When I turned around I saw Brother Dave in the water, holding on to the back of a canoe, walking two guys down the Chattooga River, I screamed at him, trying to make myself heard above the rapids, “Let ’em go!” Dave could easily have turned — or broken — an ankle and I had had just about enough.
Joe Terrell, the guy who invited me on my first trip down the Chattooga, told me his theory: He said if you get 12 or 15 guys together on a white water trip — I don’t care how well you know them, I don’t care if all of them are relatives, he said — one of them will be a nut.
I organized three canoe trips on the Chattooga and I discovered that he was right about that. This time the odd man out was in a canoe with Kerry Sipe, a good man on the river and a newspaper friend of mine since college.
The night before, when we were camping at Earl’s Ford, Kerry’s partner had talked about how he’d like to repel down the rock walls of The Narrows, several miles downstream from our camp. He talked a good game but a few minutes before I yelled at Dave that guy had been holding on to a tree limb sticking out from the bank, refusing to paddle to a ledge where he and Kerry could portage, avoiding the falls on either side.
When he had finally let go and their canoe headed downstream he had jumped out as they approached a rapid, causing the canoe to tip, fill with water, and pin Kerry against a boulder. One of Kerry’s legs was mashed. Dave had lifted the canoe off of him and was walking them and their canoe to a sandbar.
When they reached the sandbar, and their canoe was out of the water, the boy said: “When I heard Kerry scream it was music to my ears because I knew this trip was over for me.”
Postscript: Kerry’s leg was turning blue and purple so we built a fire and left him there with food and water. His partner was supposed to go for help, and he did. On dry land, that boy was all right. When we got back to our camp that night, there they were, both of them.
Coming Friday: The One Room Shack
Did this Joe Terrell work for The Daily Press?
No.
I knew Joe from high school, we both graduated from Charlotte Garinger in 1960. We became friends a few years later, after I graduated from Carolina and went to work for The Charlotte News. Joe owned a construction business but he was also an environmentalist and he got me interested in writing about Sugar Creek, a heavily polluted creek that ran through the heart of Charlotte. On several occasions we went out at night looking for polluters. [The series was called “A Sewer Named Sugar.”] Joe lives in Alaska now but we still stay in touch and I see him from time to time.
There’s a notch in my shin to this day. A little souvenir of that trip.