In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

68 I wake the way you awaken in nature, for no apparent reason, without the blast of an alarm or even the morning voices on the radio. Despite the storm and fatigue, or maybe because of both, my sleep was deep. My body feels sore in that wonderful way that means your muscles have relaxed after long labor and the rest has kneaded itself like a deep tissue massage into your limbs and muscles, leaving you aching and exhilarated. I peer out into the gray light to hear Ethan already up and moving around.We need an early start to make Fayetteville, a paddle that will stretch our endurance and cover better than twenty-five miles. But I’m game for it. At this point, I can’t imagine pulling out of the river early. During the night, the river has risen a whole foot, which is good news for the Monster . It will be a fast day for us, a day with no groundings, no capsizing, just steady paddling, some fun fast water, and a lot more wild country giving way to the inevitable trashy detritus of civilization. This morning I perform the hardest task of the whole trip: I take my sodden river shirt off the roof of the tent and button it on. This seems like no big deal, but realize I have just emerged from the double dry and cozy cocoon of sleeping bag and tent.The shirt is still soaked and muddy from yesterday ’s dunking, and further soaked by the rain, which somehow didn’t wash the mud out of it as I had hoped. It’s a cool, overcast morning with occasional drizzle that will follow us all day long. So I take a breath and just put it on, feeling the clammy weight of the sleeves on my shoulders and arms, around my belly.The pants are wet, too, but somehow I don’t mind that. The wet shirt, though. Ugh. We strike the tent in good order and pack it away, filthy from sand and sediment carried down on us by the runnel and the rain.We shove off by 6:30, and after a few paddle strokes, I no longer notice the clammy shirt or my own grogginess.We suck down orange juice and munch granola bars and fruit and move swiftly downriver in the glory of a serene morning. We and the morning birds—herons and ducks, mostly, and some others that flit by too fast to name—have the river all to ourselves, and ahead of us the fog steams off the river in 5 Chapter 5 69 ghostly filigrees, silvering the new light. As the day warms, turtles begin to adorn logs and rocks, always lined up by size, a silly, fussy orderliness that always makes me smile. We encounter the last patch of fast water on the river just above Fayetteville , where a number of local kayakers are playing, traveling to and fro across the river, upstream and downstream.They seem to belong to the houses and cottages near the river. One of them asks, “You going through them rapids?” Sure, we say, and off we go in a perfect run. It’s a glorious day for paddling, overcast and drizzly, and the rise in the river means that we are hustling along in a deceptively brisk current. Just above Fayetteville we hear what we think at first is thunder. It grows louder, more insistent, more frequent. But it isn’t thunder. We are passing the live-­ fire range of Fort Bragg, home to an impressive cadre of units, most famously the 82nd Airborne, about 40,000 soldiers in all. It is also home base for the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School and the Psychological Operations Command. When it opened as Camp Bragg in 1919 (the “camp” designation signaling that it was not yet a permanent army garrison but a transient training facility), it was a proving ground for field artillery units.The remote location made it an ideal place to shoot off cannons. What we are likely hearing are the concussions of 155-­ mm howitzer shells, so-­ called Excalibur rounds that can be calibrated to strike within ten feet of a target twenty-­ five miles away, a fact that both amazes and terrifies.The large sign on the west bank announces,“The Sound of Freedom.” The sounds of live-­ fire remind me just how often in history the Cape Fear has been...

Share