One nice afternoon, I got back to the put in to find Gus in a reflective mood, sitting on a rock gazing over the river. It was a warm day with a little breeze and lots of singing insects. We sat there for some time just taking in the river.
Doing the Carderock attainments with Gus cemented my appreciation for Fish Taco. Early in Anno Covid, the restaurant opened an outdoor eating space in the parking lot, with the orange cones and safety netting giving it a road construction aesthetic. After months of not being able to dine out, it was wonderful to sit outside in the sun and the breeze, relax after a day on the water, and enjoy food prepared by others. It became a post-attainment tradition.
Gus was a man of many boats, and he once shared a good strategy for avoiding conflict with a partner who might not see the obvious wisdom of having a vast fleet stored in the garage. He suggested picking a common color for all your kayaks, say red. Then, he said, when a new model comes out that would fill a gap in your collection, you wait until there were used ones available and search out the boat of your dreams in your standard color. For the uninitiated, kayaks are all pretty much alike, so another red boat with a few scrapes and scratches is barely distinguishable from the more venerable boats in your stable. And should your partner ask whether that was a new boat, you could honestly answer, "I think that boat has been around for a while." I have no knowledge whether that strategy was successfully implemented.
Fine Days for a Paddle
Gus had serious adventures in healthcare before I got to know him, and those adventures affected his paddling. He liked his very light, very fast white racing boat, both for its speed and maneuverability in the water and its light weight for getting it to and from the river and loading it up on the roof rack at the end of the day. He had the body mass index of a supermodel and had trouble staying warm in cold weather. Yet he paddled.
There was a trip down the Shenandoah valley to paddle Cedar Creek in January 2021. It was a warm day for January but still, it was January. To deal with the Covid/shuttle problem, Alf Cooley rigged up a plastic center partition in his car from sheet goods that probably came off his porch roof, and he and Gus made the trip in winter parkas, goggles, and face masks, driving interstate highways with the car windows open to mid-winter air. This was clearly a class V drive to paddle a class I-II creek, but it was a fine day for a paddle, we were able to get our first trip of the year, and Gus got to be on the water.
Gus also loved to surf. One of the benefits of his racing boat was that unlike the potato boats most of us paddle, it has good straight-line speed and is perfect for catching waves. He gloried in surfing the wave at Rocky Island when the Little Falls gage was in the mid-four-foot range. Beth Koller tells a story of partnering with Gus decades ago in a rodeo there, her in the bow, Gus in the stern in an OC-2. They missed the planned ender (Gus's idea), and had an inadvertent roll. Surfing is like that sometimes. But it was all part of the adventure.
More recently, Gus came with a group that was paddling the rarely run Seneca Breaks in moderately high water in search of new surfing waves. We picked through the clutter of islands, rock outcrops, and snagged tree trunks over near the Virginia shore in search of surfing opportunities. Gus thought a good wave was worth the effort it took to find it.
Not Only Whitewater
For Gus, paddling was not just about whitewater. Several years ago, a group of us joined him at a family house on Bald Head Island in North Carolina, just above the South Carolina border. This is a luscious place with a subtropical feel, rich vegetation, and a different suite of birds than we have here. The Anderson house is in maritime forest on a sand ridge between a quick moving tidal creek and a wide- open salt marsh.
The challenges of kayak touring are completely different than those of whitewater. Gus and I decided to meet early and paddle out to the barrier island from the mainland rather than take the ferry. We had to deal with navigation in an immense and confusing landscape, the Cape Fear River, with wind and tidal currents, and much larger boats whose pilots might or might not be looking for low-to-the-water sea kayaks. The porpoises were intrigued as were the gulls until they realized we had no food for them. Besides the adventure, a major benefit of this arrangement was that others took responsibility for hauling our gear out to the island.
Even the more sedate daily paddling on Bald Head required careful planning. Time and tide. Wind. The open marsh was navigable only in high water, paddling through cord grass out to a twisting and elusive channel. The tidal creek was navigable at all times but was much more pleasant paddling down with the outgoing tide and back when the water returned. You did not want to end up far from home with wind and tide conspiring against you. David (Cotton) Cottingham was the first to try the oysters embedded in the creek banks and was also the person who could tell us what all those birds were. Gus loved it all.
Grand Adventures
Gus was a prince of the Grand Canyon. He rowed a raft on his first personal descent in the 1980s and repeated the trip at every opportunity. Periodically he would run a day-long seminar on how to run a big water trip out west. He would explain the lottery, the only way for most people to run a private trip on the popular rivers; the permitting process, a bureaucratic masterpiece; selecting the best dates for a trip; finding and hiring an outfitter; gear, food, travel logistics—every little detail of trip planning and organization. As I sat in this class, I realized that I was being initiated into his lottery network. When the chances of winning a slot are one in a bazillion, having more and more people enter the lottery for specific rivers increases the chances of getting a trip. In my case, his teaching efforts were wasted because I got to go on the river when he won the lottery for 2021.
He rowed much of the Colorado River through the canyon despite being tired and having diminished strength. A few of us would jump in his boat before significant rapids to provide extra mass and muscle as it was needed. He was pleased that he picked and ran enviable lines through the huge drops--Lava, Crystal, and Hermit.
We had an adventure on a big rapid, it might have been Granite. I was paddling in front with his wife Debby. We hit the first huge drop straight on and got crushed by a breaking wave. As we approached the second big wave the boat was yawing and I turned to yell, "SQUARE US UP GUS," only to see … no Gus. I grabbed those awkward sticks that rafts use instead of more sensible paddles and spun us around to get through wave two, then Debby took over the oars and I switched to rescue mode to fish out our missing captain. He took it all in stride including the daily rebandaging of his scrapes from the gear boxes he flushed across. After many days, he would set up a chair near the water's edge and sit under a shade canopy, just taking in the river, exactly as I had seen him do at Carderock and on other banks of other rivers.
The World According to Gus
We heard of other parts of Gus's life at the Carderock gathering: his passion for social justice, his respect and support for all the kids in his neighborhood. Two of the high points for me were seeing the desk plaque reading roughly, "Great memories are made by pursuing bad ideas with good friends," and hearing a years-old story from Mike Aronoff. He and Gus were paddling on a favorite stream somewhere in the mountains west of here when Gus peeled off from the regular line and paddled away down the rapid. Mike yelled over and asked him what on earth he was doing over there, and Gus replied "I'm just looking for another wave."
May we all remember the lessons he shared with us:
We are fabulously lucky to have the opportunity to seek adventures in nature.
Anything worth doing is improved by doing it with people we care about.
Make sure you take time to admire the beauty of the wild places we visit.
It is worth going out of your way to find one more wave to surf.