It was six o'clock in the morning, and I was about to give up on a paddling trip.
     Richard had agreed to be at my house by four o'clock so that we could get an early start for Little River Canyon in northeast Alabama, but as dawn broke into full daylight, there was no sign of him. My attempts to call him at his downtown apartment had yielded nothing but endless ringing.
     Richard Carson had not been my first choice of a paddling buddy for the day, mainly because I didn't know him very well. My only previous experience with him had been on a trip to the Gauley the previous fall, and although he had proven to be a highly capable boater, he still was not the first person I thought of when seeking a partner for a challenging run like Little River Canyon. A native of Newcastle, England, Richard had not lived in the Memphis area very long. A gifted biochemist who had earned his Ph.D. by the age of 25, he had moved to Memphis for postdoctoral work at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He worked long hours and did not frequent canoe club meetings. Calling him had not crossed my mind until Lanier Fogg, one of several people who had turned down my invitation to go paddling, suggested I do so. I gave Richard a call, and our date was set.
     But now it appeared that Richard was a no-show, and I was back in bed and drifting into dreamland when the phone finally rang.
     "Sorry. I overslept," he announced in a Brit accent so heavy that it was sometimes impossible for me to understand a word he said.
     "Didn't you hear your phone ringing?" I protested.
     "Um, no... stayed out rather late last night. But I'm still keen t'paddle," he said cheerfully.
     I thought about this. Richard would get to my house around seven o'clock, pushing our arrival time past noon. It was early March, and we would be hard-pressed to reach the takeout before nightfall. Part of my exasperation was actually a feeling of foreboding that stemmed from my lack of confidence on Little River Canyon. Richard had never run this Class IV-V piece of water, and I had run it only once before, with Lanier and several other friends. Though I had gotten down it in one piece, I feared that I would not be able to recognize the major rapids. Furthermore, I would be paddling a new boat, a Lazer kayak converted to a C-1 that I would come to regard as the worst boat I have ever owned. It was incredibly tippy and quite difficult to turn even though it was short by 1995 standards. In short, I had plenty of reasons to tell Richard to forget it and go back to bed.
     "Hurry up and get over here," I told the limey scoundrel.
     We wasted little time making the trek across north Mississippi and Alabama via U.S. 72, and shortly after noon we were dragging our boats down the steep putin trail. Like everything else about him, Richard's appearance on the river was unusual. His boat was a purple Topolino, which in '95 was still much shorter than anything else on the market. His headgear was a bombproof motorcycle helmet with faceguard. Richard himself was not a big guy--5'6" or so, 135 pounds--and when he donned his boat and gear he resembled a cross between Barney and the little Martian from Bugs Bunny.
     Considering Richard's choice of such a stable boat and protective headgear, one might get the impression that he was an excessively cautious river-runner, but he was in fact quite the opposite. Richard approached big whitewater with a distinctively cavalier enthusiasm--a foolhardy approach, perhaps, but I believe it was an expression of Richard's carefree, happy-go-lucky disposition rather than the result of macho insecurity.
     This L.R.C. neophyte was obviously the more relaxed of our twosome on this day. While I nervously wobbled my way downstream, Richard immersed himself in the river as though he had been born of the springs that fed it. Richard's seat-of-the-pants style was most apparent at Pinball, the most difficult rapid on the river. A jumble of huge boulders divides the river into several slots, of which only the one on the right is runnable. To the boater descending from upstream, the correct route is by no means obvious, and even though I knew which slot to run, I felt it necessary to eddy out on river right and scout the violent, twisting drop below.
     As I did so, I called to Richard, who had paddled ahead seemingly oblivious to the maelstrom that awaited. But he either could not or would not hear me, and he disappeared over the small entrance falls before I could pop my skirt. Alarmed, I grabbed my rope and scrambled over the rocks toward what I was certain would be a situation of dire emergency. I fully expected to see Richard in the clutches of a monster hole, or stuffed beneath an undercut rock, or wedged into a boulder sieve, or pinned broadside in one of the narrow slots.
When I crested the final boulder obstructing my downstream view, all I saw was a boat, in an eddy, at the bottom of the drop, with Richard in it, his smiling face beaming at me from deep inside the motorcycle mask.
     I managed to relax for the rest of the run, knowing that Richard didn't need my help getting down the river. We reached the mouth of the canyon minutes before nightfall (of course), and we headed back to Memphis, and back to our respective lives.

     I didn't see Richard for the next few months, but occasionally I would get wind of his latest paddling adventure. That summer, Lanier and I and several friends traveled to Colorado, where an enormous snowpack had produced record water levels that gave us all the paddling excitement we could handle. While there, we heard that Richard had visited Idaho with a few of his friends and run the North Fork of the Payette at a level high in the thousands of cubic feet per second.
     Back in the East, Richard and I got together for an Ocoee run now and then, and one weekend we ran the Russell Fork and the North Fork of the French Broad, but in general our paths rarely crossed.
     In the meantime, I pursued my passion for paddling with others or by myself. I made my first trip to Idaho in the summer of '96, and I went straight to the North Fork of the Payette, eager to know what all the fuss was about. Tagging along with a group of locals, I immediately found out what the fuss was about. The water of the North Fork Payette is huge; at the same time, the riverbed is steep, technical, and rocky. For the first half-mile of the run, I felt I was simply hanging on, not really in control. In Nutcracker, the second or third rapid on the river, I got thrashed in the biggest hole I have ever seen, and I did something I have done perhaps only one other time in my life: I walked off the river.
     After that summer, I don't think I ever saw Richard again. Occasionally I would ask other St. Jude employees if he was still living in Memphis, and they would say, "Yeah, he's around, but he's busy at work," or something like that. If he was doing any paddling, he wasn't doing it with anybody I knew.
     Richard died on August 14 of this year. A big and powerful yet steep and technical river was the scene of his undoing: the North Fork of the Payette. The man accompanying him that day said he became stuck in a gigantic hole in a rapid called Nutcracker.
Richard came out of his boat in a daze--perhaps from a blow to the head, although it had seemed that the helmet he wore could have protected him from an atomic explosion. I can only wonder whether his fatal dance with the hole was the result of his nonchalant river-running style.
     The sport of paddling is populated with all manner of characters--people who look funny, people who paddle funny, people who say and do funny things. Richard was unique in that he seemed to personify all the oddball characteristics. My experiences with Richard were brief but whimsical, and I am grateful that several moments of his short life were spent with me.
 
 

Images of Richard
	Forest above and rock below frame Richard Carson's descent of Iron Ring on the upper Gauley River in 1994.  Photo by Elmore Holmes.
Richard enjoys a relaxing moment with Memphis paddler Greg Raymond in Five-Boat Hole on the Lower Gauley River in 1994.  Photo by Elmore Holmes.
	Rotors spinning, Richard tumbles down Humpty Dumpty in Little River Canyon in 1995.  Photo by Elmore Holmes.
Richard does a dance to keep warm at the Little River Canyon takeout.  Photo by Elmore Holmes.