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Chapter 2 the nantahaLa: the LiminaL unveiLed nantahala i (nantahala Lake) The Nantahala River flowed through my memory like a ghost stream from another life. I’d taken a rafting trip down it thirty-some-odd years earlier with a church group my sister Melissa was heading up. I remembered following orders and paddling backward or forward when I was told. Our guide, a camp leader not much older than me and far from a professional river rat, recommended that we remain onboard at the falls, a six-foot drop at the end of the run near the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC), a gathering of shops and outfitters , with a footbridge for observers to ogle experts and blunderers alike. One of our crew did fall out, and we backpaddled to pick her up in an eddy below the falls. She was laughing, and I remember her laughter so vividly because I feared her dead or badly injured, the jolting of the falls was so powerful, the water such a violent maelstrom. In the summer of 2007, far removed from sixfoot drops, church camps, and giddy Christian fellowship, I would put in at first on Nantahala Lake, above Nantahala Dam, the first dam on this popular whitewater river. A month later, in August, I’d put in below Wessor on Fontana Lake, formed by Fontana Dam. After a two-hour drive over the Smokies alongside Lakes Chilhowee, Calderwood, and Fontana, I arrived at a hamlet called Aquone, where you could hardly get to Nantahala Lake it was so clogged with gated communities named Arrowhead Point and the like. At an ancient bait store that rented space for RVs only, a tough-looking teenage girl—angular, pierced, tattooed—turned to an old woman in a rocker and said, “Where could he camp in a tent?” “In a tent?” asked the woman with a contempt that made me smile. She reminded me of my own grandmother, repeating my words in a gently 12 The Nantahala mocking way to expose the absurdities of my plans. Then she told me a place I could camp, for free: Old River Road, actually Forest Service Road 308; “old river,” it turns out, is what’s left of the Nantahala River after most of it had been diverted into a pipe that runs parallel to the road. Here it’s a little stream with rocks and islands barely big enough to stand on, topped with grass. I took the campsite with the least trash, next to the gravel road. Only a couple of cars passed in two hours. At this, the cleanest of the five or so sites, people had contributed their paper wipes and other refuse to the ambience. To the delight of swarming flies, somebody had poured their cooking grease on the ground. I covered that up with dead leaves and lit my citronella candles. The fire ring was full of ash and other refuse, including a slice of white bread that even the ants shunned. Above me loomed rhododendrons and maples and pines, high steep ridges on both sides of the river. Coming from the heat of the valley where I live, it seemed an oasis of cool freshness here, and it looked and smelled as if it had rained recently. That summer, even a rain that had fallen days earlier was worth relishing; stupidly, I wished for more. I hiked toward the dam down the country road, partly retracing the steps of eighteenth-century botanist William Bartram, one of the first naturalists of European descent to document the flora and fauna of the New World, as well as the culture of the native peoples, including the Cherokee. Bartram traveled on foot twenty-four hundred miles across the Southeast. Not far from where I was walking, he came upon the Cherokee chief Attakullkulla (Little Carpenter), who had traveled to England himself in 1730, with the help of Sir Alexander Cuming. At the end of Old River Road, I walked past a recycling center on Junaluska Road, then began walking down Nantahala Dam Drive, which soon turned to gravel. After three miles I came to a floodgate, or emergency spillway, that was about twenty feet high and twenty to thirty yards wide. On the way back to camp, I could hear fat drops splatting on the leaves above me like shrapnel. At first I thought it was hail, as it was so loud. A guy in a truck came by and asked, “You need a ride...

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