Page 5 of Mountain Man's River Rush
We hauled the raft onto the trailer and he drove us back to Wildwood River Co. with the windows down and neither of us talking. Not awkward silence. The kind that happens after something big, when your body is still processing and your mouth knows better than to get in the way.
Wells backed the trailer down to the dock and killed the engine. “I need to rinse the raft, rack the paddles, and log the trip. You can head out.”
“I’ll help.”
“You don’t work here.”
“I know. I’ll help anyway.”
He didn’t argue. He handed me a paddle and pointed toward the rinse station, and we worked side by side in the kind of quiet that felt like the river had followed us onto land. The lot was empty by then—not an employee in sight, doors propped open, the smell of river water and sunscreen baked into the wood.
I rinsed paddles while Wells hosed down the raft. I watched him the way I’d watched him in the gorge, and I was honest enough with myself to admit that I wasn’t watching his technique. He had a body that did what he asked it to do—comfortable, certain, a man who trusted his hands and his instincts.
He caught me looking. I didn’t pretend I hadn’t been.
“You ran the Gauley at twenty-six hundred CFS,” he said, coiling the bow line. “That’s not a beginner release. Who taught you to paddle?”
“I taught myself. Online video tutorials, books, then a lot of time on the Ocoee making mistakes.”
He stopped coiling. “You learned whitewater paddling from the internet.”
“I learned the strokes from the internet. I learned whitewater from the water.”
“Most people learn from a guide,” he said. “Or a club.”
“Most people have parents who let them near the water before they turn eighteen.”
It came out before I could stop it. I could feel the question forming behind his eyes.
“Your parents didn’t let you near the water,” he said. Not a question.
“My parents didn’t let me near anything that involved elevated heart rate, heavy breathing, or the possibility of inhaling something that wasn’t climate-controlled air.” I set the last paddle in the rack. “I had asthma as a kid. Bad enough to putme in the hospital. I outgrew it by the time I was nine, but they never outgrew the fear.”
He leaned against the trailer and looked at me. Not pity—I would have walked away from pity. Something quieter. Attentive.
“So every time you do something like this,” he said, “you’re doing it for the first time.”
My throat tightened. Nobody had ever said it back to me like that—the private engine underneath every climb and every rapid and every freefall. Everyone saw the adrenaline junkie. Nobody had ever looked at the pattern and understood what it meant.
“Yeah,” I said. “Every time.”
He nodded. Didn’t push. Processed it the way he processed information about the river—as a fact that mattered, without commentary.
“Come inside,” he said. “I’ve got to log the trip, and you need water.”
I followed him through the front room and into a back office—smaller, messier, obviously where the real work happened. A desk buried under logbooks and river charts. A mini fridge humming against one wall. A couch that looked like it had been dragged in from someone’s porch, cushions sun-faded and dented from years of bodies dropping into them after long days on the water.
He handed me a water bottle. I drank half of it without sitting down, only then realizing how hot I was—flushed from the sun, the effort, and being that close to a man who smelled like the river.
He sat on the edge of the desk and opened a logbook. “Date, put-in time, take-out time, water level, participants, incidents.” His pen moved in neat block letters. “Any incidents?”
“You missed a rock.”
His pen stilled. The look he gave me was something I’d remember for a long time—annoyance edged with something like admiration, as if he couldn’t decide which one won.
“I’m not logging that,” he said.
“I would.”
