We were eating at a McDonald’s just outside Asheville, North Carolina, and for the first time in over a month, we truly didn’t have any destination or plan. After a lengthy discussion, which covered a wide spectrum of possibilities (i.e. train hopping, rollerblading to Florida, walking into the mountains, getting jobs at the McDonald’s we were sitting in), we decided to get boats and float a river.
We selected our respective rafts at a nearby Walmart. Nick got the Explorer Pro 400, a behemoth of a rubber vessel designed for four people; I opted for the smaller but more durable Seahawk 200, a tough little raft covered in a detailed Mossy Oak camouflage color scheme.
Standing outside Walmart, holding our large cardboard boxes containing boats of dubious quality, we realized we needed a river to float. Our two closest river options flowed in opposite directions: one to the Mississippi River and the Gulf, the other to the coast of South Carolina.
South Carolina sounded nice, so we caught a short Uber ride to the Eastern Continental Divide, just east of Asheville. (This was now “The River Trip” — an aqueous subsidiary of the newly coined “The America Trip” — so river access took precedent over walking.)
The Catawba River was barely a stream at our drop-off point, so we walked downstream a few miles and found a bridge to camp under. (Bridge camping would quickly become a staple of the river trip — consistently providing sheltered and sandy camp sites with great river access, comforting car noise, and occasionally dead animals and trash.)
In the morning we pumped up our rafts and begin navigating the tiny river, bouncing over rocks and calibrating our steering methods — paddling furiously to narrowly dodge obstacles. By the afternoon, our stream had swelled to what felt like a river, as Nick and I constantly cheered “Tributary!” every time a new trickle of a stream joined the flow.
As we floated out of the mountains, splashing and spinning toward the coast, we marveled at the miracle of continuous motion, the joy of moving without walking. When rapids appeared, I moved in jerky motions, trying to propel my doughnut-like vessel around stick-jams and submerged rocks with flimsy plastic paddles. Every so often, one of us would victoriously yell out “To the Atlantic!” (still completely unaware of the hundreds of miles of lakes, portages, and swamps between us and the ocean).
I adopted a reclined position, with my butt soaking in a pool of cold water and my feet up on the other side of the raft. Nick chose a seated position at the stern of his massive raft — a regal pose completely unfitting of his water craft, which bent up in the middle and looked like a deformed hot dog bouncing down the river. In places, the flow became barely more than a crawl, as we cruised slowly past turtles that reluctantly plopped off their logs into the water when we got close.
As we floated under a bridge, a man who was patiently fishing in an eddy looked up at us and asked, “Where are you going?”
“The Atlantic.”
“Oh. I’m going for Walleye,” and he cast again.
Just after dark, we reached the first reservoir as a thunder shower hit. We immediately found a bridge sheltering the largest, flattest sandy area we had seen all day. As we set up our tents, I caught a rotten whiff.
“Something’s definitely dead around here,” I said.
We both stood and sniffed for a moment in the dark.
“Probably fish. It’s like Juneau,” said Nick, referring to the familiar smell of dead salmon that wafts through our hometown for several months each year.
“It is a lake after all. Nice! Just like home,” I agreed, and happily continued to set up camp.
In the morning, I woke up to the powerful smell of decomposition, and wandered toward the water to find the dead fish. Twenty feet from my tent, I found the corpse of a (very) dead dog. Thinking about how I breathed decomposing dead-dog-air all night, I skipped my morning granola bar, loaded my gear into the raft, and we started paddling across the reservoir, toward the Atlantic.
• Logan Miller grew up in Juneau. In 2015, he and fellow Juneauite Nick Rutecki began walking around America with backpacks and no plans. Read more at www.thewalkingtrip.com.
Lounging in a river raft.
