River of Relations

Last Monday I drove with my friend Steve Patton 30 minutes up into North Carolina to the mill town of Cliffside. One of my eight great-grandparents, John Simeon Bradley, was born a couple of miles upstream near Henrietta, but what's more, it's where I've decided that I'll put in August 7th for my 200-mile mostly solo paddle to the sea.

The Second Broad River crosses Alternate 221 at Cliffside. The river there almost forms an oxbow and wiggles several more times before its confluence with the main branch of the Broad about two miles downstream. Finding a potential put-in for my trip was easy. There's a sewer pumping station just downstream with a path to the river. Others have used it. There are the remains of a campfire or two, and an old shopping cart stands marooned upstream on the rocks below the mill dam.

I like the symmetry of starting a long paddling adventure somewhere my long-ago progenitor also started a journey of discovery, a journey that really ended up here with me. John Bradley left Henrietta around 1900 to work the mills down here in Spartanburg.

My great-grandfather likely traveled the very same highway we took to check out my launch site. In Spartanburg John Bradley met my great-grandmother, a young woman named Ella Mabe down from the hills of Virginia to work the mills as well. They married and my grandmother Hulda Bradley was born in 1908. My mother, Mary Ellen, was born in 1926, and by that time we were only one small romantic collision away from 1954 and my birth. Relations are like a river, are always flowing downstream toward the clear waters of the present.

The mill at Cliffside is closed, as are all the mills my relatives worked through three generations in Spartanburg, but Cone Mills still has an active textile business dyeing blue jeans in North Carolina. Right away we noticed that the color of the Second Broad is magenta. The water there at Cliffside looks like it's been stained with grape Kool-Aid. I made a joke with Steve about how I can tie an old pair of my jeans to the back of the kayak and darken them up a little in the waters of the Broad River. I'll be baptized in the industry that supported my mother's family for over almost a hundred years.

I've been thinking about this 200-mile kayak trip since 2006 when I paddled with friends 100 miles from our backyard on the Lawson's Fork to Columbia. This time I'll be alone most of the way. I'm planning to spend two weeks on the water. Friends and family will meet me several times for resupply, but many days I'll have nothing to occupy the river miles but my own observations, the stories I can remember, and the songs I can hum.

Steve plans to meet me at the Lake Marion dam for the final 50 miles down the channel of the old Santee River. He's done the trip before and he has familiar connections to the old Hampton Plantation where Archibald Rutledge lived. We're hoping to paddle from the Santee River channel up through old rice fields and visit the home-now an historic site-of the state's first and most famous poet laureate.

The paddling plan has a certain literary symmetry to it-from a blue river in North Carolina downstream two weeks to the land of the original South Carolina blue bloods. People have asked me if I'm concerned about mosquitoes, and if I'm sure I'll have enough food. Where will I camp? Will I carry a cell phone? Will I fish?

I'll try to paddle fast enough to outrun the mosquitoes and have a good tent to keep them at bay at night. I will tuck a cell phone away in my pack and know from my trip to Columbia that service will be spotty at best. If Steve's right, then I'll meet anglers along the way who will give me fish, so I won't need to catch them myself. (The Broad is known for its bass and I hope to fry a few over an open fire.) Whatever happens I should get a good column or two out of it all. And when I get to the ocean I'll turn around and look back toward where I started, all the way back to Cliffside and John Simeon Bradley.