There were four of us in hardboats that first full moon night on the Chattooga. Everything was strange—shiny and magical, the way river running by lunar light can be. When we dropped through the last wave into the approach above Seven Foot Falls, however, things went dark. it was a clear night, but the moon was no longer visible; hidden by rapid and ridge.
The trip had been going well. We’d all been guides on the river for a while and knew the Chattooga and each other, in some ways, better than ourselves. We’d stopped talking somewhere above Woodall Shoals, none of that pre- or post-rapid chat. When we made sounds, we made animal noises. Mostly, we were quiet. We’d been listening with hips, hulls and strokes to what the river had to say, and what the river had to say was, in part, translated by the moonlight reflected and flickering on its surface.
A river is the same river by moonlight as it is in the day, only naked, moody, evocative, less in your face. There’s nothing black and white about being on a river at night under the moon. The colors are there, but they are changed: hushed, shimmery, wavering. Trees that appear green in daytime become a soft violet; to regard them is to be less attuned to detail—leaves or bark—than to the whole…
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