FlUSHED
DANCING ON WATER AT MIDNIGHT. PHOTO: PETER J GERGELY
MOON RIVER
There were four of us in hardboats that first full moon night on the Chattooga. Everything was strange—shiny and magical, the way river running by lunar light can be. When we dropped through the last wave into the approach above Seven Foot Falls, however, things went dark. It was a clear night, but the moon was no longer visible; hidden by rapid and ridge.
The trip had been going well. We’d all been guides on the river for a while and knew the Chattooga and each other, in some ways, better than ourselves. We’d stopped talking somewhere above Woodall Shoals, none of that pre- or post-rapid chat. When we made sounds, we made animal noises. Mostly, we were quiet. We’d been listening with hips, hulls and strokes to what the river had to say, and what the river had to say was, in part, translated by the moonlight reflected and flickering on its surface.
A river is the same river by moonlight as it is in the day, only naked,
moody, evocative, less in your face. There’s nothing black and white about being on a river at night under the moon. The colors are there, but they are changed: hushed, shimmery, wavering. Trees that appear green in daytime become a soft violet; to regard them is to be less attuned to detail—leaves or bark—than to the whole.
62 RAPID EARLY SUMMER 2013
Edges blur. Shape and color run together. Sound intensifies. A group of trees or rocks becomes a mass of shape. There’s a sense of seeing through to the other side, whatever that is—the God-side, the abyss, the source of things. Matter becomes shadow. Broken water gleams silver. Everything shimmers, especially one’s balance; many who’ve paddled by moonlight know this uncanny feeling, trusting to a surface that flickers in and out of view. We all ran it, Seven Foot in the dark, and ran it cleaner than ever be-
fore. A few miles later, coming through Jawbone, we found the moon directly downstream and low over the ridge. We weren’t bothering with eddies. We just paddled on through, one by one, a few hoots and cack- les, and found, teed up on the launch pad at Soc-Em-Dog, the moon, the whole darn, squint-inducing thing. A clean line meant sticking your bow in the middle of it and holding the angle as you gathered momentum for the boof stroke, the one you’d never forget, that would send you not into the moon, but into years and years of nights on rivers under moonlight— wondrous nights, all. Thorpe Moeckel is a life-long whitewater paddler, a professor at Hol- lins University and a celebrated poet. Catch him on his local Virginia runs each month under the full moon.
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