A River Ran Me Out of Town

A River Ran Me Out of Town

Every fall, West Virginia’s Gauley River transforms into a Mecca for whitewater rafting junkies. One woman shares her tale of being served plenty of humble pie guiding the notorious “beast of the East.”

By Heather Hansman

This is what it feels like to be sucked out of a raft and pulled underwater: First, the shock, and the rug-ripped-out-from-under-you feeling of confusion and losing your way. Next, a lung-burning squeeze in your chest as every particle of air is pushed out. Last, usually right before you break the surface, you go limp, giving in to wherever the current is pushing you. It could be up, but it might be down.

That river spin cycle of disorientation is how I felt—regardless of whether I was in my boat or not—pretty much the whole time I was a raft guide on the Gauley River.

The Gauley, West Virginia’s biggest river, only runs in the fall. Six weekends a year, from early September to mid-October, the Army Corps of Engineers releases 2,800 cubic feet per second of water from the Summersville Dam, and the river becomes one of the rowdiest stretches of whitewater in the country.

Names of the rapids are dishonestly mild—Pillow Rock, Sweet’s Falls, Insignificant—but the consequences of navigating the wrong way through them can be serious. The river is one of the oldest in the world. It’s had time to polish down the rock and carve through all the cracks and fissures, transforming the landscape below the surface into a labyrinth of caves and holes that can suck the river—and almost anything floating on it—underwater.

Because of the uneven topography, it’s a pool-drop river: It moves in fits and starts as the terrain dips and rolls, making it a rollercoaster of a raft ride. The water slows down and then plunges, violent and sharp, over the edge of the rapids. Speaking of rapids, there are more than 100 of them over the 28-mile stretch—split into the class V upper section and the IV-plus lower—between the dam and the final takeout.

I didn’t come to West Virginia green, though. The summer I was 18, my mother dropped me in a field in northern Maine with a tent and a lifejacket so I could learn to be a raft guide. I fell in love with being on the water. I memorized every riffle and rock on the Kennebec River. I jumped in at the Harris Station Dam with just a PFD and swam the commercially rafted 12-mile, class IV stretch so I would know it intimately. I jumped into the community of dirt-baggery, one-upmanship, and storytelling. I bragged, drank too many beers, and snuck away from campfires with much older boys.

On the river, I felt self-sufficient and in charge of something. I loved how fast everything happened while guiding. You learn to make decisions quickly, even if they’re not necessarily the right ones. And you start to trust your own voice when you hear it the way other people do, echoing out of the back of a boat.

A lot of guides—especially women—last one season, maybe three at the most, because living in tents and getting paid less than minimum wage for physical labor gets old. The type of gals who stick around longer have a higher tolerance for embracing the guiding lifestyle.

By the time I went to the Gauley, I’d guided for three years on the high-volume, big-wave rivers of Maine, as well as for a year in Colorado on the bony, eddy-filled Eagle and the whitewater highway of the Arkansas. Being on the river had become a part of how I defined myself. “I’m a guide,” I told people when they asked what I did, even though I spent the winter scanning ski lift tickets and the off-season waiting tables.

But the Gauley knocked the wind out of me. The scale of the river, coupled with the carnage-hungry, testosterone pit of a guide community, shook my confidence and made me frantic and disorganized. The more I scrambled, the more I screwed up, hitting rocks and missing lines where I shouldn’t have. I was so freaked out it hurt. My knees shook in the bus on the way to the river and my voice shook when I introduced myself to clients in the parking lot. I had to stop to catch my breath when I talked because of the adrenaline coursing through my chest.

The seasoned West Virginia guides all had nicknames like Redneck, Squirrel, and Squirt. They kept tobacco and rolling papers in their dry bags and were cool-headed enough to roll cigarettes in the quiet pools between rapids while they told self-deprecating jokes—What’s the state flower of West Virginia? The satellite dish. They had the kinks and bends of the river memorized, so they knew when to flick their butts into the current and casually prep their crew for the next rapid.

I kept my left hand clenched so hard on the T-grip of my paddle that my fingers cramped, and my pack of raft guide jokes—What do you call a raft guide who breaks up with his girlfriend? Homeless—felt thin quickly. The only stories I knew about the river I’d gleaned from other guides, or overheard on the bus ride to the river. Squirrel was the best to listen to as he’d tell stories right up to the edge of the rapids, where he’d transition into, “OK, a little easy forward, ladies, not too hard now,” as his boat seamlessly split the waves.

When I wasn’t screeching paddle commands in a voice three octaves higher than normal, I tried to fill the slower flat-water sections by asking people about themselves and where they were from. I grew up in Boston, which, in Appalachia, made me an uptight northerner who couldn’t dance. Even worse, I came to West Virginia from Colorado.

The town of Fayetteville is at the heart of Gauley country. It’s equal parts coal mining hub and recreation Mecca and locals call people from Colorado Kool-aids. Just add water and they show up, they say. And it’s true. When the Gauley runs, guides who spend their summers on the Arkansas or the Animas come east in droves to see if they can hack it. It’s an end-of-season meeting place, proving ground, and reunion site for boaters from all over. There’s a pervasive macho one-upmanship, but there’s also a sense of close-to-the-bone family and being part of a tribe that I loved.

But that feeling of fitting in slipped away quickly as I started to falter on the river. My confidence drained just as fast. On my first commercial trip as a guide, I fell out of the boat and swam three times. By the time we got on the bus at the end of the day, I couldn’t tell if the ache in my chest was from swallowing water or embarrassment.

My first swim was at Iron Ring, the only manmade rapid on the river. In the early 1900s, loggers blasted through the rock to get wood downstream, so the river drops sharply over jagged, dynamited shale.

I know exactly what that swim looks like, because I’ve seen it, repeatedly and in slow motion, in my mind and on a screen. A video kayaker runs with every commercial trip and gets out to shoot all of the big rapids, so there’s high-definition documentation of every move. I hit a rock called You’re Fired at the top of the rapid. The boat swung backwards in a split second, and we ran over the drop rear first. In the video, I make one futile stroke to turn the boat around, but I catch more air than water. Then the boat tips violently, dump trucking everyone into the water.

I masochistically made Dave, our video boater, burn me a copy, and for a while I showed it to people when they asked about my time on the river. “Isn’t that so funny?” I’d ask. But I cringed every time I watched it.

The video boater’s favorite rapid is Sweet’s Falls, the last class V on the Upper Gauley. The river bends and the gorge forms a natural amphitheater around the rapid. Most of the companies stop there to eat lunch, so there’s always a crowd. There’s only one way to run it. You have to thread the needle between Dildo Rock, a notorious raft ripper, and Exterminator, a re-circulating hole that’s been known to trap people for hours. Even if you split the difference cleanly, you’re immediately staring down Postage Due, a house-sized rock that mercilessly flips boats. If you run right, you’re in the clear; if you get knocked left, you have to navigate yourself out of the Box, a barely boat-wide slot between the rock and the ledgy shore where the video boaters stand hovering, hoping for carnage.

You can’t see any of that from upstream, but as you come around the corner, you can hear the howl of the crowd on shore. You can predict what’s happening below by the tone of the roar.

Some guides fish for carnage because it comes with bragging rights and bigger tips. They run their boats sideways through standing waves or bow first into rocks. If they haven’t swam their guests enough by Sweet’s, there’s a mellow-looking wave below it called Fluffy Box of Kittens that, if you hit it at the right angle, is guaranteed to flip your boat, or at least dump it. Really skilled guides can knock out all of their clients, but still keep themselves in the boat.

I didn’t mind swimming myself, but I was flat terrified of flipping a boat full of clients. What if I didn’t get them all back? What if I couldn’t flip it back over? What if I got trapped and my boat went down the river without me? A loop of those thoughts ran through my mind in the pool above every rapid. I got anxious and indecisive. I started to worry about things that hadn’t happened.

When I popped up, gasping, from my swim at Iron Ring, Redneck’s boat was the closest. “Girl, what are you doing? Get to your boat,” he said in the calmest voice I’d ever heard. I swam, breathless, down river to my raft and hauled myself in, shaking.

On the bus ride home, he passed me some of the apple-flavored moonshine he brought along on every trip. “You did OK for your first one,” he said. But I wasn’t on an Upper Gauley trip with him again, and, as the fall went on, I was relegated to more and more Lower Gauley trips.

The Lower Gauley is slightly lower consequence, and a little less Hollywood. The water is still big, and the rocks are still the same time-polished shale and sandstone, undercut and filled with rock sieves. But this section drops a little less and moves a little slower. Anywhere else in the country it would be the marquee trip, but on the Gauley it’s a tier-down trip for weenies. At least, it is for the guides.

The clients tended to be a tier down, too. One morning I guided a boat full of Marlboro employees on a company outing, eight grey men with their bellies spilling out from under their lifejackets. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to pull us in if we fall out?” they asked, half joking. I wasn’t sure. The largest guy sat directly in front of me. When we hit the first big rapid, the boat buckled under his weight and he slipped out like he’d been greased. When I hauled him back in by the lapels of his lifejacket, he was wheezing and his eyes were huge. “I didn’t think a little girl like you could pull me in,” he said.

The thing is, I’m not a little girl. I’m 5’9″, and there’s no reason, aside from a bit of mechanical advantage, that women can’t be just as strong raft guides as men. And often, they’re considered better guides because they tend to think more about things like consequences.

But it didn’t necessarily feel like that in West Virginia. More than anywhere else I’d guided, I felt like I had to prove myself as a girl and prove that I was tough enough, especially when I didn’t feel like it.

The women who had been around for a while gave off the kind of nonchalant toughness that I couldn’t fake if I tried. They seemed removed from the tough guy jockeying the guys were involved in, and hardened enough that they could deal with anything. They joked about terrible trips from the past, but didn’t seem fazed; it just made them more confident and less shakable. I had always thought of myself as a tough girl, the kind of person who, within reason, wasn’t scared of anything. Now I couldn’t hang because I was scared.

Sonja, my closest rookie friend, a five-foot nothing, second-year guide whose voice was even squeakier than mine, seemed to pick it up fine. She never seemed to be hyperventilating on the bus ride, and as the season went on she picked up more and more trips. She started running meaty lines and intentionally knocking customers out of her boat. She could toe up to Squirrel, even though her eyes were about level with his belly, and tell him to stop giving her a hard time.

A big part of me truly loved being there. The overgrown gorges were beautiful in a way my Colorado-adjusted eyes weren’t used to. And, in the short minutes when I stopped worrying, it was exciting.

We camped on the edge of the New River Gorge, right where the steel arc of the New River Gorge Bridge stitches the sides together. In the morning, fog would rise out of the valley and peel back as we loaded boats and sorted lifejackets.

Every Monday night, after the river stopped running for the weekend, the restaurant at the company I worked for served cheap wings and beer, and all the guides and locals would come down to suck sauce off their fingers and listen to music. Old guys, and young guys who danced like old guys, would pull me into the circle and try to teach me how to two-step. Our river manager played banjo in a bluegrass band that would pick out Old Crow Medicine Show tunes and twangy covers of Prince songs. When I walked the road back to my tent, I could hear Merle Haggard in the distance.

By Wednesday night, though, the pounding would be back in my chest and I’d lie in my sleeping bag wondering why I wanted to be a raft guide.

I left before Bridge Day, the rafting and B.A.S.E. jumping bonanza that happens the last weekend of Gauley season. There were rumors of early snow back in Colorado, and I was physically and mentally exhausted.

This isn’t a victory story with a tidy end. I didn’t overcome anything and, truthfully, I got more and more scared before every trip. The pressure built, and I was convinced that the odds of something bad happening were getting worse.

When people ask me about my time there, I don’t lie, but I tend to exaggerate. “It’s fun there. I want to go back,” I say. And I would. For a weekend. But, much like a river, I’ve moved through that gorge and I can’t really go back.