Poconos

Lehigh River Cutting It's Way Through the Poconos

I could tell some other great stories about the Channing Way Communes that sprung up around UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, but I'm kicking a dying horse. A final word on them though. The communes died off as the kids got sick of starving all the time. Careers in hippy-dom don't create much wealth.

*****

I saw the Extreme Games up close in Providence years ago. It's not like what you see on TV. There is no loud, lead guitar music to egg on the competitors nor 400, one-second-long fast cut camera angles either. When you see it on the TV, it's a complete stage show.

I saw the street luge event. I watched as young 20 somethings lying flat on their backs as they passed me doing...a flaming 20mph. They rolled by me and...and...that was it.

“What's the big deal?” I thought to myself.

What was more interesting were the contenders and video crew milling about. I heard most were out of LA. They were more entertaining than the games themselves.

There were California dudes who did have that surfer look down pat. It's odd seeing a dude walking on brick sidewalks past old Colonial Houses on Benefit Street. The early New England architecture and surfer attire do not associate well. That beach look can be pulled off in San Diego only.

*****

My dalliance with Extreme Sports was a whitewater rafting trip on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania. It was a package deal for a group of us that provided the bus ride, condo and a day trip down the Lehigh. It was a typical weekend getaway. I had never rafted and visiting the Pocono mountains seemed like a cool idea.

The rafting company should've been called. “Uh, We Just Slapped This Company Together as You Guys were Driving Out.” I can't say we didn't have accommodations but their training course was about six minutes long and all they kept repeating was, “If you fall into the water...point your feet downstream!”

We piled onto our rafts with our food, beer and paddles in a fairly quiet section of the river. What surprised us all was how cold we felt. We were deep into the Poconos and under a thick canopy of trees, so not much warm sun penetrated at all. The forest was full of that grayish fog that crept into the hollows and darkened the scene further. Adding to our chill, we had to step into cold mountain water to move the rafts out to center to catch the main stream.

The Lehigh river is not that wide. At it's widest in the Poconos it might have been 20 yards.  What the Lehigh lacks in width, it makes up by falling twenty-five feet down at times. The first rapids we approached none of us could see, but heard just fine. All of sudden the raft fell from under us and down we went. None of us had any idea of how to steer it.

Quickly we were shoved up against this monstrous pillar of rock that rose out of the churning water and as we inched further and further up it, the center of balance changed and one by one, we all were dumped into the water.

 

All I remember was being sucked under. We all had life vests on but they don't really work in rushing water too well. I can remember that the sun had come out as I was looking at it as I was being dragged along the bottom of the river. The surface of the water sparkles just as much from underneath as seeing it from the shore I can tell you.

The water rushed so fast that I don't recall all the cuts I received from banging into the rocks. The next thing I remember, I was hacking, coughing and bobbing like a cork in a quiet pool where the rapids had finally spilled into. I regained my bearings and dog paddled to the shoreline, grabbed an overhanging branch and pulled myself halfway onto the mud. I tried to stand up but I couldn't.

“Shit! My legs are broken!” I thought.

After looking at them and finding nothing wrong, I tried standing again. I managed it but they were shaking so much. Later the I found the reason. I was so frightened I couldn't stand.

I leaned against the tree and saw beer coolers, empty rafts and people thrashing about. The pool was turning into a traffic jam. My thought was, “Oh Christ, we have another 50 miles of this!”

Once it was over, we all collected our gear and set off anew but I was hopped up on fear for the next spill. I jokingly said to one of the leaders there if there was a way through the woods to get back to Wilkes-Barre. “Nope! This is the only way to get home!”

I can attest to this: You will become competent very quickly when you have fear and 20-40 foot drops in the river to deal with. I learned, we all learned hastily, how to spot the current as it goes over a cascade and how to position the raft to find that “slot.” We learned how to look down the river about 50 feet to see where the current twisted and turned so we could paddle like maniacs to the center of it.

It took me about three plunging rapids to become confident in one hell of a hurry. Once I got the hang of it I could calm down and focus on the mountains as they rose right out of valley bottom.

It's beautiful.

The further along we went downstream, the distance between rapids spaced out more so we just leaned back, sucked down beers and drifted along. I think I can understand why Pennsylvania is a huge deer hunting state. As we floated along, all you heard were the hooves of deer taking off. On occasion you'd see one bounding in 15 foot leaps through the woods to escape us. We think, think we saw one black bear a ways off too.

What's cool too, as you drift along, the land changes. It went from sloping forested banks to sheer rock cliffs that stood up on either side of the river. The guides estimated the height to be around 100 feet up. These cliff faces had tunnels dug into them that made them look worm eaten. “This is coal country!” The guides told us. The first miners would spot a coal seam exposed in the cliff wall and would mine both ways, towards the river and back into the mountain itself. These were cut before Lincoln was President we were told.

By the end of the trip, the Lehigh does widen out and the current slowed down markedly, which meant we were approaching Wilkes-Barre.

In the condo that afternoon, as I was taking a shower, there was a puddle of mud at the bottom of the stall. I had no idea I became that filthy. It was nice to wash off the smell of algae though. What was an unknown perk was that we found out the band Little Feat was performing at a 4-H thingy nearby and there was open admission. The locals there thought we were all from NYC due to our accents. We were told by some they had relatives that lived on Long Island, completely mishearing us say “Rhode Island.”