Hi, Octane at Emory
Method
I sure am glad Octane’s finally opened in Emory Village.
When Silvia goes to church on the Emory campus Sunday mornings, Peanut and I have had to hang out at the Village Starbucks — which is, you know, fine … but it’s Starbuck’s.
Octane opened last week in the space formerly occupied by Method (and before that an Inman Perk, and before that a Caribou).
I prophesy: Octane will survive where others have struggled. For one thing, as I understand it, it’s never been a lack of actual business that caused any of those three shops to close (each had its reason). For another, Tony Riffel and his crew at the original Octane on the west side always have struck me as smart, customer-oriented operators.
The joe at Emory Village is a bit on the expensive side — they use the Chemex brewing method — it’s a damn good cup of coffee. And the outside digs — under a wide awning, with nice un-tippy tables and plenty of electric outlets — are perfect for drinker, dog and computer.
Upper Chattahoochee – Sautee Creek to Highway 255 bridge
This is the second of three trip diaries on a weekend canoe run of the Chattahoochee River. I hope these articles will guide others to canoeing the Chattahoochee. The first installment was titled “Upper Chattahoochee River in canoe, with dog.”
Sautee, Ga., is a cute little cluster of buildings on a fork in the road four miles southeast of the tourist’s overdose known as Helen. It’s also a rock’s throw away from the put-in for the first stretch of the Chattahoochee River that’s actually suited for canoeing.
Phoebe, Peanut and Ellen ride down the Chattahoochee River.
If you get to Sautee by heading east on Georgia Highway 17, take a left onto Highway 255, then an immediate right onto Lovers Lane. A couple of hundred yards to the east, you’ll cross Sautee Creek. There’s a dirt road to the right and a small parking area just after the bridge.
My paddling companion, Alex, and I walked down the dirt road for a bit to make sure there weren’t any trees down across the narrow, muddy waterway. After the previous night’s storm, it wouldn’t be surprising to find one. And if a tree had fallen all the way across the creek, we might have wanted to put-in downstream from the hazard.
But we lucked out. Muddy water was moving at a pretty good clip down the creek, but there didn’t appear to be any trees across it.
Because we didn’t get on the road in Atlanta until nearly 10, it was now almost noon. We unloaded the canoes. Alex and the dogs waited at the put-in, while Ellen and I ran a quick, six-mile shuttle and left her car near the next bridge on the Chattahoochee River (also on Highway 255). [I’ve biked this shuttle in the past and; though it’s a bit hilly, it’s not a bad ride and the shoulders are nice and wide. It's a nice way to run a shuttle.]
Ellen and I came back in my car and slid the boats down a muddy bank into the water. Alex was eager to get into his yellow kayak, so he squirmed in and started skittering around. Ellen got Phoebe, her hound dog, into her canoe, and Phoebe stood with her front feet on the bow seat. She commenced to howling — Phoebe, that is, not Ellen.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you,” Ellen said. “That’s what Phoebe does the whole time in the canoe. I hope you can take it, because you’re going to have to listen to her all weekend.”
As Ellen launched, I lured Peanut with a snack into my bow. She immediately assumed the precise possion of Phoebe, with her front feet on the bow, but thankfully she didn’t begin howling.
The Sautee, which may be 20 feet wide, winds between steep banks, before snaking under the two-lane highway bridge. Less than a quarter-mile from our put-in, it meets the Chattahoochee River. At that point the Hooch is a pastoral stream. It widens a bit as it ambles southeasterly down the broad Nacoochee Valley, which is best known for an ancient Indian burial mound, visible from the road a mile or so upstream from where we were.
The mound sits in the middle of a field and is topped by a gazebo, which is more than 100 years old — but not as old as the mound. The Nacoochee Valley actually has some of the oldest Native American artifacts in North Georgia. Arrowheads and beads found in the area go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Much later, the valley was part of the Cherokee Nation.
Then, in 1828, whites found gold in the area — according to most accounts along nearby Dukes Creek, a tributary that enters just upstream from Sautee Creek. That find launched the United States’ first real gold rush, which led to the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears.
Now, the Nacoochee Valley provides a pretty and pastoral — if not exactly wild — landscape. Through this stretch, the river offers gentle pools interspersed with mild shoals that allow novice (and rusty) canoeists to practice their strokes, to turn the boat sideways for waterbed rides over tiny waves, to catch little eddies and to drift back out into the current as the boats leapfrog each other down the river on a beautiful, mild spring day. Or you can just drift and occasionally rudder.
The water was just the right height for a fun run. Overnight, the nearby USGS gauge near Cleveland, Georgia, put the river’s volume at 2,000 cubic feet per second, which would have forced us to move so quickly that we wouldn’t have had time to relax. This level was perfect: Quick enough to keep us moving even if we didn’t stick our paddles in the water, but not so insistent that we would have called it pushy.
Around one bend, we found a jumble of wood that reached all the way across the river. A big tree had fallen, and now other logs were jammed up against it. But we had plenty of time to pull over and take a close look at it. Would we have to carry around? Nah. There was an opening. Ellen walked with the dogs downstream, while I guided my boat through the branches, then I watched the dogs while Ellen and Alex made their ways through.
The most excitement on this stretch was provided by Peanut, who couldn’t stand the fact that her pal Phoebe, along with Ellen and Alex, weren’t together with us in the same boat. She seemed excited to be on the water but so worried that the pack wasn’t together than she started balancing on all for legs on the gunwale rails and the very bow of the boat.
Finally, she realized her predicament, tried to get down and plopped clumsily into the cold water. It was Peanut’s first swim, and she did find — looked a bit shocked at how cold the water was, but immediately knew how to doggie paddle. And once she got over the confusion of which way to go, she realized that she should head right back toward me. I yanked her up by her harness, but she needed surprisingly little help scrambling into the boat.
Budda-budda-bup. Do that doggie shake and shimmy to drive off. Walk around excitedly in the middle of the canoe, head back up to the bow … and start whining again .
A mile downstream from the confluence with the Sautee, rocky outcrops squeeze in on the river, which tightens just a tad. There are small mountains on both sides, but the rapids are still very mild – Class I and the mildest Class II, which means that everything’s an open shoot.
In this kind of water, you head straight for the downstream-pointing “V’s” – open channels that end in a series of friendly little waves. And if you want to slow down or play with the current, or want to watch the young kayaker who’s with you play on the waves, you just point the nose of the boat at a 10 o’clock or 2 o’clock angle into the little eddies that form behind any sizable rock. The backward current that’s circling around to fill in the space behind the rock will catch your boat, as well. With a couple of simple strokes with your paddle, you’re suddenly effortlessly pointing upstream — and the dog, who suddenly thinks this canoeing stuff is quite interesting, is grooving with the ride, watching Alex follow behind us, and enjoying the sunny day.
I last road this stretch in 1992 — I can place the date by the girlfriend I took along — and I remember remarking to her that I was disappointed to see so many summer homes along the way. As far as I know, this entire stretch of river always has been in private hands. In the old days, that meant the wide valleys were the settled parts, while the steeper stretches — I wouldn’t quite call this part of the river a gorge — were thick with green: Mountain laurel lining the river banks, and oak and pine forests climbing up to the ridgetops.
But better roads put this part of Georgia a half hour outside Gainesville, and less than an hour from Alpharetta. Ambitious developers began to stripe the hills with suburban-style cul de sacs, and to drop dream homes on the ridges. Spectacular views for them, a less pristine river corridor for us.
Just as more houses have popped up over time, more pop up as you move downstream on the river — toward Atlanta. But all that settlement couldn’t detract from the splendid day. The narrower river and slightly bigger drops made the rapids more playful.
Phoebe kept baying. Peanut fell in the water one more time. Ellen hooked up her canoe to mine so we could have a snack. And Alex looked more and more comfortable playing in the waves — almost as comfortable as his uncle did in a kayak on this very same stretch more than three decades ago.
On that day, his uncle and I were just a couple of years older than Alex now is. Despite the new houses, the river hadn’t changed nearly as much as I had.
Upper Chattahoochee River in canoe, with dog
The Upper Chattahoochee River has a special hold on Atlanta canoeists.
Unlike other North Georgia streams — the Etowah, the Cartecay and the Toccoa, for example — the Hooch is an essential part of Atlanta: It’s the area’s main water source and eventually becomes the state’s longest river. On its banks, sits the region’s largest natural playground, the Chattahoochee River National Recreation area.
And though the Chattahoochee is a relatively small river that cuts along the edge of the city rather than smack through its center, it is the closest parallel we have to Mississippi in St. Louis, the Willamette in Portland, or — silly as this may sound — even the Thames in London.
When I’m talking about the Upper Chattahoochee though, I mean the Hooch upstream from Lake Lanier, outside the metro area. At that stage, it’s a small mountain stream that spurts from a rather unimpressive spring on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and gathers with a few other gurgling brooks before rushing through touristy Helen, Ga.
In Helen, the Chattahoochee’s just a tubing creek. But downstream, the river’s joined by another little stream called Sautee Creek and finally becomes, umm, a river – big enough to carry a enough water for canoes, but still small enough to be confused in low water with other North Georgia paddling rivers that don’t get to be upgraded to anything beyond “creeks”: Amicalola, Talking Rock and Fightingtown.
That wasn’t the case two weeks ago when my childhood friend, Ellen; her 12-year-old son 13-year-old son, Alex; their dog, Phoebe; my dog, Peanut; and I
set off for a two-day paddle on the Chattahoochee. Friday night, April 10, it stormed big time across North Georgia, so the river was certain to be up considerably. The Chattahoochee was bound to have the volume and power of full-fledged river.
It would be Alex’s first river trip in the kayak he’d recently bought from a friend of mine. He’s a physically confident kid who picks up athletic challenges quickly, and he’d taken a kayaking course last year at the Nantahala Outdoor Center.
Still, I’m on the careful side, and I wanted to make sure he’d have a good, learning experience. Plus, Ellen and I each would be giving a dog the magic carpet ride in the bow of our respective Old Town Discovery canoes. Phoebe’s been on a couple of long canoe trips, but I was a bit nervous about Peanut. She’s a rambunctious year-old boxer mix, who has a hard time sitting still while the world goes by without her active participation. I was right to be nervous.
There are several good ways to figure out how challenging a river trip might be. One is just to build up experience: You get to know the difference between a Class I or II river, and Class III, IV or V river, and it becomes second nature to know that — while a Class V run was perfectly reasonable when you were in good paddling shape and were kayaking just with your experienced buddies — maneuvering a clunky Discovery with a puppy in the bow, after you’ve been sitting on your butt in front of a computer for a decade, is a different story.
Plus, you understand that water levels can change everything.
Before we settled on the Chattahoochee, I thought we’d head up to Amicalola Creek, a very pretty, ledgy, little stream near Dawsonville, or to the nearby Etowah River, which is a tad bigger than the Amicalola but just as ledgy very similar overall.
Rain’s often good for those little rivers. The water gets high enough to turn boat-scraping “technical” runs into gushy, fun rapids. On the other hand, too much rain — especially a big storm — can make narrow creek beds hazardous. Fallen trees can span from bank to bank, turning into “strainers” that allow powerful floodwaters to rush through but can trap boats or swimmers.
I looked up the forecast Friday night: Two inches of rain were headed Dawsonville’s way, and Dawson County was under a tornado warning. Uh-oh. Hair boaters might be eager to go creeking on really vertical flood-stage stuff — not me with my dog, Peanut.
Maybe, it was time to check out a wider river with a bit less drop in it. That way we’d be less likely to hit fallen trees and other detritus. And, if we did come across a strainer or two, we’d be more able to stop and take a look without being washed into it.
Late Friday night, I went to the paddler’s favorite government website: the U.S. Geological Survey’s real-time water graphs. Yum, yum, yum, for any paddler.
Sure enough, it showed the water in the Amicalola zooming upward: A gauge went from just over 1 foot to about 1.7, and the real measure of volume — cubic feet per second (CFS) — shot up on the graph like a rocket, from an average level of about 250 cfs (creek territory) to nearly 600 (which appeared to be a record for the date). And all the water that had rained surely hadn’t washed into the creek yet, so it was bound to go higher.
The Etowah looked pretty similar.
So, I checked out the Chattahoochee, which I knew to be a relatively mild run with a couple of nice Class II rapids. The main raps against it: It’s too popular, there are too many houses along it to feel secluded, and it’s a bit wider than some other mountain streams. So in low water it can get a bit rocky. Plus, I wasn’t sure it’d be challenging enough for Alex.
Well, scraping bottom wouldn’t be a problem on this trip. The CFS appeared headed for 2000. But weekend forecast called for no more rain, so we’d be hitting the river after the flood crested. Technical little, rocky rapids would become big wavy ones – roller coaster rides with strong eddies and pretty good hydraulics, perfect for the doggy to get used to riding the rapids, even better for Alex to practice his moves.
Plus because the Chattahoochee’s around 50 feet wide through the stretch we’d be paddling, any fallen trees were less likely to blockade the entire river.
Looked like we lucked out on the water levels and the weather. We were heading to the Chattahoochee.
PART II: Upper Chattahoochee — Sautee Creek to Highway 255 Bridge.
Peanut’s lame joke
Peanut got surgery for her torn arterial cruciate ligament Wednesday. There are 11 staples in her rear right knee, and there’s a very large hole in our bank account.
She looked so silly when we picked her up, wiggling on three legs, wagging her tail (along with the other leg), and licking at us but not quite hitting her target. Now, with that plastic lampshade thing on her head (to prevent her from picking at her wound) and her crying as she hobbles around the house, she looks and sounds pitiful.
It reminds me of a great learning experience I had when I was a farm insurance salesman in the Midwest back in the late-1940s. I was heading west, somewhere in northern Iowa — or was it southern Minnesota? And the sun was setting over a two-lane highway in front of me. Suddenly …
… I thought I saw something crossing the road. To this day, I can’t say what it was or if it was anything at all. All I do know is that I swerved and, blinded by the light, I landed the ol’ Packard in a deep, muddy ditch. There was no way I could get the car out of there, so I walked up the road a mile or so to next farmhouse.
A comely lass answered the door, dressed in cutoff jeans, a plaid cotton shirt tied up above her waist in typical farm-girl style, and pigtails. I know. I know. It’s like something out of an old farmer-salesman joke. But it’s all true.
“Daddy,” she yelled back into the house as soon as she saw me, “there’s a fancyman here wants to talk to yew.”
I explained to the man of the house my predicament, and Joe-Bob Johannsen couldn’t have been more courteous. He introduced his wife, Josephine; the daughter, Jomelda; and a little toddler named Jo-Jo, who was Jomelda’s son.
There was no mention of Jo-Jo’s father until a few minutes later, when Farmer Joe told me he wouldn’t let a single salesmen stay in the house ever since the last salesman came along; nine months later, he said, they ended up with Jo-Jo. Come deer season he’d be looking for that salesman again, but he didn’t hold out much hope of finding him.
But, Farmer Joe said, I could stay in a very neat loft in the brand new barn if I wanted. In the morning, he’d be happy to feed me breakfast and to pull the car out the ditch with his tractor.
He was right about that loft. It was clean and comfortable. If not for the slight scent of hay wafting up from bellow, you’d have thunk you were in a guest house.
But then in the middle of the night I started hearing a pattern of sounds that made me curious. “Clip-clip-clip-CLOP,” it went. “Clip-clip-clip-CLOP.” It would stop for a while, and I’d fall back asleep, but then it started all over. “Clip-clip-clip-CLOP.”
By morning, I was insanely curious about the sound, so I looked down on the barn floor and saw the culprit: A pig lay curled up below me, deep in dreamland. Only this pig was in pen that was nicer than the others’ — it had a fan and a cool tile floor — and the pig had three natural legs, as well as a wooden one. Somehow, the pig realized I was looking down at it. It got up quickly and started walking around in circles, snorting and sniffing and hollering, but most of all making a racket on his pen floor. “Clip-clip-clip-CLOP, clip-clip-clip-CLOP.”
Right then, the breakfast bell rang, and Ma Jo yelled out some muffled words about me being welcome to breakfast. So put on my clothes, hustled down the ladder, trotted cautiously by the ridiculous site of the pig with the wooden leg, out of the barn and into the side, kitchen door of the farmhouse.
There was a meal waiting on the table that couldn’t be beat. Fresh whole milk, and farm eggs, easy over. Homemade biscuits slathered in butter. Home fries cooked to perfection. And bacon.
“How’d you sleep, Mr. Edelson?” Farmer Joe asked me.
“Great. Great, Farmer Joe. ‘cept one thing did catch my curiosity.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“Well, why do you have a pig with a wooden leg?”
“Now, listen to me son. Lemme tell ya about that pig. ’bout a year ago, lightening struck the old barn we had on that very same spot and a fire got started. And that pig … that pig woke all the other animals up, figured out how to open the barn door from the inside and led the rest of the animals out into the pasture.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” I said, still a bit incredulous. “I didn’t know a pig could do all that. But why does he has a wooden leg?”
“Son, the barn wasn’t the only thing that burned that evening. This house is rebuilt, too, because that fire leaped from the barn by way of an old oak tree and into the attic. Me and the Missus were sound asleep in our bedroom, when that pig bursts in oinking and snorting and jumping up on the bed, so’s I’d smell the smoke, which I did. And I told Ma Jo, ‘Ma Jo, let’s get outta here.’ Pig done the same thing for Jomelda, and purty soon we were out on the front lawn, watching the house burn down.”
“OK. That’s amazing, too,” I said. “But I’m still just curious: Why the wooden leg?”
“I can tell you this, I wouldn’t be sitting here today, telling you this story, if it weren’t for that pig. No sir. And neither would Jomelda or especially Li’l Jo-Jo.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, Jomelda realized kinda late that in all the confusion, she’d left Li’l Jo-Jo in her bedroom. Suddenly, she let out a holler, that’d make an owl shiver, and she started running like a quarter-house toward the front door. Well, that pig ran right in front of Jomelda, tripped her up, made her fall flat on her face, circled around and dashed straight into the house — like I never seen a pig run before and I reckon I never will.
“We all wuz crying, and we had to hold Jomelda back because she still was determined to get inside that house. But it was all aflame at this point and seemed about ready to collapse, so all we could do was pray. Then, out of the flames, with the house falling down right behind him, that pig came a’runnin’. And clamped tight in the mouth of that pig was the most beautiful site I ever see’d a pig carry. He had Little Baby Jo-Jo by the scruff of his neck, like Li’l Jo was one of his own piglets. Jo-Jo was cryin’ and coughin’ and maybe he got a few hairs singed, but other than that, he was fine.”
The way the whole family was nodding their heads, I could tell they were all witnesses to the same miracle. I’d heard of animals doing incredible feats, but none that could exceed this one: The pig carrying an infant out of a burning farmhouse.
Still, I remained curious: “OK, Farmer Joe. That is amazing. But can’t you tell me why that pig has a wooden leg?”
“Well, son, a pig like that — you don’t eat him all at once.”
Ah, freedom!
They say that when you’re down, you find out who your friends are. Well, I never knew how many friends I had.
Thank you, Atlanta — and especially my old colleagues at Creative Loafing — for being so warm and generous since I was unceremoniously canned by the brass at Creative Loafing Inc.
I’ve been spending most of the past three month rejuvenating and enjoying myself. Silvia and I have had a lot of fun with our dog, Peanut. She (Silvia, not Peanut) has been fixing up our old house to rent it out, so that we can make a few bucks that way instead of spending money on renovating it.
I’ve gotten a few freelance jobs, and that’s been fun. But really I’m still trying to figure out what the long-term game plan is. I know it involves writing and editing, and I know it involves developing an audience online. So I suppose this blog is a step in that direction. I’ll try to post regularly.
Our new website!
