Learning the Valley: Excursions into the Shenandoah Valley

Running the River

R U N N I N G T H E R I V E R Edward and I are lazying down the Maury River in a canoe I bought from the Livery after it started leaking too much to rent it out anymore. When the Maury swirling aroundourtennis-shoecladfeetreachesshoelacedepth,it’stimetostart bailing,but,until then,we let the river hitch a ride with us.Between the mooing cows and murmuring river,afternoon sun and the beer in my gut,I’m half asleep and Edward’s in charge, paddling this way and that across the river as he learns the hard way how to steer a canoe when your partner’s too lazy to help.The murmuring in my ears becomes a little louder, more and more insistent, and my copilot is yelling, “Rapids, Daddy, rapids.” Twenty years ago when I first came to Rockbridge County, I’d have been terrified; two beers earlier, I might have been attentive;but now I’m relaxed and happy that the river’s decided to wake itself up a bit. I sit up, grab my paddle, and look downriver to where the Maury shallows out in a rock-bestrewn rapids perhaps fifty feet long and nowhere deeper than a cobble. We’re going to scrape, but that’s why the canoe leaks in the first place: it rubbed the Maury the wrong way once upon a time,and the river punched a hole in her just to let her know who’s boss out here. It was Matthew Fontaine Maury,charter of the oceans’ currents,Confederate soldier and VMI professor, after whom Virginians renamed what until then had been the North River.Rising west of North Mountain where the Calfpasture and Little Calfpasture rivers combine,the Maury flows first through the four miles of rock-strewn Goshen Pass,which my black and blue butt remembers inner tubing one summer and which kayakers more successfully run when the water’s up in winter. Once through the mountain, the Maury settles down, and wiggles forty contented miles through the Shenandoah Valley, cutting oxbows in the valley limestone to the puzzlement of geologists unused to such placid-river hallmarks in a mountain stream. The current flows,first on this side of the river’s bed,then on that,crossingsover marked by rapids or riffles. Nor does the current linger long on either side, driven by will or fate,inertia,gravity,or accident to switch sides every half mile or so. Where the current runs against the shore, the bank can be high, a thousand or more clambering,climb-me feet of rock.Edward and I explore those cliffs from RUNNING THE RIVER 101 time to time, sneaking across some absent farmer’s field to gaze down upon the Maury,Edward heaving a cobble he’s picked up from a fossil streambed laid down who knows how many years ago when the Maury ran a thousand feet of rock higher than it is today and all that rock from North Mountain to the Blue Ridge washed downriver to Virginia Beach,where I have sifted through my fingers sand that came from Lexington so long ago it had forgot its birth bed. On the other side of the river, away from the current, the Maury builds point bars, sand and rock junkbeds, where everything that can get snagged—trees, fences, tires, tin roofs, canoes, dead cows, plastic bags—gets snagged. Here too, though, the river builds sand bluffs, just high enough above the water to look down and play king of the fish. Grassy picnic grounds when grazed by cattle, they’re sunny enough for me to lie down on while Edward plays in the water, chasing fish and overturning rocks to see what lives beneath them. And much still does, despite our best efforts to pollute the stream to death. Pick a rock up, and you’re likely to see half a dozen multilegged creatures scuttling from the sun,various larvae,mostly may- and stonefly,an occasional,larger dragonfly, sometimes a full-grown water penny or, find of find, a pincer-waving hellgrammite big enough to scare a boy into dropping the rock he’s found it beneath.Saferandcommoneristhecrawdad,betrayedbythebright-coloredpebblesscatteredinfrontof itsentrance,backpedalingaway,withEdwardinpursuit. Feet dried, beer drunk, crawdads fled, we pile back in our canoe and float downstreamagain,therivercarryingusfourmilesanhourtowardhome.“Rapids, Daddy, rapids” shakes my lethargy from time to time, and we paddle thirty frantic seconds, whooping and hollering as the canoe, bottom be...