It was late spring 1994, North Georgia had been hammered by several tornadoes, clearing swaths of trees, destroying buildings and clogging rivers with acres of downed trees. I'd just moved back to my family's farm in Jackson County to build a house after four years of teaching Inupiaq children in the Bering Strait region of western Alaska.
I received a phone call from Steve Hicks, my good friend and canoe partner in an aborted attempt to paddle from the North Georgia Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico in August of 1981, but that is another story. Steve related that the Chestatee and Etowah Rivers had tons of tornado debris in them and our friend Ben Lachance, who, with his wife Dana, owned Appalachian Outfitters and rented canoes for day trips on the rivers, was missing a prime chunk of his business season due to the choked river. Would I be interested spending a day clearing parts of the River?
After four years of shoveling snow, walking to work in 70 and 80 below wind chilled mornings, across drifts higher than my head, snow machining and skiing across miles and miles of frozen tundra and ocean, and swimming once in the frigid Bering Sea, did I want to spend a day moving some brush out of a warm, sun kissed Southern mountain stream? What do you think, dear reader?
Steve said he’d meet me at the canoe outpost, early the next day. I asked if we needed tools and he replied that Ben had everything for us. We left the farm, drove through Gainesville, across the upper reaches of Lake Lanier and up GA Highway 60 toward the mountains. Less than an hour later I was pulling into Appalachian Outfitter’s rental outpost on the Chestatee River, a couple of miles outside the home of Georgia’s historic gold rush town, Dahlonega.
After a round of handshakes and back slapping hugs with Steve and Ben, we climbed in Ben’s van. He’d already loaded a canoe and gear in the canoe trailer. He told us that the Etowah drainage had been hit hard by a tornado and there were parts of the river completely blocked. If we could open a route through the blocked parts of the river he could start running rentals again. He wasn’t sure how bad the log jams were in the less accessible parts of the river, but said he’d be grateful for whatever we could clean out. It sounded like an interesting day.
Arriving at the put in, we quickly unloaded the canoe, filled it with chain saws, gas cans, axes, a bow saw, our lunches, a couple of gallons of water, paddles, life vests, and our lunches. Too bad we didn’t have a camera in one of the gear bags, what we encountered and did that day would scarcely be believed by others in later years.
I’d taught Steve some canoeing basics back in 1981. In the intervening thirteen years his passion for whitewater and his paddling skills had far surpassed my own. He’d run and guided rivers all over the southeast and was a master paddler.
I took the bow, Steve the stern and to Ben’s hearty wish of, “Good luck!” we pushed off into the small, swiftly flowing river,
Steve joked that we’d likely be in for a tiring day.
Now I must reveal that Steve and I were both blessed with some uncommon physical skills. I was lean and muscular at 220 lbs. with many years of Olympic style weight lifting behind me. I was fast and powerful. Steve was even more of a physical beast. He was built like the classic powerlifter he’d been, with thick thighs and chest, a mighty back and shoulders, and arms that looked like he could choke a bull. I didn’t expect we’d find much of a challenge on the river that day. Oh how wrong I soon realized I was.
Within a quarter mile of twisted river we came upon a narrow set of riffles with several small trees leaning from the banks, limbs immersed in the water and tops bobbing in the small waves. The river was impassable for forty feet. We pulled alongside the gravel bar and grabbed the chainsaws. We quickly began limbing the trees, cutting up the trunks and tossing the logs and branches onto the gravel bar. Within a few minutes we were left with just a couple of trees down in the water. One was pinning the top of the other in the stream. After a minute’s discussion I ended up shimmying out a fallen tree hanging about six feet above the river with a bow saw, cutting off the tree top so that Steve could wrestle it out of the water and open the channel by a couple of canoe widths.
That done we headed on down the river cutting up fallen trees, moving brush from the stream, sweating in the building heat, laughing, talking about old times and our kids and life the last few years while I’d been away.
It was a beautiful morning with blue skies and a light breeze. Being out on the emerald colored river was intoxicating. We quickly fell into a working rhythm of removing limbs, then one of us lifting, prying or bracing the tree trunks while the other ran a chainsaw to cut up the dense hickories, oaks, and lighter poplars. Most of the trees were small only a few inches in diameter. A few were large, heavy old behemoths that took long minutes of finagling, pushing, lifting, cutting, and balancing to remove them from the river.
My respect for Sthil products grew by the hour as the saws took a beating being pinched and trapped by logs, pulled underwater, and dropped when one of us needed to escape large falling branches. It was a great day to be strong, healthy young men doing a crazy task with nothing but time to worry about.
We took our lunch on some rocks near a small rapid, stretched out to rest a few minutes then headed on down the river. As we rounded a bend, there stretching across a gravel bar and blocking the river was a massive old red oak. We pulled onto the bar, unloaded the saws and began to work. There was a steel cable, maybe a quarter inch in diameter wrapped around the tree and other smaller logs nearby. We tried to unwrap the cable but had no luck. Before I could start to hack at it with an axe and Steve suddenly pulled out his Leatherman pocket tool, opened up the saw blade and with no problem at all sawed right through the cable. I was amazed.
After a bit of limbing we were left with the main part of the tree trunk still in the water blocking the river channel. I waded into the moving water just over my knees and began to cut the two-foot diameter log. Steve took off another large branch from under the tree and without warning the rest of the huge tree settled into the river pinching and pulling my running chainsaw completely beneath the water.
Steve yelled, “Don’t, quit!”
Quick as a flash, he positioned himself between me and the gravel bar. In water just below his knees he shoehorned into an impossible position with his thighs under the log. He began to groan and lift with his legs and back. The tree moved imperceptibly. I continued to feed fuel to the submerged saw, with bubbles boiling from the exhaust port. Steve groaned again and shifted to get more of himself under the giant log. The log moved a bit and suddenly I was cutting wood again and moving the saw through the log – under the water. With a crash and a splash the log severed. I yanked the running saw out of the water, where it’d been running for nearly a minute. Steve released the log and fell back into the river. We both dragged ourselves onto the gravel bar, exhausted and laughing in between our gasps for air.
After a few moments we worked together to move the large logs out of the water, cutting them into more manageable pieces. (The saw, which had been cutting underwater fired right up!)Then we loaded our gear and paddled on downstream, still laughing at the sheer audacity of the situation that we’d just gone through.
The rest of the afternoon we spent cutting and moving more logs from the river, occasionally using more refined versions of our technique of one lifting a massive log to take pressure off a pinched saw blade while the other ran the saw, sometimes partially in the water, but never completely submerged again. It was brutal, back-breaking work, with hands and forearms cramping from hours with the saws and axes, and canoe paddles.
Finally, late in the day, we entered a part of the river where the water slowed, the rocks were replaced by muddy riverbanks and old trees leaned far out over the dark, deep water. The river was deceptively calm, and silent. We paddled on enjoying each other’s company and the solitude of the river. We rounded a bend and there before us was the mother of all river blockages.
Trees, limbs, and bushes of all shapes and sizes stretched thirty yards from one riverbank to the other. The jam was fifteen to twenty feet in width. Logs floated, in the quietly moving water, others were piled over their submerged brethren, tilted at odd angles to the water, with limbs running every which way. In places the logs were packed tightly enough to look like a raft. A raft you’d not want to step on.
We slowly eased the canoe up to the jam. Steve pushed the blade of his 58 inch paddle down into the water until his arm was elbow deep, shook his head at the depth and pulled the paddle up. We looked at each other with wide-eyed expressions.
Steve whispered, “There’s lot of water moving under this thing.”
“Plenty of stuff trapped under it too,” I whispered back.
The shadows of the ancient trees added to the developing sense that we were in the midst of a powerful and dangerous piece of the Etowah.
With another look at the jam and at each other. Steve said, “portage.”
I nodded my agreement.
We paddled back up stream a few yards from the jam and ferried over to the muddy riverbank. We unloaded our gear and slipping and sliding up the six foot muddy bank we carried it above and past the spooky jam, then down to the river. We repeated the portage with the seventeen-foot canoe, reloaded the boat, and pushed off into the river. As we looked at the jam from the downstream side, we agreed that rather than risk our lives trying to manually clear that obstacle, dynamite would be the best option.
A half hour later, in dim light, after fourteen hours on the river, we were at the road bridge and there was Ben with his van and trailer waving to us and pointing to the take out.
In the evening’s gloom, with muscles aching and exhausted beyond all reason, we loaded the boat and gear and told Ben that his river was clear except for the giant, scary jam near the end.
He couldn’t believe we’d gotten so much done. As we told him of huge trees and running his chainsaws under water he shook his head and smiled.
I don’t recall where Steve and I ate on the way home that night. I just remember sitting across a table, two men exhausted and sore, nursing beers and laughing tiredly as they rehashed the events of the day.
Today, I’m recovering from a hip replacement and have another one scheduled. Steve is fighting his own health battles and we once more live at opposite ends of the continent, but there was a day by God, there was a day.
Fairbanks, Alaska
February, 2019