Waves, eddies, and the literati By Elmore Holmes October, 2004      I don't really consider myself a voracious reader. I've always been a rather slow reader. I think a big reason I gravitated toward math and the natural sciences in school was that I was intimidated by the lengthy reading assignments in English, history, and social science courses.      Nevertheless, I've always liked books. I like the way they look and the way they feel. I like that I can open a book and be instantly transported into the author's world.      For me, books and paddling have gone together since the very beginning. Not long after my first whitewater canoe trip as a summer camper in North Carolina, I saw my first paddling book: Carolina Whitewater by Bob Benner. The director of our camp, who was a friend of Benner, had a spiral-bound early edition that we took turns reading in the van on river trips. It happened that Benner's son, Dave, was the head of the canoeing program at our camp during my first several summers, and in this book there was a photo of Dave rolling his C-1 at the base of Nantahala Falls. In those days I could imagine no rapid more formidable than Nantahala Falls, and seeing Dave--my teacher--featured in this book playing The Falls convinced me that there must be no greater paddler in the world.

Elmore's columns appear monthly at the Outdoors, Inc.,website: www.outdoorsinc.com

     As I got older, I took advantage of the autonomy a driver's license bestows, visiting some of those North Carolina rivers that the camp couldn't send trips on. Then, new volumes began to appear on bookstore shelves that made me look toward even more distant horizons: Whitewater Home Companion by William Nealy. Ozark Whitewater by Tom Kennon. A Paddler's Guide to the Obed-Emory Watershed by Monte Smith. Appalachian Whitewater, whose three volumes by multiple authors covered the entire Appalachian mountain chain.
     After college I moved north to attend graduate school in New York City, and even though I didn't have a car or a boat with me in my cramped Gotham quarters, I managed a couple of train trips into the suburban countryside to explore rivers of the Berkeshires and Catskills on foot. I imagined myself running the big drops like the people I had seen in guidebook photos.

     Masters degree in hand, I moved back south and immersed myself in paddling, and my skills improved rapidly. Over the winter I ran rivers in the Southeast and West Virginia that I had previously known only in the pages of books. Then, the next summer, I drove out to Colorado, and as usual, a book was my guide. This time, it was A Floater's Guide to the Streams of Colorado by Doug Wheat. Wheat's tome is more than just a river guide: the book includes dozens of historical photos and anecdotes from Rocky Mountain river lore.
     On that trip I met a guy named Gordon Banks, who was putting together a new guidebook that would offer never-before-published information for our rapidly-evolving sport. That winter, Colorado Rivers and Creeks by Banks and Dave Eckardt hit the shelves with updated stream data, "new" creek runs, colorful anecdotes, and vivid photography. I spent the spring with my nose buried in it. The summer (1995) saw epic high water in the Rockies, and I headed back out to Colorado with intimate knowledge of the rivers that would soon beat me to a pulp.
     Back East I was starting to do some whitewater slalom racing, and I sought guidance on this complex discipline. Bill Endicott, the long-time coach of the U.S. national team, was way ahead of me: his series of books on racing had been in print for over a decade. The sport was already beginning to outpace the technical instruction that Endicott's books offered, but there was more than enough good advice for a hack like me to ponder. I was most captivated by the case studies of individual athletes in Endicott's landmark volume The Ultimate Run. Studying technique in the gates was all well and good, but in these case studies I found what I really love: stories. Stories of people, and places, and history.
     Endicott had also written a pair of books on other paddling disciplines: The Danger Zone, which covered wildwater (downriver) racing, and The Barton Mold, a case study of Olympic flatwater champion Greg Barton. Soon, I had my hands on these books as well, because... well, just because.

     Eventually, I ventured beyond river guides and technical manuals, into sure-enough literature. Edward Abbey, a lifelong examiner of the issues affecting the American West, wrote a number of fascinating essays on the desert canyons cut by the Green and the San Juan and the Colorado. Both Abbey and folk singer/river-runner Katie Lee wrote gut-wrenching condemnations of what might be the greatest environmental tragedy in U.S. history: the burial of Utah's Glen Canyon beneath Powell Reservoir. Lee, in All My Rivers Are Gone, bids a tearful farewell to her beloved Glen Canyon that is no less heartbreaking than the death of a lover.
     I've also read my share of "true stories" of wilderness adventure. The journals of R.M. Patterson, a hunter and trapper who negotiated the unforgiving river systems of Canada's Northwest Territories, are now available in book form, titled Dangerous River. Two accounts of the tragic 2000 Tsangpo Gorge expedition in Tibet have been published: Courting the Diamond Sow, a first-hand account by expedition leader Wick Walker; and The Last River by noted outdoor adventure journalist Todd Balf.
     In recent months, a couple of river-related volumes have rested on my night table. Never Turn Back by Ron Watters is a biography of legendary big-water pioneer Walt Blackadar. I read this book with the Alaska Atlas and Gazeteer close by, eager to learn all I could of the desolate, glacier-scarred canyons of the Alsek, Stikine, and Susitna rivers of Alaska and northern British Columbia. Whitewater Classics by Tyler Williams revisits those North American rivers that fifty of the most accomplished paddlers on the continent consider their favorites.

     My home river, the mighty Mississippi, figures into its share of great literature, most famously that of Mark Twain. But to my knowledge, no one has written a book specifically on paddling this great river. My old college typewriter is up in the attic somewhere...