The
Toccoa River runs through the heart of Fannin County dividing the county in two.
Fed by mountain streams, it flows north towards Tennessee exiting the county at
McCaysville on the Tennessee line.
The Toccoa is dammed by the Blue Ridge Dam. The dam, which was built by the TVA back when Franklin Roosevelt was President, is smack in the middle of Fannin County and forms Lake Blue Ridge. Lake Blue Ridge has two claims to fame: it is the highest in elevation of all the lakes in the TVA dam system, and it is also the southernmost home of a fish called the Walleye.
The name “Toccoa” is from the Cherokee term for “where the Catawbas lived.” The Catawbas are a Native American tribe. North Georgia was the home of the Cherokees before they were kicked out by white men in 1840. Given the meaning of Toccoa, it would appear that some Catawbas lived in the middle of the Cherokee land at one time.
Curiously, the Catawbas are Siouan-speaking tribe but the Cherokees speak an Iroquoian language. The two languages are as different as Portuguese and Romanian. This makes me wonder. If telephones had been invented back then would you have had to press one for Cherokee and two for Catawba? On weekends did Cherokee couples go out for some Catawba food? Did unattached Cherokee braves want to hang out along the Toccoa because they heard the Catawba chicks were loose?
Back to the Toccoa River. It has two names. At the Tennessee border it becomes the Ocoee River. Same river, different name. I have yet to find an explanation for why that is.
One of the attractions around here is tubing the Toccoa. There are several small companies in the area that make money renting tubes to people and transporting them up river to float down the Toccoa. So it was that a couple of Saturdays ago I found myself accompanying Meredith, her brother and his wife and daughter for a tubing trip on the Toccoa.
I had reservations about going. I’m just not good at extended family outings. I have a tendency to become curmudgeonly. I suspect that’s due to all the conviviality and good cheer that usually accompanies such affairs. It grates on me. Maybe it’s the Italian in me. A large family dinner in an Italian family is considered a bore unless a shouting match breaks out.
Despite my misgivings, I decided to go along on the tubing trip. The drill should be familiar to you if you ever went tubing. You go to the end point, select a tube, then the tubing company drops you off upstream so you can drift back to the end point. It’s a pretty simple business model. They probably don’t study it at Harvard Business School.
The first thing we had to do was select our tubes. There were two choices: tubes with a bottom and tubes without a bottom. That’s when the guy in charge of handing out the tubes casually remarked that the water temperature that day was 51 degrees.
51 degrees! That’s a setting on a refrigerator. It is not a proper temperature for a river that I am about to go tubing in. I spent 37 years living on the Gulf of Mexico. I refuses to go swimming in the Gulf unless the water temperature was at least 85 degrees. According to the hypothermia tables, it takes 10 to 15 minutes to lose dexterity in 50 to 60 degree water if you have no protective clothing. Exhaustion or unconsciousness occurs in 1 to 2 hours, and death occurs in 1 to 6 hours. While I thought it unlikely I would lose consciousness or die, I was concerned about the possible loss of dexterity. I had visions of coming out of the water with claw fingers and never being able to type or play the bass guitar again.
We selected the tubes with bottoms. I don’t know about the others but I was thinking that the thin fragment of vinyl across the bottom of the tube might provide some insulation and keep my butt dry. Nope.
The other feature about these tubes is that they had a small inflated hump at one side to provide a back or head rest. As events would prove, the purpose of the hump is more of an aspiration than a reality.
After selecting our tubes we piled into a van and were driven to the drop off point where we entered the water and started the adventure. It was at this point I discovered that the tubes were designed to carry emaciated runway models, small children, dwarfs and anorexics. They were not intended to float a six foot one, 200-plus pound man comfortably down the stream. Imagine a limp strip of bacon hanging over the mouth of a coffee cup. That’s pretty much what I looked like once I sat in the tube. My legs hung off one side, my upper body projected over the other side, and my ass drooped in the middle. Because of my weight my tube sat lower in the water and my butt sat deeper in the river.
Any thoughts of a dry ride were quickly dispelled. It took less than 30 seconds for 51 degree water to slop over the side of my tube where it was trapped in the middle by the vinyl bottom of the tube. If you want to replicate the experience try dropping ice cubes down the front of your shorts. Major shrinkage will occur. Harry and the twins were not happy. And if Harry and the twins are not happy you can bet your ass that I’m not happy.
Because my legs hung over the side of the tube into the water they acted as a sea anchor, slowing my progress and causing me to face upstream. I spent ninety percent of the time traveling backwards down the river. This got old pretty quickly. There’s a reason sight-seeing busses have forward facing seats. It’s much more interesting to watch the sights approach you than it is to see them disappear behind you.
Not that it mattered much from a sightseeing perspective. The inflated protrusion on the tube that was supposed to be a back rest or a head rest was neither. In my case it was simply a large inflated lump somewhere in the middle of my back. When I lay back in the tube I discovered that I was facing the sky. In order to actually look where I was going (or in my case where I had been because I was always facing backwards) I had to crane my head up. It didn’t take much time for that to cause major neck fatigue. I spent most of the trip staring at the sky.
The Toccoa is a shallow river with a mild current. There are large rocks in it. Some of them project above the surface; others are just below it. Because I was floating backwards and facing the sky I couldn’t see the rocks to avoid them so I kept running into them and getting hung up. The fact that my butt was riding deeper in the water only increased the number of rocks that I could run into. This was, literally and figuratively, a pain in the ass.
Every time I ran aground on a rock I had to attempt to shove my way clear. This usually resulted in another splash of frigid water on my privates. The constant struggle to get free of rocks slowed me down considerably. It didn’t take long for my tubing party to get well ahead of me. This meant that I had to spend an inordinate amount of energy awkwardly using my arms as paddles to catch up with them. It was a really hot day, and all this exercise made me start to sweat. It’s a curious sensation to have your ass in a deep freeze while the rest of your body is sweating.
All rivers have eddies and backwaters. The eddies and backwaters are sections of the river where the water slows or even flows backwards. For some reason I kept drifting into these eddies and backwaters. When that happened I would have to do more arm paddling to get back in the current flow. I started to wonder whether the trip was an allegory of my life.
There were the large, low hanging branches over many stretches of the river. Because I couldn’t see where I was going I kept drifting underneath them. I didn’t mind that. At least they were something to look at other than the sky. And then someone warned me to watch out for snakes dropping out of the branches. Oh great. That’s all I needed to make the trip truly memorable. On the positive side, there was no way a kamikaze snake could surprise me since I was always looking upwards.
I was very happy when we finally arrived at the end of the trip and I could get out of the river. I don’t want to scare anyone away from enjoying a tubing trip down the Toccoa if you’re ever up this way. The rest of my party had a great time I’m told. But I’ll be honest with you. If I ever get another invitation to tube the Toccoa I’ll pass. I’d rather try to pass a kidney stone than go through that experience again.
The Toccoa is dammed by the Blue Ridge Dam. The dam, which was built by the TVA back when Franklin Roosevelt was President, is smack in the middle of Fannin County and forms Lake Blue Ridge. Lake Blue Ridge has two claims to fame: it is the highest in elevation of all the lakes in the TVA dam system, and it is also the southernmost home of a fish called the Walleye.
The name “Toccoa” is from the Cherokee term for “where the Catawbas lived.” The Catawbas are a Native American tribe. North Georgia was the home of the Cherokees before they were kicked out by white men in 1840. Given the meaning of Toccoa, it would appear that some Catawbas lived in the middle of the Cherokee land at one time.
Curiously, the Catawbas are Siouan-speaking tribe but the Cherokees speak an Iroquoian language. The two languages are as different as Portuguese and Romanian. This makes me wonder. If telephones had been invented back then would you have had to press one for Cherokee and two for Catawba? On weekends did Cherokee couples go out for some Catawba food? Did unattached Cherokee braves want to hang out along the Toccoa because they heard the Catawba chicks were loose?
Back to the Toccoa River. It has two names. At the Tennessee border it becomes the Ocoee River. Same river, different name. I have yet to find an explanation for why that is.
One of the attractions around here is tubing the Toccoa. There are several small companies in the area that make money renting tubes to people and transporting them up river to float down the Toccoa. So it was that a couple of Saturdays ago I found myself accompanying Meredith, her brother and his wife and daughter for a tubing trip on the Toccoa.
I had reservations about going. I’m just not good at extended family outings. I have a tendency to become curmudgeonly. I suspect that’s due to all the conviviality and good cheer that usually accompanies such affairs. It grates on me. Maybe it’s the Italian in me. A large family dinner in an Italian family is considered a bore unless a shouting match breaks out.
Despite my misgivings, I decided to go along on the tubing trip. The drill should be familiar to you if you ever went tubing. You go to the end point, select a tube, then the tubing company drops you off upstream so you can drift back to the end point. It’s a pretty simple business model. They probably don’t study it at Harvard Business School.
The first thing we had to do was select our tubes. There were two choices: tubes with a bottom and tubes without a bottom. That’s when the guy in charge of handing out the tubes casually remarked that the water temperature that day was 51 degrees.
51 degrees! That’s a setting on a refrigerator. It is not a proper temperature for a river that I am about to go tubing in. I spent 37 years living on the Gulf of Mexico. I refuses to go swimming in the Gulf unless the water temperature was at least 85 degrees. According to the hypothermia tables, it takes 10 to 15 minutes to lose dexterity in 50 to 60 degree water if you have no protective clothing. Exhaustion or unconsciousness occurs in 1 to 2 hours, and death occurs in 1 to 6 hours. While I thought it unlikely I would lose consciousness or die, I was concerned about the possible loss of dexterity. I had visions of coming out of the water with claw fingers and never being able to type or play the bass guitar again.
We selected the tubes with bottoms. I don’t know about the others but I was thinking that the thin fragment of vinyl across the bottom of the tube might provide some insulation and keep my butt dry. Nope.
The other feature about these tubes is that they had a small inflated hump at one side to provide a back or head rest. As events would prove, the purpose of the hump is more of an aspiration than a reality.
After selecting our tubes we piled into a van and were driven to the drop off point where we entered the water and started the adventure. It was at this point I discovered that the tubes were designed to carry emaciated runway models, small children, dwarfs and anorexics. They were not intended to float a six foot one, 200-plus pound man comfortably down the stream. Imagine a limp strip of bacon hanging over the mouth of a coffee cup. That’s pretty much what I looked like once I sat in the tube. My legs hung off one side, my upper body projected over the other side, and my ass drooped in the middle. Because of my weight my tube sat lower in the water and my butt sat deeper in the river.
Any thoughts of a dry ride were quickly dispelled. It took less than 30 seconds for 51 degree water to slop over the side of my tube where it was trapped in the middle by the vinyl bottom of the tube. If you want to replicate the experience try dropping ice cubes down the front of your shorts. Major shrinkage will occur. Harry and the twins were not happy. And if Harry and the twins are not happy you can bet your ass that I’m not happy.
Because my legs hung over the side of the tube into the water they acted as a sea anchor, slowing my progress and causing me to face upstream. I spent ninety percent of the time traveling backwards down the river. This got old pretty quickly. There’s a reason sight-seeing busses have forward facing seats. It’s much more interesting to watch the sights approach you than it is to see them disappear behind you.
Not that it mattered much from a sightseeing perspective. The inflated protrusion on the tube that was supposed to be a back rest or a head rest was neither. In my case it was simply a large inflated lump somewhere in the middle of my back. When I lay back in the tube I discovered that I was facing the sky. In order to actually look where I was going (or in my case where I had been because I was always facing backwards) I had to crane my head up. It didn’t take much time for that to cause major neck fatigue. I spent most of the trip staring at the sky.
The Toccoa is a shallow river with a mild current. There are large rocks in it. Some of them project above the surface; others are just below it. Because I was floating backwards and facing the sky I couldn’t see the rocks to avoid them so I kept running into them and getting hung up. The fact that my butt was riding deeper in the water only increased the number of rocks that I could run into. This was, literally and figuratively, a pain in the ass.
Every time I ran aground on a rock I had to attempt to shove my way clear. This usually resulted in another splash of frigid water on my privates. The constant struggle to get free of rocks slowed me down considerably. It didn’t take long for my tubing party to get well ahead of me. This meant that I had to spend an inordinate amount of energy awkwardly using my arms as paddles to catch up with them. It was a really hot day, and all this exercise made me start to sweat. It’s a curious sensation to have your ass in a deep freeze while the rest of your body is sweating.
All rivers have eddies and backwaters. The eddies and backwaters are sections of the river where the water slows or even flows backwards. For some reason I kept drifting into these eddies and backwaters. When that happened I would have to do more arm paddling to get back in the current flow. I started to wonder whether the trip was an allegory of my life.
There were the large, low hanging branches over many stretches of the river. Because I couldn’t see where I was going I kept drifting underneath them. I didn’t mind that. At least they were something to look at other than the sky. And then someone warned me to watch out for snakes dropping out of the branches. Oh great. That’s all I needed to make the trip truly memorable. On the positive side, there was no way a kamikaze snake could surprise me since I was always looking upwards.
I was very happy when we finally arrived at the end of the trip and I could get out of the river. I don’t want to scare anyone away from enjoying a tubing trip down the Toccoa if you’re ever up this way. The rest of my party had a great time I’m told. But I’ll be honest with you. If I ever get another invitation to tube the Toccoa I’ll pass. I’d rather try to pass a kidney stone than go through that experience again.
Hilarious!!
ReplyDeleteWalleye! Good eating. Reminds me of my childhood. Introduced Tim to walleye last time we were back "Up Nawth," and he still talks about it. You're missed in Pinellas County, Jim!
ReplyDeleteI haven't done much fishing here but I've heard Walleye are hard to catch. I don't miss the work and the traffic but I do sometimes miss the relationships. Hope all is going well for you.
Delete