As I lined our canoe up to shoot the rapids roaring just ahead of us, Kerry Sipe and I both had a moment of clarity.
He saw a light on the right bank of the Neuse River and said to me, “Let’s call it a night.”
And I said, “OK.”
I paddled to the right bank and we made our way up through a thicket toward the light, in a mobile home park next to the river. We knocked on the door of the first home we came to. The door open, and closed, just like that.
We went to the next mobile home, and knocked again. An older black woman answered the door and let us in. With her were a young woman and a teenage boy. Bless that woman for taking a chance on two, wet, somewhat shaken white men in need of help.
The woman put a blanket around Kerry and set him down in front of a heater. She said she didn’t have a phone but we were only two miles or so from my house. Warmed up some, I took off walking.
As I headed up a dirt road toward U.S. 64 a car coming toward me slowed, and then stopped beside me. The driver rolled down the window and asked, “Were you in an accident at the dam?”
Dam? There’s a dam on the Neuse? That was news to me.
Click on the arrow and you’ll hear what we heard that night but you won’t see what we saw. We were upstream; it was dark. We had no idea we were approaching a drop from a 16-foot high dam into what might have been the end of our lives.
Sounds like rapids to me.
“Get in,” the driver said to me, “your wife’s looking for you.”
I got in but I knew Donna wasn’t looking for me. She was looking after our three small boys. Kerry had just gotten married. Had to be his wife.
The man who picked me up drove me to U.S. 64 and then across the Neuse River bridge to a store on the other side of the river. Kerry’s bride, Linda, was waiting there with her mother. It was dark, Kerry and I were hours overdue, and she feared the worst. When she saw me get out of the car, wet and alone, and she cried out. For a few seconds, Linda Sipe thought she was a widow.
Postscript
Like me, Kerry was a newspaperman-for-life. He took a job in Virginia and he and I hadn’t talked in decades, I guess, until we exchanged emails a few days ago. He had heard about my story blog and commented on one of the stories. I emailed him and told him I planned to write about our adventure on the Neuse.
Kerry wrote, “…she [Linda] tells me she and her mother were pretty sure she was a young widow when we hadn’t shown up so long after dark. She would have missed the next 45 years of wedded bliss.”
I did not get back in a canoe or kayak until this year, when I kayaked about 225 miles down the Neuse River from Raleigh to Oriental, on the North Carolina coast.
But that night didn’t keep Kerry off the water.
“I just gave away the 17-foot Mohawk Kevlar canoe that I paddled on whitewater rivers all across the South,” he wrote. “We live on a lake, but flatwater just isn’t the same and I decided I used up all my luck on moving water.”
Coming Monday: “A Warm Memory”
