Gauley, By Golly
A Perspective from Our Editor Ricky Paul
Friday night. Clockwise, from left: Shay, Mighty Michael Taylor, Benjamin, Jackson, Me (holding the camera), Spence Daddy
It’s funny what you notice in moments. I’ll never forget the first time I played onstage at No Name, our local college bar. I was nervous. So nervous my hands dripped down onto the metal and wood of my guitar, and then from my guitar onto the hard, gray carpet of the temporary stage. The air smelled like beer, and the audience was four people: the friend who drove me there and the three musicians waiting for their turn at the open mike. And I was halfway through my first song, Sublime’s “Garden Grove”, when my mind left the stage and floated, floated on down the road, down along the railroad tracks and across the bridge over the river to my house, where I wasn’t sure if I had remembered to plug in my laptop.
And when, after seven and a half years, I finally walked across the stage to accept my college degree, when those lights and cameras shone in my face, when that tassel slapped the spot behind my ear, when some old guy shook my hand as though he were the one who had believed in me all this time despite the rage and the doubt in that cruel-ass world outside, I was trying to remember where I had parked.
But when mighty Michael Taylor roared over the white fury of Lost Paddle, “I need more! We need more! All forward! Harder than this! We gotta get left!” all I could think was “Gee. That’s a big fucking rock.”
The second Friday in September fell on the fourteenth last year, 2018, and the dirtbags came forward from their holes to congregate in Summersville, West Virginia. They showed up in their vans and their Subarus, and they set up camp all over Veterans Memorial Park just off US 19. Normally vacant, the grassy area just past the softball field found itself Thursday night covered in the tents and the booths of outdoor retailers hoping to peddle their wares in the chaos that would follow. And as the evening bled on, camp sites sprouted outside the borders of the main lawn until they formed the forest of tents and cars I found Friday night when I arrived.
This would be my second Gauley Fest; my first had been the year before. I’m a very occasional member of the paddling community, so I’d had to hear about the festival from Spencer. I’d been skeptical about coming, but he’d made some good points.
“Stop being a little bitch,” he’d said.
So I came. I rented a Nissan Versa and drove the four hours from Richmond to Summersville, and I found God in that West Virginia water and nirvana with her paddlers, and I promised to come again, and holy shit, it had been a year.
So I loaded my car again this September weekend, and again I made the drive from Richmond, and I walked up to our campsite to see that not much had changed in a year; in fact, if I didn’t know better, I would have thought that the tents and poles and tailgate chairs and folding table had never been broken down and had just stayed up these past twelve months. Camp even included a drunk and sweaty Michael Taylor who wore the same mile-wide smile as always.
“Great to see, ya, man!” he said, and he gave me a big ole bear hug.
And it was great to see him, too. It was great to see all the returning faces from last year, and it was great to meet new ones. The paddlers are a family, and arriving at Gauley Fest is like joining them for Christmas. And this particular family contains a bunch of alcoholics, so I had some catching up to do.
I stopped by the Gnarcissist booth to greet Pete and Nicky P., and they had kegs of beer, so I grabbed a cup, and my night was underway. All around were tents and booths and lights and people. The energy on that first night is electric. Everybody is glad to see everybody else, and if you talk to the paddlers, they’ll tell you about their runs on the Lower earlier that day.
“Yeah, it was fun. Went down the Lower today. Stoked to run the Upper tomorrow.”
But there’s a little something else in their voices on Friday night. Something tiny. An after-taste.
It’s fear. The Upper Gauley, denoted as the 9.8-mile stretch from Summersville Dam to Mason’s Branch has a number of rapids, but there are five main ones, known as the “Big Five”: Insignificant, Pillow, Lost Paddle, Iron Ring, and Sweet’s Falls. All of them, according to American Whitewater (https://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River/detail/id/2378/, accessed on 12/25/2018) are Class IV-5.0 on the International Scale of River Difficulty.
It’s a mean river. According to American Whitewater’s Accident Database (https://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Accident/ , accessed on 7/7/2019), at least nineteen people have died on the Upper Gauley since 1977, including at least one every year from 2005 to 2011. In 2009 and 2010, there were six fatalities, three in each. This shit happens, and the paddlers know it.
And I knew it, too. And though we all laughed and cheered and bonded, we left something out in the night. We hadn’t done what we were here to do. Not yet.
So a few beers and several dozen group selfies later, I curled into my tent and drifted to sleep over the sound of wafting voices scattered from a few distant camp sites.
“Here I am,” I thought. “Here I am.” Tomorrow would be a test with real stakes, and I was past the point of preparation. It was time to do, and that was a peaceful thought, I guess. Worry or fear or overthinking weren’t my friends, and it wouldn’t have done any good to entertain them. So I went to sleep.
And then the morning is almost anti-climactic. You wake up, and not everybody is up yet. There are a few people sitting in camp chairs, but nobody is doing anything to move the process forward. And you’re not going to be the one to do it, so you sit next to Benjamin, and you say “Thank you” when somebody pours some coffee into your cup, and then you become one more non-contributor.
Then around nine or so, Spencer gets fed up with the fact that nobody has started breakfast yet, and he explains, using his complex proprietary Spence Daddy Time Equation, that at this pace, we won’t be on the river “until like noon”. At this point, Mighty Michael Taylor emerges from his Coleman tent wearing his trademark grin, and he walks over to the camp stove, and he whips up two dozen eggs to feed the masses. Spencer begins slicing avocados.
After breakfast, it’s time to solve a bunch of non-problems like “Who’s going with Michael to set up shuttle?” or “Are you taking that brown WaterShed? Do you have room? Can I put this in there?” or “Does anybody want this Clif bar? I don’t need it,” and other trivial shit. Then you load up Nicky P.’s truck, and you drive for like an hour to the put-in near Summersville Dam, and it’s packed, so you wait your turn. And by the time you, Shay, E-Roc, and Michael Taylor load the raft and carry it to the water, it’s 11:56 a.m.
And there I was. In that holy water. Spencer, Jackson, and Nicky P. were in kayaks. Spencer was giggling like a child. All the nerves from the night before were gone. In our raft, a sense of duty came over us. Fear wouldn’t help now. We needed to be there for each other in those rapids, especially since there were only four of us in the full-sized raft.
And as we drifted down the first bend, Michael gave us his raft-guide soliloquy.
“Listen to me at all times. When I say ‘give me one forward’, that means one stroke forward. When I say ‘give me one back’, that means one stroke backward. Two forward, two backward, three forward, three backward, same thing. ‘All forward’ or ‘all backward’ means go until I say to stop. When I say ‘take a break’, that means stop paddling. If I say ‘get left’, that means everybody needs to get to the left side of the boat as quickly as possible. Same with ‘get right’. If you go in, swim like hell to safety, and don’t stand up. I may contradict myself. Always listen to the last thing I say. Okay?”
We nodded.
“Okay. Give me two forward. Take a break. Two forward.”
You hear it first. The roar. Then you see the whitewater up ahead.
“I think we should just run it,” Michael Taylor said with a grin. Shay, E-Roc, and I shrugged. “Fuck it. I don’t need to see it. We got this. Let’s go all forward!”
Funny enough, the first rapid is called “Insignificant”, and it’s one of only two true Class Vs on the Upper. You have to navigate through a technical rocky section into a pretty sizeable wave train. Then there’s a hydraulic you have to either punch or skirt, and then there are two gigantic undercuts that you should avoid, and you’re through.
Except we hit the hydraulic sideways and almost flipped on the first rapid. Flipping there would involve, in the words of Michael Taylor, “swimming like hell” toward river left while the current pushes you river right directly into those mean-ass undercuts. Not a great start. Fortunately, we washed free, and we managed to keep everybody in the boat, and it was on to Pillow.
Pillow is the showcase rapid on the Upper Gauley. It’s big, and it’s impressive, with relatively lower consequences than other big rapids. It also has plenty of space to observe, with a gigantic flat rock positioned right above the crux of the thing. “Stadium Rock” somebody told me it’s called, but I haven’t been able to confirm on the internet that that’s actually a thing. But on that Saturday, around lunchtime, it’s packed full of paddlers, skirts still dripping, boats pulled up on the banks, and they raise hell on the rocks as rafts, and kayaks, and canoes, and Creature Crafts, and river boards, and just about anything that’ll float down a river take people through the wild rapid. And as you sit up around the bend, you feel the nerves, and you hear the shouts from the rocks around the rapid as the people ahead of you either make it, or they don’t.
Then you navigate a cute little rock line, and you’re committed.
“I need all forward! Harder! Harder!” yells Michael as you blast through the white water. And you, Shay, E-Roc, and Mighty MT dig your paddles in the water for those insane four or five seconds, and then you’re through it, and then you take the river right line around Volkswagen Rock at the bottom, and it’s time to eddy out and join the paddlers on “Stadium Rock”. And it’s your turn to watch everybody run Pillow.
We didn’t take the badass line. I guess it probably doesn’t make as much sense in a raft, but the real G-Unit paddlers take the high line, and they splat the rock just below all the spectators, and then they flush out to the left of Volkswagen Rock. About half of them flip, and about half don’t, but they usually roll up at the bottom. Once in a while, a kayaker swims. Fortunately, at Pillow, this really isn’t very dangerous. Not like it would be on the next rapid we would run. The most challenging part of Pillow, the part you’d be most likely to flip on, is at the end, right in the stadium. So if you flip there, you count “Two Mississippi”, and you’re in flat water. Even if you can’t roll, there’s not much to hurt you if you come out of the boat. You’ll just catch a bunch of shit from the paddlers, who all saw it happen.
And the fact that this rapid is so big and poses relatively little risk makes the crowd bloodthirsty. Once in a while, if a kayaker swims, or, better yet, a raft capsizes, they all roar in lust. They stand there in their helmets and skirts and PFDs, sodas in hand, and they hoot, and they holler at the carnage. Every few minutes, a paddler will leap from the safety of the rock into the froth of the rapid, and he’ll disappear into the white, only to surface downstream in the flat water and swim to the bank. And if one of the “unsinkable” Creature Crafts makes the mistake of taking the high line, the paddlers will jump on and try to flip it. They’re ruthless.
And as soon as you’ve run Pillow, you become one of them. You stand with them, and you yell, too. I even jumped off “Stadium Rock” this year and into the rapid. I tried to surface right away, but white water is aerated. It’s not dense enough for you to just swim to the top. I had to wait until the river took me downstream before I could lift my head and breathe again. I coughed, and I felt foolish, and I swam to the bank.
Pillow is an experience. This is one of the scenes everybody who comes to Gauley Fest takes home. And we stood in the stadium for a while, and then we swam back to our raft on the opposite shore and ate some lunch. Then it was time to carry on. The river wasn’t done.
And then there’s the third of the Five. This one doesn’t look as crazy as Pillow, especially from the top, and it’s way less easy to observe, because it lasts for a quarter of a mile. It has four drops, and each one follows just after the previous, so if you miss your line on the first one, or, heaven forbid, you were to swim on the first one, you’ve got a lot of white water to get through before you’re safe. It’s called Lost Paddle, and it’s the most intense section of the river, if you ask me. Probably if you ask the paddlers, too.
And we styled the first drop. And then the second one was pretty intense, but then you get through, and you’re tempted to relax. Nope. Here’s drop number three, and we make it, but we’re pretty well right of where Mighty Michael Taylor wants us. And I look up, and I realize that we’re not going to get far enough left. There’s a wall of undercuts in front of us, and the safe line is river left. There’s just no fucking way. It’s too far. I look at the rock we’re going to get pinned on.
“Gee,” I think. “That’s a big fucking rock.”
And then comes the adrenaline. And Michael’s yelling like a maniac.
“All forward! Harder! Harder! I need more! Harder than this!”
And a moment of serenity comes. Clarity, almost. Shay, E-Roc, Michael, and I paddle our hearts out. People have drowned missing the line we’ve just missed, but there’s no fear in the boat. Just purpose. Just this awesome moment where we might or might not make it to safety. Where this day either will or won’t take a turn for the very sketchy. Or worse. But that’s kind of the truth you find in the white water. You find situations where you have to keep your cool, and you have to paddle the hardest you’ve ever paddled. Or you could die. Or someone in your boat could die. And you know this, and you know you’re not invincible, and it’s okay.
And sure, you could die in your car on the way to work one morning. We all know that. But it’s different. Somebody built that road, and they had the cars that would be riding on it in mind when they did. And they put lines in the middle, and they put stop lights and stop signs, and they designed this whole system that was meant to be driven. That was inherently tame. And it’s only violent when it breaks. When somebody doesn’t follow the rules.
But nobody designed the river. They can have a say in how high or low the flow is based on the Summersville Dam’s releases. But nobody put this rock here and that tree there and that hydraulic over there. And whether you swim or you sink makes no difference to the water. It just keeps rolling. And it’s infinitely bigger than you, and it’s infinitely stronger than you, and it’s infinitely older than you. And to ride it is to submit to its power. And you might not shake Death’s hand. But you see him in the rocks ten or twenty feet away. And you understand that you aren’t in control. Not even Mighty Michael Taylor is ever completely in control.
We got around the rocks that day. We made it river left, even though there were several seconds when I was certain that we wouldn’t. And we raised our paddles, and we cheered our success, and we went on to Iron Ring.
Iron Ring: Big tongue. Don’t go left. There’s a hole. Moving on.
According to gauleyriverrapids.com, John Sweet made the first descent in 1968, and the last rapid in the Big Five is named after him. I know they call it Sweet’s “Falls”, but it’s really more of a big slide. You enter from the right side of the top, and you get going pretty fast, as it drops off quickly, and then you punch the white water at the bottom. You’re not quite safe yet, as the big rock at the bottom—Postage Due, they call it, because if you hit it, you’ll “stamp” your raft to the upstream face—threatens to spoil your triumph, but a few back strokes and you’ve made it through the Big Five.
And at this point, Michael Taylor asks for a bag of wine, and that big ole grin, which never left, seems a little more relaxed. We push our raft onto the shore at the takeout, and we hug each other. We all shake Michael’s hand, and we feed him alcohol. He’s earned it.
We shuttle back to the campground with some folks we met on the river. We tie our raft to the top of the van, and fifteen of us pile in. On the way back, we sing songs, and we act like children. Everybody is happy. Everybody is right where he or she wants to be. We’ve come through. We’ve made it. It’s time to celebrate.
Saturday night is not Friday night. Friday has tension. Saturday has none. The paddlers drink their beers and their kombuchas. They wrestle each other in the grass. There’s a band on stage, and they go all night. Jackson Kayaks gives away some gear. Food trucks feed you pulled pork or tacos or burgers and French fries.
Gnarcissist sold all their sunglasses, but they saved a pair for me, and I put them on to walk around the grounds. Down at the campsites in the trees, there was a DJ with lights and lasers and shit, and I went and danced for a while. Then I hung out around a campfire. Then I went back out and heard the band a while longer. Michael Taylor was in a great mood, having brought the three of us through the water safely. He gave me a couple sweaty bear hugs and shared some no-bake cheesecake with me, and we hung out in a raft on the ground for a while, which turned out to be a great spot to sit in the midst of the frenzy. Folks came and went from our raft, and we met them and shared their stories. We talked a lot about the river.
A bunch of us also spent some time on top of the van. We hung out in camp chairs, and we took a selfie, and we told each other about our lives, and our hopes and our fears.
There’s love among the paddlers. They’re a community, and if you join them, even for a weekend, they welcome you like family. They’ll feed you eggs and avocados and kombucha and shit, and they’ll get you drunk.
And then it’s over. And it’s time to go back to life. Mine was that of a software engineer in Richmond, Virginia, so I hopped in my car on Sunday, and I hit the road.
A group of us met up at the New River Gorge, just down the road, and we took in the views, and then we got some Pies ‘N’ Pints (just the pies for me) to close a perfect weekend. And then we parted ways. Me down my path, and the paddlers, down theirs.
But there’ll be a breezy, not-too-cool September weekend, not too far in the future, in the green hills of West Virginia, and I’ll get to be a paddler again. And I’ll get to ride the river, and I’ll get to walk around in Gnarcissists, and maybe we’ll sit in a raft and eat no-bake cheesecake. Maybe I’ll swim. But for those few days at Gauley Fest, life is all right.
Who’s in for 2019?
Appendix (the selfies): What started as a silly little piece mutated into this 3800-word monstrosity that you’ve now read (or, more likely, skimmed. I’m not offended). Before that weekend, I had the idea to “bring back the group selfie”, and thus, I set out to document the whole weekend with just the front-facing camera. Anyway, putting them all in the middle of the piece didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but I didn’t want them to go to waste. So here they are, with captions.
On the way to the river (Front to back: Me, Jackson, Spencer, Benjamin, Nicky P., E-Roc)
At the take-out. Front to back: Me, Shay, Jackson, E-Roc, Spencer
The adventures are endless. I was glad to finish off the no-bake cheesecake. This was one of my favorite moments of the whole weekend.
Spence Daddy, Shay, and I at Pillow
Van ride back to camp. What a feeling!
Group photo at the New River Gorge. (Left to right: Shay, Mighty MT, Paul, Benjamin, Nicky P., Nicole, Spence Daddy, Pete)