row forward, so that the momentum and mass of the boat does the lion’s share of the work. We did not have that advantage. A raft of middle school girls in a raft did better, even after ejecting the driver out the back of the raft at the top. I am sure they (like Charleton today) weren’t even aware I was gone, no longer ‘in control.’
I guess “control” can be illusory. Perhaps a good whitewater run through a dangerous rapid is one that I can float down river from. In auto racing, they say, “keep the rubber side down.” In flight, they say a good landing is one you can walk away from. Charleton and I struggle to find the appropriate words for our survival of Marten’s.
The river is calm below the rapids. It feels like a huge exhale of breath to now float along calmly and slowly. We are both standing, completely drenched by McKenzie water. There is a foot of water in the bottom of the boat, but we are upright and still afloat. Charleton and I turn to each other, shake hands and yelped wha-hoo into the dry atmosphere! The Floating Wahoo Brothers.’ We are now members of the fraternal ancient order of Marten's.
Epilogue to Marten’s.
Some may wonder at the friends I keep. No doubt those who wondered at the friends Charleton kept would populate a small state. The above tells of my very first trip through Marten’s with me at the oars. Yet despite the first river debacle, the first brush with drowning, I had to try it again. Implausibly, Charleton had no hesitation. He agreed to ride in the front seat the next time through. Didn’t we learn our lesson the first time? Lessons are for sissies. Accordion players take lessons, real men run Marten’s.
This time the lesson of the first trip was to be seen by spectators, standing on the boulder on the little island near the entrance. Again we arrive on the long stretch; again we see the approaching splashes just over the top of the rapid, the volume of noise increasing as we near the entrance, soon to be tested by another thrashing.
A wooden drift boat (most of it anyway) was wrapped around the entrance bolder. No question what it was, nor why it was there. Somebody didn’t make it through the first round in the ring, struck down before the bell. It was a broken up McKenzie drift boat at the top of the rapid. Some unlucky oarsman’s boat.
They say, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistake, expecting different results.
Both of us severely represented that saying. It was our theme song for this trip. We entered Marten’s properly, just inches from ‘kissing’ the rock standing guard over the first chute of water. The near kiss of the near miss also applied to the pile of splinters passing by us, two guys trying to maintain bladder control while hurtling towards that familiar veg-o-matic called the Big Suck Hole.
No different news to report this time through. We repeated our loosely defined encore. We made it another time. Whooped another time. Shipped a foot of water another time. Notably, neither of us had acknowledged the presence of the broken up boat on the ‘guardian’ rock, until we were spit out of the end. Now safe.
It was nearly twenty years before I tried Martin’s again. The delay was not out of any sort of fear, but because that section still isn’t my favorite stretch of river. I did go back, but when I returned, I was armed with years of rowing experience. The rapid still ‘kicks your butt,’ yet I kept complete control of the boat. I kept things under control enough to bypass the suck hole at the bottom. It was and always will be a loud, frantic and wet experience. Yet it is no longer a persistent demon in my thoughts, demanding to be exorcised. Been there, done that. Got the wet t-shirt.
After our two Marten’s trips, Charleton soon left Eugene, having completed his graduate architecture work at University of Oregon, returning to his native Mississippi. Oregon is a completely different movie than Mississippi. I remained in Oregon, ultimately becoming a boat builder, building the very sort of boat that is best suited for thriving in white water rapids such as Marten’s. I did it for twenty three years.
Charleton and I were the sort of friends who seldom talked, but were always close. I visited him in Mississippi about 1989. I shipped boat parts ahead of me, enabling us to build a boat in a day. We had often vowed to do that when he and I were together in Oregon. During that trip, we sailed in the gulf of Mexico. We ate barbecue. Drank beer. Planned and won wars. Told all the lies that ever existed.
Charleton came to Judy’s and my wedding in 1999. He witnessing signature is on our marriage license.
He married his second wife, Elizabeth sometime after that. He and his new bride rode out Katrina in the attic of their beautiful antebellum home, just across the street from the Gulf in Pass Christian, Mississippi. “The Pass” was the center of the target for the landfall of Katrina. I managed to contact him during those anxious weeks after the storm. I wanted to upbraid him for not evacuating, but to do so would insult my former passenger who had the grit to ride Marten’s with me.
We sent him our Christmas letter in 2013. It announced my new friend, Parkinson’s Disease. Charlton was the only person who called me out of concern for my condition.
Beer Dog and Charleton Jones. Built a boat in a day. We talked about what we had ever talked about before and much more. Hearing that Mississippi voice peeling away the decades. What a wonderful conversation we had.
It was our last.
There are demons out there that ply their trade among fine people, unknown to anyone, until it becomes too late. I now know Charleton battled demons nearly his entire life. One day in 2013 the demons took Charleton prisoner. He took his own life, exhausted in the battle with them. When I found out, I was so sad. So sad. So helpless. Just to write these words causes disabling grief.
A large undivided chunk of my McKenzie River Drift Boat legacy, whatever that is or becomes, belongs to Charleton’s willingness to tame the famous river rapid, “Marten’s,” with me. We exorcised that demon. Together. It won’t ever come back.
The next downriver “run” of rapids offer many fun class one’s, almost no class two’s and two class three’s. The first rapid of the two “class three’s” is “Brown’s Hole.” It is a single event, a brief single wave, hiding great big suck hole. Scouting it from the bank doesn’t tell a boater much about the rapid. From the bank, it looks like a frothy spot in the river. Not much more. It makes a rather pedestrian presence.
I’m not sure if it is fair to call Brown’s a rapid in the true sense. I normally think the value of running rapids in a riverboat is to run through them, not avoiding them. The fun is in the ‘set up’ for a rapid, then negotiating the toils and snares on the way through. A splash of wet over the handrails never hurts, as chilly evidence of the experience.
See, the object of “running” Brown’s isn’t to run through it. It is NOT running through it. Not running “Brown’s” is not easy. The river flow wants to drive your boat right into the suck hole. You need strong arms and great effort to avoid it, just to go around it. I’d like to describe the idea of not going through it as sorta like….. proving a negative. I’m probably wrong. It just seems a shame to burn perfectly good ink, telling how I…., “missed” Brown’s Hole. Can you see the contradiction?
Since I’ve always preferred to float the stretch higher up the river, I have only limited experience going around Brown’s. I am a competent rower, however, so I have the skills necessary to row around it. It’s a pretty good “pull,” on the oars, but with a McKenzie boat it should be doable every time. The hardness of the hull transferring the energy of the oar stroke to the water, and the lightness of the craft all help, compared to, say, an inflatable raft.
A white water raft can do it too. It can pass through it, or go around. It simply takes more heft. More power. Going through it in a raft is far wetter. Many like wet. I don’t especially like wet. I prefer running Brown’s in my McKenzie drift boat. I prefer dry. Going through Brown’s in a raft risks the unwanted and involuntary lesson; how to count the bubbles underneath the boat. Many love the thrill of counting bubbles. No surprise; yet given the choice, I don’t like counting bubbles near the bottom of the river, wondering what comes next. An obituary….?
One day the call came. The church youth leader needed a raft driver to guide a half a dozen Middle School girls on a McKenzie white water float trip. In my world, being associated with an inflatable raft on “my” river is antithetical. In my ‘hard boat’ world, we call the rafters “splash and giggle.” While we “hard boaters” are searching for serenity through casting a fly line to a wary trout, the heat of summer brings the ‘hatch’ of inflatables, their drivers in little or no control over them. They are all over the river, with water buckets and water pumps. It is the shotgun effect of silliness. There is often an ice chest full of ‘Bud,’ trailing along behind the locus of polypropylene. Many will wave at us. They ask, “Catching any?….belch…. What kind of bait are ya use’in?” That day I will be among them. I can’t believe it. I wanted to wear a grocery bag over my head. Maybe even a plastic one.
Longtime river guide Wally Lewis counseled me how to survive paddle rafting. Since the raft was configured to be a paddle raft, each paddler straddles a side tube and paddles according to the commands of the captain. Me. My role is to steer and command from the very back. Wally said; “Make sure you have a rope in the back of the raft so you can hang on to something connected to the boat after you get thrown out in bumpy water.”
So that’s just what I did; I hung on just like Wally said as the raft dove its nose into Brown’s Hole. In the wink of an eye, I was levered out of the back of the boat and found myself counting bubbles, wondering that same old question, what’s next? Someone reading about me in an obituary? My whit knuckles still the rope.
I had commanded the girls to paddle with all their might, and all the might of their ancestors, away from the suck hole. There just wasn’t enough girl-power to do the job.
At the end of major rapids, there is often a slow flat spot where the rafting party can re-organize. I climbed out of the river, then back into the positions of command, and sent us on down river. It was a hot day, so at least I was dry for the start of our ride through Marten’s, lying an hour down river. Marten’s is a much longer rapid, so when I was thrown out for a second time at the top of it I got to count several more bubbles than in Brown’s. This time, bubble counting all the way through it, top to end, wondering again, “what happens next?”
First time rowing Marten’s
“Killer Fang.” “Widow maker.” “The Green Wall.” “The Room of Doom.” These are names of whitewater rapids that chill the souls of the rowers who ply them. Those names, though, mean nothing to us on this summer day in 1981. Those are names of infamous river rapids from other rivers, other places. On this day, the river is the McKenzie and our object is Marten's Rapid. While no name to strike fear in those not baptized into its legend, we know its legend. Thus, we fear. On this day, the reckoning of our wooden McKenzie drift boat and Marten's Rapid lies before us, my friend Charleton and me. After today, our names will be added to the rolls of those whose boat just missed the kiss of the big rock at the entrance and dropped into the roily cauldron.
Fishermen began floating the McKenzie around the turn of the last century in rowboats. Records show Milo Thompson and others guided fishing trips as early as the ‘teens. Herbert Hoover fished the McKenzie many times in these boats. Through time, the rowboat shape changed to accommodate the waves that the river served up. Gradually, the wide transoms, which faced down stream, grew taller. Fishing clients (“dudes”) could now be drier than they were in the old rowboats.
I had gone through Marten’s once in Eric Walton's boatas a passenger. The river was nearly at flood stage. The rapid was ‘blown out’ that day, a ‘freeway’ at high water, so I couldn't get much sense of it. The ferocity of a river rapid changes at each level of water flow. At a high-water level, Marten’s doesn’t have much of a personality. At normal flow, and especially at its lowest flows, it is the most dangerous rapid in the McKenzie.
Today we’ll take our turn at running it, my first time through using my own hands, pushing and pulling my own personal oar handles. A used car dealer once said; “everybody drives a used car.” That phrase somehow reminds me that there was always a first time for every boat-man (or woman) to run Marten’s. Like many things dangerous done for the first time, once it’s over with, another boatman has earned the badge, has punctured that anxiety that goes with “pre Marten’s. But we were upriver, scared. Until today, we talked only bravado.
The prospect of adventure now becomes real. The craft floats out from Blue River landing towards the current, the glassy stream of water that will move under us. This liquid is always ready to catch whoever comes to it and takes them on their way. So this morning’s water calls us out to queue up for our turn in line. The boat easily floats on the clear medium. The water is so gin clear, it’s as though it isn’t there at all. It’s a different reality to think the boat is floating on a thin film of nothing. We seem elevated on this gradual flow of air-like clarity, dropping its way gradually down the river ahead of us, the unknowns waiting to meet us this particular day. It has done so long before we’ve come for our ride; the river relentless through its frequent roaring rapids for unknown centuries. Of those rapids, Marten’s is the patriarch of such thrills on this river.
Both of us had heard about it many times. We had discussed it frequently over a beer, laughing at how cheap talk was. Among the group of river runners we hung out with, we had leveraged the legend of the thing to a near god-like worship.
Earlier that day, Charleton and I scouted it in person, wading across the small stream of water between the shore and the small mid-river island next to the rapid. This bit of dry earth shields the view of Marten's from the shoreline of the main river. Both of us were feeling the effects of this element of secrecy the island dealt us. It masked a normal view from the riverbank, violating a sense of fairness, a sense of full disclosure. It was saying we could not completely prepare for it. We had to run it to fully know it.
We climbed the big boulder overlooking the noisy mass of water on the other side. From there, we could see the ‘Big Wave.’ The ‘boat eater’ of rare return. The Big Wave is ultimate destination within the rapid; it marks the bottom, the end of the rapid. It is the rambunctious finish line, so it is the focus of the ride. It will consume all our thoughts through the day upriver of Marten’s until the job is done.
This rapid is a ‘class three’ out of the commonly accepted scale of one through six. A class three means dangerous passage, requiring experience and skill. That first trip, I had neither. Many call Marten’s a class four, meaning big waves and/or holes combined with technical maneuvering. Five’s mean significant danger to life and limb. Six’s are Niagara Falls; have a large life insurance policy in place and paid up current. Your heirs will certainly use it, so buy a lot. They’ll have a nice wake for you.
All the twists, turns and oar pulls of the boat help avoid a visit to this place, Marten’s, this final hell spot. It is, in river language, a huge suck hole, like Brown’s above it, a “reversal,” where a large volume of water flows over a rock, turns down toward the center of the earth, finally curling back along the river bottom, back upstream. This fellow truly is regular ‘boat eater.’ But standing on the shore, it really didn't look that deep. Or that difficult.
Is it denial? Or ignorance? I asked my co-conspirator;
“Hell, I don't know. Wha'd ya think, Charleton?"
My friend is from the Southern coast of Mississippi, here to earn his master's in architecture at the University of Oregon. Charleton, pausing for a time in contemplation, looking out over the noisy froth, uttered;
"Did my mamma raise a fool?"
I replied, without much commitment in my voice;
"They say these things never look the same from the side as they do from up river, or actually going through them. If we set up between those two large boulders at the top, it looks like we just need to stay in the chute. Piece 'a cake. The Big Wave doesn't look that bad."
"Beer Dog (my nickname), this is only the 2nd time you've ever rowed a drift boat!” (The first time was in a lake)
"I've rafted down the river a couple of times"
"But not this far up." He was right. We were forty miles upriver from the much calmer lower river. "Let get out of here before I change my mind." From that time, until post-suck hole, Marten's ceased to become a topic of conversation. Neither of us wanted to risk any negative effect that might happen by simply mentioning the name.
We drove up to Blue River landing, where we pushed the boat off the trailer. “Blue River” has three launching ramps. It is a busy spot on weekends, yet not today, so we had our pick. We chose the middle one. The boat clunked down on the concrete ramp, then made a loud scraping complaint as we pulled it down the concrete into the water. We were planning to ‘take out’ at Leaburg Lake, a small reservoir roughly six river hours downstream. I had purchased a book with a few cryptic instructions on how to navigate the larger rapids. I grieve that poor tree, cut down to produce it, as it proved worthless.
Martin's messy whitewater is about half way from our launch point at Blue River Landing and the lake. I had been rowing for about three hours without serious problems, but for a whack and a bump here and there. I felt like I was learning quickly. I became relaxed with my continuing familiarity with the oars, rowing in a flowing river, through moderate rapids, and I was feeling secure with the boat. There are seven class two’s ahead in the first few miles. But I felt I had command of our craft and the oars.
That false sense of security soon began to deteriorate.
We rounded a turn in the river, finding ourselves at the upriver end of a long glassy stretch of water before us. Peaceful. Flat and slow. We were creeping along like Huckleberry Finn. Far away, we could hear some noise, and could see a few tiny fingers of back-lit white water splashing up into the air.
The names of Rapids come into being from tradition and lore. I don’t really know how. No one ever seems to remember how each got its name. Perhaps it’s simply by consensus of folks living on the river as well as those who have rowed it hundreds of times. It’s often good for some things to remain legendary without the ability to verify every little detail. The river is a mystery, and legend helps keep it that way. It’s the way it should be. We know too much for certain abut life anyhow. Or we think we do.
Well known as they are to the experienced rower, there are still no signposts for the uninitiated and untutored. During our journey, after running a particular rapid, we always asked ourselves if that particular rapid was Marten’s. I now realize that Marten’s is one of these rapids that, if you have to ask; “Is this Marten’s?” It isn’t.
At this distance, our intuition told us this time, this was it, at the far end of the slow water. Watching it come towards us was like watching a canon ball coming our way in slow motion. There is simply too much time to think. We certainly did a lot of thinking, yet neither of us mentioned the name Marten’s. So Marten’s came, but we kept quiet about it. There was nothing more to say or plan. All our anticipation, legend telling, preparation became moot. Our task now is to watch it come at us. Then survive it.
Our place change in the water lying from the turn in the river to the head of Marten's is smooth and slow. The other side of the stone pillars we scouted earlier lay waiting for us, stoic in their indifference to our feigned indifference. The Big Wait for the Big Wave. Our conversation is light, neither of us yet uttering a word about what our eyes clearly behold ahead. Charleton is fidgeting in the passenger’s seat. The conversation is "normal." Charlton’s words become dog eared, erring towards his Mississippi accent. He must be nervous.
I try some light conversation; "Charleton, what does Pinky think about all the time you spend in Lawrence Hall?" Pinky is Charleton's wife, a tall, slender redhead from California. Lawrence Hall is home to the architecture department at the University.
"Well, Beer Dog, ..."
I'm not listening. The hoped for distraction of conversation doesn't work. It doesn't stop our creeping on down river as we continue on at an even pace. The river itself is becoming shallow and the boat is just elevated over the gravel that passes under the plywood bottom. The gravel is very clean, reflecting a variety of hues. The water looks fishy, but I see none. I am sure the trout are wise enough to our pending predicament as to not fear us. The question occurs to me;“Do fish laugh?” They must know we are soon to be an argument for hilarity. Perhaps they will soon be counting the same bubbles.
We're now getting closer, perhaps thirty yards from the head of the rapid. We shift our weight in the boat, preparing, hoping that we are centered properly for the first ‘pour off’ at the top of the drop. Charleton spreads his feet out to brace himself.
Braced for a graceful entry, the boat suddenly jolts to an abrupt stop. Unprepared, we are both knocked out of our seats. Bodies, arms and legs seem spread out all over the inside of the boat.
The water is very shallow at this point. It is also moving so slowly that small rocks make no imprint on the surface of the water moving over them, making them difficult to ‘read’ their location from any kind of distance. In faster current, a telltale bump of water flowing over a rock will reveal the location of the sub surface rock. There are many hidden here. There is normally some warning, yet not here. Until we get to the first ‘pour-off,’ It becomes pot luck, finding a path between them.
My hold on the oar handles tighten my knuckles to a whiter hue. Now an oar tip is stuck in the gravel on the river bottom. The mass of the boat is moving sideways down river, causing the oar tip to dig deeper into it. The boat continues to move, getting closer to where the oar tip is stuck. The oar begins climbing through the oarlock into the boat, something I hadn’t experienced before.
I didn’t know what was happening for a moment. I managed to twist the oar tip and break it free. The boat pivots on another submerged rock, situating us out of position to set up for the narrow entrance. The boat stops its swing on now a third rock, making for another jolt, taking us broadside to the current. Here we sit.
My desire is to totally focused on the rapid ahead of us, yet I am continually distracted.
"Mercy!," Charleton says in his wonderful southern accent, who’s genesis is rooted in the slow pace of hot, humid Mississippi. It is calming, allowing us to let the events of the last few minutes to catch up to us.
"You OK?" I ask.
"Other than we're grounded ten feet from the worst rapids on the McKenzie River, how could life be any better?"
After a channeling a little boat yoga ‘centering,’ some deep breathing, we prepare to restart the drama. Charleton grabs our third oar (a necessity on the river) and begins to fend us back into position. I now have my two oars free, ready to navigate once we get under way. We rock the boat in unison, breaking free again. floating on to the point of no return. We are committed. The blind leading the blind. No one to hear us if we scream.
Despite our chaotic sequence and recovery, little do we know the real drama is beginning. The cheap guide book said to pass as close to the big boulder as we could, on it's right side, then "simply" hold the boat straight for the rest of the rapid on our way to the Big Wave. At the outset, I unknowingly turn both my oar paddles horizontal, so when I try to push down on the handles to bring them up out of the water for another oar stroke, they don't move.
We are accelerating and the boat is rocking so wildly through the waves, that I can't seem to find the presence of mind to rotate the oars so they could easily be lifted out of the water. Reaction born in inexperience is always worse than action born from inexperience. A commander in battle would say; “We are losing the initiative.” The oar tips are again hitting the bottom, throwing my knuckles, in their death grip on the handles, into Charleton's plywood seat back. I feel pain, but ignore it. They draw blood.
We are out of control, heading right for the Big Suck Hole. The boat is traveling on its own; oblivious of my effort to control it. It is rocking up and down in the waves, about 45 degrees off center. Charleton is truly blessed at this point. His gaze is frozen forward, having no idea his oarsman is now a wild man, completely out of control of the boat. This ridiculous state of affairs continues as we hit the Big Wave. Through the thrashing, I am calmly resigned to our fate;
“We're gonna go in. We are going to sink the boat in Marten’s Rapid. Both of us will be counting bubbles, wondering what comes next.”
The Big Wave as always, is ready to greet us. We could feel it saying;
Hi, boys! Nice of you to…….drop in…”
It reaches out and wraps its great big, white, frothy arms around us. We are still out of alignment. There is no noise but loud roaring. There is nothing left for us to do at this point, but be victims. Helpless.
In a split second, the bow (front) of the boat rises straight up. It pauses there for what seemed like an eternity, water pouring over the rails. In that eternity it is deciding whether to slip backwards, back into the morass, or move forward. I just take it all in, patiently waiting for the decision to be made. “It won’t be long now.”
Somehow, incredibly, the bow began to move forward and begin to drop. It began to inch itself out of the hole. I don't know why, but those big arms let us go. We continued moving out of the froth, the Suck Hole deciding to send us on down river. By all rights we are both blessed. Riding the whole way through Marten’s with no one at the wheel, entering the worst of it willy nilly, at an odd angle, would normally sink a boat. The purposeful way to run the hole is to row forward, so that the momentum and mass of the boat does the lion’s share of the work. We did not have that advantage. A raft of middle school girls in a raft did better, even after ejecting the driver out the back of the raft at the top. I am sure they (like Charleton today) weren’t even aware I was gone, no longer ‘in control.’
I guess “control” can be illusory. Perhaps a good whitewater run through a dangerous rapid is one that I can float down river from. In auto racing, they say, “keep the rubber side down.” In flight, they say a good landing is one you can walk away from. Charleton and I struggle to find the appropriate words for our survival of Marten’s.
The river is calm below the rapids. It feels like a huge exhale of breath to now float along calmly and slowly. We are both standing, completely drenched by McKenzie water. There is a foot of water in the bottom of the boat, but we are upright and still afloat. Charleton and I turn to each other, shake hands and yelped wha-hoo into the dry atmosphere! The Floating Wahoo Brothers.’ We are now members of the fraternal ancient order of Marten's.
Epilogue to Marten’s.
Some may wonder at the friends I keep. No doubt those who wondered at the friends Charleton kept would populate a small state. The above tells of my very first trip through Marten’s with me at the oars. Yet despite the first river debacle, the first brush with drowning, I had to try it again. Implausibly, Charleton had no hesitation. He agreed to ride in the front seat the next time through. Didn’t we learn our lesson the first time? Lessons are for sissies. Accordion players take lessons, real men run Marten’s.
This time the lesson of the first trip was to be seen by spectators, standing on the boulder on the little island near the entrance. Again we arrive on the long stretch; again we see the approaching splashes just over the top of the rapid, the volume of noise increasing as we near the entrance, soon to be tested by another thrashing.
A wooden drift boat (most of it anyway) was wrapped around the entrance bolder. No question what it was, nor why it was there. Somebody didn’t make it through the first round in the ring, struck down before the bell. It was a broken up McKenzie drift boat at the top of the rapid. Some unlucky oarsman’s boat.
They say, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistake, expecting different results.
Both of us severely represented that saying. It was our theme song for this trip. We entered Marten’s properly, just inches from ‘kissing’ the rock standing guard over the first chute of water. The near kiss of the near miss also applied to the pile of splinters passing by us, two guys trying to maintain bladder control while hurtling towards that familiar veg-o-matic called the Big Suck Hole.
No different news to report this time through. We repeated our loosely defined encore. We made it another time. Whooped another time. Shipped a foot of water another time. Notably, neither of us had acknowledged the presence of the broken up boat on the ‘guardian’ rock, until we were spit out of the end. Now safe.
It was nearly twenty years before I tried Martin’s again. The delay was not out of any sort of fear, but because that section still isn’t my favorite stretch of river. I did go back, but when I returned, I was armed with years of rowing experience. The rapid still ‘kicks your butt,’ yet I kept complete control of the boat. I kept things under control enough to bypass the suck hole at the bottom. It was and always will be a loud, frantic and wet experience. Yet it is no longer a persistent demon in my thoughts, demanding to be exorcised. Been there, done that. Got the wet t-shirt.
After our two Marten’s trips, Charleton soon left Eugene, having completed his graduate architecture work at University of Oregon, returning to his native Mississippi. Oregon is a completely different movie than Mississippi. I remained in Oregon, ultimately becoming a boat builder, building the very sort of boat that is best suited for thriving in white water rapids such as Marten’s. I did it for twenty three years.
Charleton and I were the sort of friends who seldom talked, but were always close. I visited him in Mississippi about 1989. I shipped boat parts ahead of me, enabling us to build a boat in a day. We had often vowed to do that when he and I were together in Oregon. During that trip, we sailed in the gulf of Mexico. We ate barbecue. Drank beer. Planned and won wars. Told all the lies that ever existed.
Charleton came to Judy’s and my wedding in 1999. He witnessing signature is on our marriage license.
He married his second wife, Elizabeth sometime after that. He and his new bride rode out Katrina in the attic of their beautiful antebellum home, just across the street from the Gulf in Pass Christian, Mississippi. “The Pass” was the center of the target for the landfall of Katrina. I managed to contact him during those anxious weeks after the storm. I wanted to upbraid him for not evacuating, but to do so would insult my former passenger who had the grit to ride Marten’s with me.
We sent him our Christmas letter in 2013. It announced my new friend, Parkinson’s Disease. Charlton was the only person who called me out of concern for my condition.
Beer Dog and Charleton Jones. Built a boat in a day. We talked about what we had ever talked about before and much more. Hearing that Mississippi voice peeling away the decades. What a wonderful conversation we had.
It was our last.
There are demons out there that ply their trade among fine people, unknown to anyone, until it becomes too late. I now know Charleton battled demons nearly his entire life. One day in 2013 the demons took Charleton prisoner. He took his own life, exhausted in the battle with them. When I found out, I was so sad. So sad. So helpless. Just to write these words causes disabling grief.
A large undivided chunk of my McKenzie River Drift Boat legacy, whatever that is or becomes, belongs to Charleton’s willingness to tame the famous river rapid, “Marten’s,” with me. We exorcised that demon. Together. It won’t ever come back.