By Marcus Wohlsen

Lee Belknap had seen near misses on the Chattooga before. A 25-year veteran of Georgia’s most fabled whitewater river, he’s run the Five Falls rapids on Section IV-the Chattooga’s hairiest stretch-hundreds of times. At a rapid known as Jawbone, he’d seen paddlers get dumped from their boats and shot out of a churning hole between slick boulders only to emerge downstream unscathed. He’d seen boats stuck there, but their occupants slip away to safety.

So when his friend Rod Baird’s boat upended at a hazard on Jawbone called Hydroelectric last summer, Belknap didn’t panic. He carefully picked his way over to the rocks and saw a paddle pop out-from the boat? From under a rock? He wasn’t sure. Suddenly, a hand shot through the surface of the water, and Lee Belknap found himself at ground zero of a slow-motion nightmare.

“It was like the dream scene from Deliverance,” he says. The force of the water had pinned one end of Baird’s boat to the rocks while the other end pointed toward the sky, with Baird caught beneath the river. Belknap moved the bow of his boat into the entrance of the hole hoping to allow Baird to pull himself to the surface. Baird grabbed the boat and pulled mightily but could only get his head within two inches of the surface. After struggling for a long, painful minute, Baird’s hand went slack.

In the 1980s, when whitewater paddling was still a fringe sport practiced by an intimate group of dedicated fanatics, Belknap lost a half dozen friends to rivers in the space of a few years. Miraculously, he would not lose another today. Belknap jumped out of his boat, swam over to the rock above Baird, climbed its slippery face, and retrieved his rope from his boat before abandoning it. With the rope, he was able to help another rescuer to the scene, where they teamed up to knock Baird and his boat free. Other paddlers chased it down the river. By the time Baird was pulled from the river, he had been without air anywhere from six to eight minutes.

Yet when Belknap finally reached Baird’s side, the CPR had already returned color to his friend’s cheeks. His heart was beating again in five minutes. Within fifteen, he was breathing again. After a few days, Baird was on his feet. Lung and kidney problems kept him in the hospital for several weeks, but he ultimately made a full recovery. Earlier this winter, Baird and his friends went skiing. Accidents like Rod Baird’s don’t happen often, even in the high-stakes world of Class V whitewater paddling. (Whitewater paddlers rate a river’s difficulty on a scale from Class I, the easiest, to Class V, the hardest.) But when they do, even the best paddlers sometimes can’t escape the clutches of the rivers they love.

In the Southeast, home to the highest concentration of world-class whitewater in America, popular rivers like the Chattooga and the Upper Gauley in West Virginia claim lives almost annually. Some of these deaths can be chalked up to inexperience coupled with negligence, like the nine college students who, against the explicit instructions of their raft rental contract and a national forest ranger, took their raft from Section III into Section IV, many wearing unzipped life jackets and no helmets. Their rafts flipped, and one of their buddies never made it home.

But for every frat boy with a death wish, there are seasoned experts each year who misread the water, miss a simple but crucial move, or simply lose concentration for a moment and find themselves pinned to an undercut rock, trapped under an inexorable crush of water that mere human muscle cannot surmount. These are the paddlers that ride the razor’s edge: tackling narrow, rocky, steep mountain creeks that plummet hundreds of vertical feet per mile; flinging their boats down towering waterfalls; flying through thrashing turbines of whitewater the size of houses. For them, death lurks behind every rock, beneath every fallen tree.

Nevertheless, with dramatic improvements in boat technology in recent years (especially among kayaks) and the emergence of so-called extreme sports as a pop culture mainstay, more paddlers are boating at a Class V level than ever before, taking on whitewater challenges pioneers of the sport couldn’t have dreamed of even 20 years ago.

At the same time, fatalities are on the rise. According to reports issued by the American Whitewater Association, 2003 saw the highest number of paddling-related deaths in a decade (49).

But these statistics don’t, for the most part, alarm the river rats in the world of Class V paddling, where pushing the envelope can take on the dimensions of a spiritual mission.

“Kayaking is a moving meditation, especially running the hard stuff,” says Anna Levesque, five-time member of the Canadian national freestyle team and World Freestyle Championships bronze medalist. Levesque recently returned from Uganda, where she became the first woman ever to run the White Nile’s furious Itanda rapids. “I have a daily yoga practice. The idea behind all of that stuff is to clear your mind and focus on the moment. When you’re kayaking hard, that’s what you’re doing. You’re in the here and now.”

Whitewater kayaking in America has come a long way since the 1970s, when a few daredevils started imitating what they’d seen in Europe, where the sport was already well entrenched. Back then, would-be kayakers had to make a deep commitment to whitewater from the start, since the only way to get a boat was to build one yourself. The number of paddlers was so small then that if you saw someone else with a boat on the car, you’d stop and exchange phone numbers.

At that time, nearly every descent of a river was a first descent. No guidebooks existed. Often the only way to learn a river, its major obstacles and hidden hazards, was to go out and figure it out yourself. As boaters attempted more and more difficult rivers, the knowledge they gained from surviving it was harder and harder won. Serious injuries and fatalities increased, though so did the number of paddlers. By the 1990s, the major rivers of the Southeast had mostly been conquered.

That left a new generation of paddlers searching for ways to forge their own identities in a whitewater world that seemed overshadowed by the godfathers of the sport. Needless to say, they didn’t balk at the challenge.

To understand just how far the Southeast’s most ambitious paddlers are pushing Class V whitewater paddling today, pop the latest issue of Lunch Video Magazine (LVM) into your DVD player and sit back for a wild ride. Based out of Asheville, North Carolina, the urban epicenter of Southeast paddling, the production team that puts out this quarterly, hour-long video compilation and companion booklet also stars in it. If you haven’t seen true Class V paddlers in action before, LVM will shatter your notions of what it’s possible to do in a kayak.

In countless sequences, helmeted paddlers in bright orange or yellow plastic boats little more than six feet long disappear into the spray or behind car-sized boulders on stretches of river as steep as ski slopes. After emerging at the bottom unscathed, they’ll go back to the top and do it again-backwards. Not to mention the back flips, three-sixties, and aerial corkscrews. If you can do it on a BMX bike or a skateboard, chances are someone’s tried it in a kayak while countless tons per second of bone-crunching whitewater storm down on all sides.

In one tantalizing excerpt, Ed Lucero a red-bearded, flower-shirted chap with the demeanor of a children’s folk singer, calmly informs viewers of his plan to take his boat over Alexandra Falls on Canada’s Slave River in the Northwest Territories.

“It’s the biggest drop I’ve ever run,” he says. “It’s going to be wonderful to push through a new barrier. We all exist in the present, and this is my present moment right here: falling down that waterfall.”

The sequence ends just as you see his boat pass the point of no return. Did he survive? Lucero was reportedly thrown from his boat and lost his helmet upon impact. But the drop, estimated at 112 feet, sets a new world record for kayaking.

It may seem crazy to hurl yourself off the aquatic equivalent of a ten-story building. And maybe it is. But Lucero’s stunt shows just how far the frame of reference has shifted over the past ten years when it comes to what kinds of water today’s top paddlers consider a reasonable risk. Not so long ago, Class V paddling in the Blue Ridge-and anywhere else, for that matter-didn’t get any tougher than the Green River Narrows. A ragged, rocky stretch of steep water along North Carolina’s southern edge near Saluda, the Narrows features thread-the-needle slots and huge drops. At high water, the Narrows’ Gorilla Falls still poses one of the world’s quintessential whitewater challenges. But somewhere along the way, the Green stopped being hard. Some of it had to do with a log at a critical spot that finally washed away. Boats got better: safer, more durable, more maneuverable. The same thing could be said, it seems, for the paddlers.

Leland Davis is a Class V paddler who maintains a Web site devoted to the Green River Narrows. Though the Narrows killed a paddler in 2000 and paralyzed whitewater safety expert Slim Ray in 1991, Davis says high-end paddlers no longer think of the Narrows as an especially scary place to paddle. You want scary? Davis asks. Check out the Linville. The Linville River runs through the heart of the famed Linville Gorge Wilderness in the Black Mountains of western North Carolina. It’s a seething tangle of rapids surrounded on both sides by high walls of metamorphic rock and strewn with giant boulders that have fallen from above. With 10 continuous miles of whitewater at or near a Class V level, the Linville stands as one of the longest high-intensity paddles east of the Mississippi.

“Not only is it incredibly dangerous because of all the undercuts,” Davis says, “but there’s also so much of it to remember. It’s so easy to lose your concentration at some point during the day. There’s been so much thrown at you. “The more you know the Linville, the less scary it gets. But there’s two sides to that coin. The more you do it, the more you notice the dangerous spots. And almost everybody who goes down the Linville has a close call.”

When it comes to whitewater paddling accidents, Charlie Walbridge occupies a niche somewhere between Jon Krakauer and that guy who directed those “Highways of Death” movies high school teachers show in driver’s ed. Since 1975, Walbridge has chronicled everything from broken legs to mass drownings for American Whitewater. Culling from newspaper and television news reports, word of mouth, and more recently the Internet, Walbridge has managed to compile the most comprehensive record of American river mishaps in existence.

Published annually in print form, Walbridge’s safety reports can also be found on the American Whitewater Web site (www.americanwhitewater.org) organized by state and river. In the tradition of Into Thin Air or The Perfect Storm, these accident reports recount the circumstances surrounding paddlers’ deaths in meticulous, wrenching detail (see sidebar). Some are gripping tales of survival, like the story of Rod Baird; more are grim testaments to the awesome power of rivers, which often condemn paddlers to a slow death by drowning while rescuers struggle in vain from a few feet away.

Though the literary value of Walbridge’s reports is undeniable, he isn’t out to give a sensation-hungry public a good read. Walbridge is a veteran paddler writing for paddlers. Each report concludes with a detached analysis of the events that most likely led to the victim’s accident and a discussion of the lessons his colleagues in the tight-knit world of expert paddling can draw from the mistakes of others. It can seem like a cold exercise, but in a sport where risk is not only inherent but integral to the experience, paddlers can’t afford to get sentimental. Walbridge doesn’t fool himself that paddlers can somehow achieve total safety. At age 55 he doesn’t paddle high-end Class V water anymore himself. Still, he has no interest in standing on the banks scolding young hot shots for running creeks that are too steep or taking drops that are too high. “People want to see how far they can go. But it’s hard to know how far you can go. It’s sort of like going into combat. . . . You don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like until you get there. I don’t know exactly how to tell people to avoid danger except that as you go up the ladder it gets progressively riskier and you have to use your own good, honest judgment to keep yourself out of trouble.” Walbridge insists that whitewater paddling has an undeserved reputation for being an especially dangerous sport when stacked next to other outdoor activities. He points to a pair of studies undertaken by American Whitewater, which placed the fatality rate among whitewater kayakers at 2.9 per 100,000 participants-just above swimming and just below rock climbing and scuba diving. The majority of these, he says, can be attributed to inexperienced paddlers getting in over their heads or failing to take the most basic precautions, like wearing a life jacket and not paddling while under the influence of alcohol.

“You get a lot of people doing just about anything and some people are going to get hurt,” Walbridge says. “There are a lot more accidents. There are also a lot more paddlers. As for experienced paddlers who get killed on the river, Walbridge says, it’s hard to draw any lasting lessons. “About the only thing you can take away is that running high-end whitewater is risky,” he says. Even the best paddlers, he notes, can make a bad decision that doesn’t seem significant at the time but turns out to come with serious consequences. And who can fault a paddler for losing focus for just one little instant? It’s just that in Class V paddling, one little instant is all it takes for a clean run to turn into disaster.

Matt Sheridan was a born paddler. As a teenager, he’d proven himself a world-class talent, tackling Class V whitewater across the Blue Ridge and beyond. Asheville’s top paddlers, among them the Lunch Video Magazine crew, quickly recognized his talent and took him under their collective wing. Last summer, Sheridan went with a friend, Pat Keller, on an expedition to run big water in British Columbia. During the trip, Sheridan became pinned to a rock underwater. Keller struggled valiantly to free him, but to no avail. Sheridan drowned. He was 18 years old.

Sheridan’s friend Tommy Hilleke of Asheville started running whitewater at age 16. At age 20, he ran the Narrows for the first time. His boat got pinned. He lost his paddle. He hiked out chastened, but not defeated. The next summer, he came back and ran it clean-his first successful Class V run. Now 26, Hilleke is a four-time champion of the Green River Narrows race. He’s one of Lunch Video Magazine’s featured paddlers. His sponsors include Teva and LiquidLogic, an internationally recognized kayak manufacturer based in Flat Rock, North Carolina.

Sheridan once threw Hilleke a rope on a river in California to help him out of a jam. Hilleke says he can’t help feel some sense of responsibility for the loss of his friend. “He became one of the ones we called first when it rained big. He would always be there,” Hilleke says.

Hilleke turns somber when he talks about Sheridan, which you notice because it stands in such contrast to the outgoing, all-American cheerfulness he otherwise projects. If you just met him, you probably wouldn’t get the impression that this was a man who only in his twenties has already lost not just one but many friends on the river.

Hilleke says these losses inevitably cause him to question his motives for taking the risks he does.

“Once there gone, you can tell yourself there’s no reason to take this risk,” he says. “But then it’s like why were they doing it? There must be something deeper to it.” Class V paddlers describe that something in many different ways, though they all seem to come back to the same themes. They testify to a Zen-like moment of pure concentration, the sheer difficulty of the river’s obstacles forcing the mind to empty itself of clutter for the sake of sheer survival. As they progress in skill, pursuing that moment becomes almost an end in itself. The better paddlers get, the further that moment gets stretched out, until a Zen moment becomes more like a Zen groove.

Most also feel they gain a more abiding connection to the natural world, not just from traveling through some of the world’s most exotic and unspoiled wild places but also by engaging the deep intricacies of rock and water as they puzzle out the cleanest line through a thicket of rapids. The search for ever-more challenging and remote whitewater becomes a kind of spiritual quest to seek the edge of self and then, once that edge is found, to push beyond it. Yet more than anything else, says Trip Kinney, a lanky, blond Class V paddler from Asheville, it’s the tribal quality of the bonds that develop among Class V paddlers that keep them in the game. Kinney speaks from personal experience. But he’s also got the statistics to back it up. A trained social anthropologist, he wrote his Master’s thesis on why Class V paddlers take the risks they do. Through extensive surveys, Kinney found that paddlers who got into the sport seeking thrills alone didn’t stay in it for that reason. Those who commit to Class V paddling for the long haul have become as dedicated to their core group of paddlers, Kinney found, as they are to the sport itself. “The intimate connection paddlers have to the places they paddle creates a deep bond between them,” Kinney says. When accidents do happen, he says, they can have the counter-intuitive effect of making Class V paddlers even more committed to what they do. “Tragedy certainly drives home the reality of what you do,” Kinney says. “It also tightens the bond.”

Not only to the living, but to the dead. In one scene in Lunch Video Magazine Issue 10, the crew scatters the ashes of a buddy into a torrential falls on a wild river in Norway. Their faces radiate grief, but also determination. The brief ceremony over, they mourn the best way they know how: They run the rapids.

Why? To hear Tommy Hilleke tell it, putting away boat after the deaths of fellow Class V paddlers runs the risk of devaluing what they lived for in the first place. “It hits hard, but you can’t quit,” Hilleke says. “It’s like leaving your boys hanging.”