The Guide

The Guide

by Burt Kornegay

Editor’s note:  Carolina Paddler is proud to present this wonderful essay written by Burt Kornegay. Burt was an outfitter and guide for 30 years, running Slickrock Expeditions out of his home near Cullowhee. Burt started out leading backpack and canoe trips here in the Blue Ridge, expanded them to the Southeast, then ended up guiding a lot of trips in the West and a few in Canada. Along with guiding, Burt has written numerous articles for Wildlife in North Carolina, and self-published A Guide’s Guide to Panthertown Valley—a trail map and guide to a very popular place to hike and bike in the Nantahala National Forest. The map’s been selling well since 1996, going through several revisions. Recently Burt has been writing a monthly outdoor column for a regional publication called Smoky Mountain News, titled “Up Moses Creek.” (Burt and his wife, Becky, live on Moses Creek.)

“The Guide” is a chapter from The River Between the Bridges, a book Burt has been writing about a simple three-day canoe trip he made alone down South Carolina’s Enoree River in 2014. The trip was the first thing he did after closing his guiding business and retiring.  Going down the Enoree forms the book’s storyline, but while underway he travels elsewhere in thought and memory.  Carolina Paddler hopes to share more of Burt’s writings in coming months.  Now, let’s see where “The Guide“goes.

The Guide

“If you’re lucky enough to be in a canoe, you’re lucky enough.”

I don’t remember where I heard that saying, but if there’s any truth to it, then I’ve been lucky enough.  A lifetime’s worth of lucky—in all kinds of canoes.  The canoes I’ve been in have ranged from the big tandems I used for 30 years when I ran Slickrock Expeditions as an outfitter-guide—roomy enough to carry two people and all their gear on river expeditions—to the small whitewater canoes I still squeeze myself into for outings with friends here in the Blue Ridge.  But of all the canoes I’ve been in, the one I’ve felt most lucky to own is a solo river tripper called the Guide.

The Guide was designed by Mad River Canoe Company in Vermont in 1995.  It was a scaled-down version of the company’s tandem tripper, the Freedom 17, and Mad River marketed it as “the perfect solo river-running boat for day trips or expeditions.”  But as kayaks became ever more popular and the demand for canoes declined, the Guide’s “perfection” in the showrooms of outfitting stores declined too.  To boost sagging sales, Mad River changed the boat’s name to Freedom Solo.  Then in 2008 they stopped making it.  I understood the rebranding and the economics, but for reasons greater than gain or loss I was thankful to have my Guide.

The Guide is 14 feet six inches long but just 29 inches wide in the beam.  That makes it a slender vessel, and it rises symmetrically to points in the bow and stern, suggesting the classic canoe profile of a crescent moon.  More than once when I’ve passed other paddlers or people standing on shore, I’ve heard them say, as if they can’t help but let the words spill out, “That’s a beautiful canoe!”

The Guide is a composite of new and old.  Its hull is made of Royalex, a modern plastic laminate that’s smooth and rigid but has some flex.  Royalex makes the vessel watertight and tough.  But the canoe’s gunwales, seat, and thwarts are made of straight-grained white ash, a pliant yet strong hardwood that’s been used for centuries in traditional canoe construction.  And its deck plates are of light brown walnut.  The wood trim trues up the laminate hull, holding it in shape.  And it is pleasing to look at. What I see around me as I canoe along is the beauty of finished wood.

The Guide’s keel line is moderately rockered, and from side to side its hull has a shallow V arch.  Its sides curve slightly inward midship to form tumblehome.  If you’re not familiar what such boat-design terminology, here’s what all that means to me: there is no straight line or right angle or flat plane to the Guide.  Everything about the boat is convexing and concaving as it waxes or wanes.  The Guide is as perfect in its own way as an apple—though its shape is closer to an apple slice.

The Guide is 14 inches deep at the center thwart and it weighs 54 pounds.  Mine is bluish green, a hue the company called spruce.  I think the color aligns the boat with the world it is made to travel through, one of water, woods and sky.  Yet because the Guide is also an “open boat,” as canoes are often called—without a watertight deck, hatch, cockpit, or protective covering of any type—when that world rises into waves and wind and rain, it has no spray skirt to tighten, no lid to batten down.  To draw on an ancient word for openness, the Guide is hypethral, “under the sky.”  But with its skyward openness comes vulnerability.

The Guide is also dichotomous.  Out of the water it is a stiff, awkward thing to handle, resistant to being pushed or pulled, picked up, carried.  Contact with earth seems to drain the boat’s life away.  On the ground it is deadweight.  Shouldering the Guide and portaging it around something impassible like a waterfall or logjam—that is something I do only when there is no other way to travel on.

But when I slide my Guide back into the water, it becomes weightless, alive.  Touch it with one finger or let a puff of wind brush against it when it is not tethered and off the boat goes as if with a mind of its own.  Pull it back and step in, I sense immediately how responsive it is to the current’s every tug and sway.  At that tippy moment of entry—with the canoe teetering under me and a rapid churning below—I know what it feels like to be a tightrope walker when he steps out onto a wire stretched over a hollow space.

And then the Guide carries me.

No, carries is not the right word to describe what happens when I’m in the boat.  Rather, I know what it means to glide. On a tranquil stretch of river, the Guide glides as smoothly as a spot of sunlight does along the dark flanks of the mountains near my house—a single ray having found an opening in an overcast sky.  It glides as silently as a cloud shadow does when I watch it move along our valley floor, cast by a single cloud on an otherwise sunbright day.  Except that, parting the water as it carries me forward, the Guide leaves behind an expanding wake that makes the water and world reflected in it undulate.

Underway like this I seem to leave gravity and my everyday life behind.  The nighttime mist that forms on a river suddenly lifts, revealing a clear day!  My pulse quickens, my eyes open, and I see the river’s onward glistening current passing so quickly over its dark rocky bed below.  I see the banks and bluffs and their reflections, the plants and animals, and people too—I see them as if for the very first time.  And through gaps in the bordering forest I catch glimpses of the wide world I’m passing through.  Even though I know this is coming, it always takes me by surprise.  And I see myself too in closer, more urgent relation to it all. Here I am moving on the face of an element that, rippling out beneath me, is beautiful to look at and is the nourishing womb of life, and yet is mysterious too, even threatening where it boils up in turbulence or deepens into blackness—at once intimate and yet apart.

It’s said that walking is man’s primal mode of travel.  I’ve even heard it said we walked our way across the world into the human race.  Well, canoeing is a way of walking for me.  On my knees in the Guide, with a paddle in my hands—my white ash hiking staff—I walk into a new world, which is to say a canoe world, buoyed from below by life, by death.

I bought the Guide after coming within a whisker of death while driving home in my van from a trip I’d run for clients in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, pulling a trailer of canoes behind.  It was Sunday, November 2, 1997.  In that nighttime, nightmare crash on Interstate 75, flush with traffic hurrying north out of Florida towards Atlanta and beyond, I slammed into a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that had broken its straps and fallen off a trailer into my lane.  There was no warning.  The heavy machine lay black and invisible on the pavement like a submerged rock lying dead ahead in strong current.

Three women who’d been on the trip were riding back with me, and we had pulled off in Cordele to get something to eat.  With food in our stomachs and the gas tank full, I accelerated up the entrance ramp and merged with traffic again. It was a river of red taillights streaming into the night.   While listening to the others talk about the swamp trip we’d just made, I set the van on cruise to match the traffic’s flow and glanced at the clock, it was 7:00 pm.  Four more hours would see us home.  I settled in for the drive.

That’s when I saw some thing lying directly in front of me—disappearing beneath the hood—Impact.  The Harley jammed under the van’s front axle, lifting the wheels off the ground.  Then its gas tank exploded, setting the van on fire.  The collision sent us skidding across the interstate with flames streaming out behind.  I heard the women screaming, saw vehicles around me brake and veer away.

     Was that a motorcycle?

     Was someone on it?

      Am I plowing into an accident scene?

     So that’s what an airbag feels like!

So many thoughts and impressions raced through my mind in the instant it took for calamity to happen!  Some lodged there never to depart.  I can still hear the sound the motorcycle made grinding against the pavement—the weight of the van riding on top of it.  Its mortal groans came up through the floorboard at my feet.  And I can still see through the van’s windows a strange amber glow in the night. Stunned by the collision and the airbag, at first I didn’t realize we were on fire. In that moment of alarm and confusion I felt like I was being tumbled in some rapid, not sure which way is up.  There was only one thing I knew for certain—if we roll over, we are going to die.

I held onto the useless steering wheel and—the van and trailer starting to jackknife—pumped the brakes.  It was all that I could do.

Then I saw the median guardrail, and the van careened into it, went screeching along, steel against steel.  There goes the paint job, I thought with grim humor, still not able to comprehend the totality of what was happening.  It was a brand new van.

 It wasn’t until we ground to a stop that the flames shot up all around. Even through the windows I could feel their heat.  Fed by gas, those flames would quickly grow until they were as high as the trees beside the highway.  They would scorch and warp the guardrail, make the pavement bubble.  They would turn the van into a torch that lit up the Georgia night.

I remember helping the woman in the front passenger seat unbuckle her seat belt.  She’d been punched by her airbag, her lip was split, and she was dazed.  Then she fumbled with her door.  Since my door was jammed tight against the guardrail, I reached back and jerked at the side-door behind her, and when it swung open, I yelled “Get out! Run!”  Our gas tank, I knew, was going to explode.  Since then I have thought of those women—Corinne, Donna, Ellen—as my comrades in fire.

I grabbed the emergency fire extinguisher, still thinking there was something I could do.  But no sooner had I followed the others than the van’s interior burst into an orange inferno, ravenously consuming everything inside.  I could hear it sucking in air.  I looked at the small, red First Alert canister in my hand, lit up by a fire it could in no way extinguish, and started running.  Then the thought came to me—Uncouple the trailer!  Save the canoes!  But turning back, I saw fiery fingers wrapped tight around the hitch.  Ironically, the fire extinguisher was the only piece of equipment saved from the fire.

That’s when the image of my son came to me.  Henry was at home, he was eight years old, he was waiting for “Daddy” to return.  Becky was getting him ready for bed.  Going home, I suddenly realized, was the one thing I could do.

I ran along the median looking for the others.  But all I saw was the interstate’s three lanes of northbound traffic coming towards me, crowding past.  Headlight to taillight, each car and truck looked like a segment of some giant metallic serpent sliding out of darkness into the light.  And I saw faces behind the windows rubbernecking at the sight of me and at the burning wreck.

I waited to cross, finally just chanced it.  No one was going to stop.

The next day I came back with Becky to see if anything could be salvaged, and to assure myself that it all hadn’t been a dream.  We drove south past the accident site, took the next exit and came back. Pulling over onto the outside shoulder, I stepped out, and the first thing I saw, standing directly across from me in the middle of a field, was the steel-gray water tower for Vienna, Georgia.  It looked like a giant bulbous exclamation point propped up on stilts to mark the spot.  What I did not see, however, was the wreck itself.  Van, motorcycle, and canoe trailer were gone.

Waiting for a break in the traffic, we ran across to the median, and there in the emergency pull-off we came on window glass shattered by the heat, hardened drips of red and orange plastic from the melted taillight covers, the burnt metal zipper to my duffel bag (the bag itself and all its contents were entirely gone), a woman’s blackened shoe, charred pieces of the maps I’d used on the canoe trip, and much more.  It looked like detritus washed up on shore from a ship that had burned at sea.

To put distance between herself and the roaring traffic, Becky climbed over the guardrail, and there she drew my attention to the Harley’s ruptured gas tank and kickstand.  They were lying in the grass.

The sight of the debris, and the lingering acrid smell, took me back to the first highway patrolman to arrive.  The van was still burning furiously when he stopped beside the four of us, huddled together in the chill night air.  What I recall are his eyes: they were as cold as steel ball-bearings.  Eyes like that are what it took to bring Interstate 75 to a halt.  I watched as one more car tried to slip past in the outside lane, only to have the patrolman step in front of it. He slapped the hood with one hand, aimed the beam of his Maglite through the windshield with the other, and yelled—“I SAID STOP!”

After that, every flashing blue, red, orange, yellow, and white light in Georgia, or so it seemed to me, converged on the scene.  And while the firefighters hosed away until the hissing hulk of a van and motorcycle welded together emerged from the stubborn flames, I listened to two of them banter about who had killed the biggest buck.  It was deer hunting season in Georgia, and for them the wreck was just another interstate night.

I picked up the Harley kickstand and the charred Okefenokee maps, then Becky and I ran back across the highway and left.

But the accident followed in my thoughts and dreams. At the Ford dealership in Canton a week later, I bought a new van, and when I started to drive it off the lot, flames suddenly shot up in front of me, causing me to slam on the brakes.  It was a flashback, and I could feel their heat.

 Two weeks after that I walked into the Great Outdoor Provision Company in Winston-Salem to start replacing the lost equipment, and there, suspended from the ceiling as if floating in air, was a beautiful canoe. I knew it had been hung that way to catch the customer’s eye.  But the instant I saw it, I also knew it had floated into the building on its own and lodged just there—a vessel perfectly shaped for river travel inviting me to get in and ride.  I saw GUIDE printed in small white letters on the bow and felt a sudden joy at being alive. When I left, the Guide went with me, a gift of renewal for my nearly lost life.

In the years since then, the Guide has carried me on every kind of water, from the flat “prairies” of the Okefenokee, where we were the tallest objects moving across green expanses of spatterdock and lily pads growing out of water so still and black it looked like warm, rich earth, to the cold, clear pulse of Oregon’s John Day River, which dwarfed us at the bottom of its Great Basalt Canyon, 2000 feet deep.  The canoe is scuffed and creased, its wood gunwales bruised, scratched, and patched—that is, until I replaced them with new white ash.  I also replaced the original cane strips in the seat, worn and broken, with sturdy seatbelt webbing, and repaired a crack in the hull.  The canoe, though aged with river travel, is even more beautiful to me because of these things.

                                                                            .    .    .

 It is morning, and standing on the bank of a river, I turn to pack the Guide.  It takes me just a few minutes because I’ve done it many times before and because there’s not that much to pack.  A plastic cook box holds my food, a one-burner stove, a pot, bowl, cup and spoon.  Old-time canoeists used cook boxes too, made of wood.  They called them wanigans, from the Objibwa word wanikkan, meaning “storage pit.”  A large vinyl drybag, today’s equivalent of the India-rubber packs that canoeists used on river trips 150 years ago, holds a change of clothing, a few toiletries, a first-aid kit, my sleeping bag and pad.  For bugs I include insect netting, for shelter a lightweight tarp.  The cookbox goes in front, along with an extra paddle, and the drybag goes in back.  Then I trim out the boat with the remaining bill of lading: a jug of drinking water from the mountain spring that feeds our house, and a knapsack with things I want to keep handy, including binoculars, a notebook, and a rain jacket.

The way my gear is stowed I know the Guide will float trim.  And when I kneel in it—my backside on the seat, my knees down, giving me a secure, three-point contact with the boat—I can reach forward or back easily with the paddle to control the craft.  If cruising on flatwater, I slide both knees over to the side I’m paddling on to tilt or heel the canoe.  It’s known as the North Woods tripping position and it puts the water within easy reach, though it requires a delicate balance.  But if whitewater shows ahead, I center up, knees spread.

Guide packed, I slide it into the water and settle in. An upstream breeze brings the sound of rapids to me.  I pull on my lifejacket.  Here goes, I say to myself, and push away from the firm shore.  Feeling the river nudge the bow downstream, I dip the paddle and the canoe begins to glide.