off the pavement / By Seth Naman

Rattlesnake Creek

One of the highlights of the run was a beautiful bedrock gorge. It was short — a half mile or so — but it was unlike any other part of the run. Sheer walls extended 75-100 feet straight up from the stream surface. Dainty ferns and bright green moss clung to the rock as waterfalls of all sizes and characters leaped off the tops of the cliffs. Some shot straight out in one organized stream, as if created by a fire hose; others, not so brave, crawled down the rock walls, clinging to the moss as they went. I paddled under one of the falls and looked up — the water from the cascade seemed to melt into the dull gray sky — as the spray fell on my face and pounded the top of my boat. The rain continued to fall as the brown water of the creek pushed and bubbled about, polishing the bedrock on its way downstream.

The finale of the gorge was a remarkably symmetrical hole in one of the bedrock walls. It was clear that the creek was not meant to go where it was going. Paddling up to the hole gave me vertigo, like my eyes were telling my body and brain something they didn’t want to hear. And looking through it was insane, because the river made a turn immediately after the hole, and waterfalls came off the stream bank on the other side of the hole in the wall. There was a fun drop as you exited the hole that added a little exclamation point to the creek.

When we took out for a short portage, a quarter, a hub cap and a gas tank lay helplessly on the stream bank. After the portage it was a short trip to a low head dam-type structure with big bent rusty metal I-beams over the top of it. The purpose of the entire structure was not discernible to the average kayaker. But it did make for a fun rapid that dropped away as we paddled over the concrete.

Below I could see the mother of all tunnels. A double tunnel! As if the other man-made objects weren’t enough, we were confronted with yet another marvel of humanity. This one had twin oval arches that were about 15 feet high from the surface of the water with 200-foot tubes that curved around to the right. It was dark inside, but you could see the proverbial light. Some of us went down one tube and some down the other. I went down the right tube. It was eerie.

At the takeout, Damon and I talked about the strange nature of the creek — the “engineered river,” as we called it. It was striking: the beauty of roiling river invigorated by rain, juxtaposed with multiple concrete tunnels, a low head dam, a big hole in a gorge wall and the detritus of an automobile society.

Have you ever noticed that humans travel where rivers and creeks have cut trails through steep mountains, blazing the path for us? Rattlesnake Creek is one of those streams that has done the work for us. And like many rivers, road-building has compromised the natural state of the waterway. But even though Rattlesnake Creek has been reshaped from its original form, the intrinsic beauty of a free-flowing river remains. When a big rain hits, the snake seems to come alive, smashing against the tunnels and the concrete that confine it, trying to tell the road where it should be going.

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