Hot Springs: Not the same, but still different as always

The Pre-Scout

It’s too big. It’s too big. It’s just too damn big.

It’s the experience that’s too big – too big to just sit down and write a something coherent about what it’s like to paddle FB9 for the first time since Hurricane Helene blew through last September. The experience for me, is always going to include a trip either to Hot Springs at the takeout or Marshall at the put in, and if I could swing it both. I hope to come back to Marshall later, But for this run, I’m only looking at Hot Springs.

I came into town a few days before I paddled. I had with me my Jackson Flow and a bag of Milwaukee tools thinking I would either find a crew for the river or volunteer at some rebuilding effort. Mostly, I was thinking I’d peek in windows and pull on doors just to see what was open. I hoped I might, maybe, meet some people I could talk to about the status of the post Helene recovery effort.

It turned out, it was easy to meet people. There was a 30-ton excavator working in Spring Creek right in the middle of town. If you know anything at all about small towns, you know there’s nothing to bring men together like a 30-ton excavator in a creek.

I was no sooner out of my truck to gawk when I was hailed by a man who looked like the outdoorsy type, maybe even a paddler.

“We should get him to put us in a play hole while he’s here,” he called.

Paddler, alright.

The man is Andy Turner and he was paddling the North Chick in the days when people were still paddling Perception Dancers.  He retired as a contractor three years ago and would have liked to have stayed that way.

“There was nobody in town with infrastructure background so it was incumbent upon whoever can do it,” he told me.

He’s restoring Spring Creek Tavern and the Whiskey Girl Mercantile and Event Space next door. Over the next few minutes, Turner introduces me to the owners of those two business, Tim and Amanda Arnett of Spring Creek and David Wagner of Whisky Girl. He also introduces me to Wayne Cosby of Bluff Mountain Outfitters and Chris Donoshod of Big Pillow Brewing.

The upshot of the conversation I had is Hot Springs has a lot of work to do and people are hard at work doing it. Lots of business are still closed.  But there’s enough that’s back, and enough that never substantially shut down to begin with, that Hot Springs is already a terrific post-paddle stop for boaters in the area. Hot Springs is still a welcoming town, and people were happy to indulge a guy running around town with a legal pad to get that word out.

I’m up front with them about who I am and what I’m doing. They’ll probably recognize me next time they see me and I don’t want them to think of me as ‘that guy who wasted their time that day.’ So I let them know I’m not a reporter. I’m not really even a blogger. I’m a guy with a URL who has a notion of a blog. In terms of exposure, I’m really not anybody.

But this is Hot Springs. You don’t have to be anybody here.

The Shuttle

The parking lot at the takeout is crowded. Surprisingly, so for March. There’s a pile of garbage people have pulled from the river and staged from removal, so I parallel park beside that. I figure it can’t do any harm to obstruct a pile of garbage and might even be a community service.

There was a truck in the parking lot bearing the decal of French Broad Riverkeepers, of the Asheville-based environmental group, MountainTrue. They had a motorized rubber raft in the river. Its operator assured us that motor boats in the river was not going to be the new normal, and they were only here to clean things up.

It’s a beautiful, sunny day and a good group. This is my first time paddling with any of them. At 62, I may be one of the younger guys here. Shuttle talk is a giddy rhapsody over 1980s hair metal bands.

At the put in, I paddle around looking for a place to roll. People like to see you roll, especially if they haven’t paddled with you before. But the water is cold and no one is even watching. I decide not to roll. Instead I’ll impress them later on with my signature move: paddle in the general direction of a surfable feature – the bigger and scarier the better – fail to get in and try to look disappointed.

It’s not always easy to assemble a Knoxville group for FB9. This is our ‘plan b’ river – the one we fall back to when the Occoee or the Pigeon isn’t releasing, or when there hasn’t been enough rain to bring in drainages that are more convenient or more interesting.

Going down the river, we form a sort of geriatric front brigade, paddling our creek boats and complaining about things. One of us is in a Perception Dancer. Play-oriented youngsters bring up the rear with their slicies and their hand paddles.

The Maze

There’s no big splash in the Maze, but the giant boulders can intimidate new paddlers. This aptly named feature is about tight turns and challenge ferries. This is a hard feature to come to know. There’s a particular chute I usually hit or look back at and wish I’d hit.

The French Broad River, I’m told, is one of the oldest if not the oldest river in the world. Someday I hope to paddle it with a patient geologist who will explain to me what that means and maybe point out evidence of the eons here in the nooks and crannies of the Maze.

But until I do, I have the following geology to offer from Wikipedia and a couple of You Tube videos:

The French Broad was running on a continent that doesn’t exist anymore well before that continent bumped into another continent that doesn’t exist anymore. That event created the Appalachian mountains. It also created a whole new continent, and that one is gone now, too. The tectonic plates at play in all this eventually went their separate ways and the continent broke apart. Some of it became North America, and some of it became Africa.

The point of all this is the French Broad predates not only the continent she’s on, but also the continent that was that continent’s predecessor. That, I postulate, is what makes her so stubborn. While many of the other rivers that took the brunt of Helene’s flooding have been virtually rewritten, the French Broad, in Section 9 anyway, hasn’t changed.

At least between the banks she hasn’t. But outside the banks, she’s now a mess. There’s flood debris everywhere — an occasional traffic barrel, something that might have been a refrigerator, tires –lots of tires,  disturbingly, an abandoned rescue gurney.

Most jarring is the PVC pipe and tubing – tens of thousands of linear feet of it — ten-foot sections of six-inch schedule 40 piled like pixie sticks in the woody slash. There’s black tubing, some in sections, some in a spaghetti mess. It’s the conduit around power lines, maybe, or maybe it’s the water line they use in irrigation systems. Or maybe it’s both. Or maybe it’s neither.

All this came from the Silver-Line Plastics Plant upstream, where it was double-screw extruded, stacked for storage in a flood plain, and washed downstream with the rains of Helene.

“They ought to have to come down here and clean it up,” says one of my new paddling friends.

He’s not the only one saying it. The company is under pressure to do that, and they say they’re working on it. But the only cleanup effort that is obvious from casual observation is the one under way from MountainTrue.

The S Turns

S-turns is an ominous rapid, and you don’t see it until you’re already in it. You hear it roar, ominously, from behind the rocks ahead. You watch the people ahead of you bust moves and then, ominously, disappear. If you do things right upstream you get an easy ride off the left shoulder of a hole. If you do things wrong, you catch the meat of the hole. You may find yourself upside down if your brace isn’t solid and you’re not ready to show the bottom of your boat to the upstream current.

Friendly collection eddies make this a great place for learners to develop their Class III skills, while the drama and playability make this rapid a pleasure at every skill level.

Quick, beginners! What do you on the river when you’re overwhelmed?

You find an eddy. And that’s what I did that day when I visited Hot Springs.

I sat on the banks of the river with a cigar, stared at Surprise Ledge, and contemplated the ubiquitousness of blue plastic tarp. You see it everywhere along the river, usually in tattered strips. Maybe Silver-Line made that, too. But I suspect it’s here because people put it out prior to the storm hoping to protect something. Now, whatever that was is somewhere else and pieces of their tarp are here.

The cigar came from Tobacco Road Bikes, Burley and Brew. An eclectic shop uniquely possible only in Hot Springs, NC. The way to find out if Hot Springs is still Hot Springs is still Hot Springs is to go this shop and look through the aisles for a live chicken. Yes, he’s there. In the candy aisle, not bothered by me at all.

Why is there a live chicken? I don’t know. That’s a tourist question, so I don’t want to ask.

The store owner, Aaron Gosnell, is finishing up breakfast from a Styrofoam to-go container. I didn’t ask, but I’d guess it came from the Rendezvous Diner a stone’s throw away. The Rendezvous is the last, near last anyway, of the old southern diners that used to be everywhere. It’s the best remaining example I know of, and I’ve timed many trips down FB9 so I could have breakfast here.

Big Pillow

The boof at Big Pillow is out today or this might be the day I finally smash it. The Asheville boaters show me an interesting boof just before pillow rock. Someone points out a line between the rock and the left bank. It looks interesting, so I take it.

At the Hot Springs brewery named after this rapid, I talked a bit with Chris Donoshod. I regret not talking to him about paddling. It’s always been obvious this business is the product of a paddler. Here, you can buy creative paddler-themed stickers, t-shirts and hats. You will find on tap P.F.D Pilsner and High Side Pale IPA.

A few weeks before my visit, Donoshod reopened on a limited schedule, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Since then, he’s made more progress. He’s now open every day but Monday. Big Pillow Brewing looks the same: same courtyard, same picnic tables. Looking at it today, it’s easy to forget the amount of work it must have taken to put the place back together. Donoshod points out to me the spot on the wall where the waterline was, and he points to the spot where there had been a “pile of toothpicks” that had been his original picnic tables.

From talking to the others in Hot Springs, I get a sense that the town reached a sort of turning point in it’s recovery when Donoshod started serving again.  I’ll argue that Hot Springs isn’t a tourist town, but I won’t argue with anyone who says Hot Springs is a party town

Sandy Bottom

I’ve paddled this section of river at 800 and I’ve paddled it at near 10,000 and this is the one rapid that is always the same. You can run it middle left as a wave train. But for me, the move is to blast through the breaking waves on the right and into the eddy behind them. Today, I don’t blast so much as awkwardly brace and retreat. Then I have to paddle gracelessly into the eddy from below. There, I make a few attempts to get into those breaking waves for some play, but I don’t make it. I allow my shoulders to slump a little bit so everyone can see how disappointed I am.

There was no ice cream at the Hillbilly Market and Delli that day in Hot Springs. I guess my shoulders must have slumped a little bit because the woman behind the counter  assured me ice cream would be back later on. She asked she asked me, honey, did I need a receipt? I did not.

The Hillbilly Market serves as local grocery store, deli, way station, and, when things settle out, ice cream parlor. Here, you’ll find mini-mart goodies, fresh meats and produce, and lots of packable nutrition for Appalachian trail through-hikers. The store carries your basic candy bars and more esoteric fare such as dried beat chips and pickled quail eggs. There are bins and bins of dried beans and barley and such, and they give the place the air of a frontier trading post – a place where a pioneer family might show up in their buckboard wagon to provision their homestead.

If that pioneer family craved a nice cappuccino or a butternut squash mango smoothie, Pa could turn his team left out of the Hillbilly Market, climb the hill, and find Aritsun Gallery and Café in a new location. It’s temporarily operating out of a mechanic’s shop that has been converted to retail space. Here, daughter Sally can pick out a pair of fair trade certified organic cotton socks while Ma shops for – oh, an umbrella, maybe —  always keeping at least one hand clamped over the eyes of Caleb Jr to shield them from depictions of a long-haired plump woman lounging carefree among mushrooms and whimsical forest creatures. The woman in the paintings is wearing not a thread of clothing and giving not a damn what anyone thinks about that.

Artisun Coffee is a place where local artists, such as Seleena Mecho –whose paintings were on display in March — can place their work in front of visitors and passers-through. It’s a comfortable and engaging place for visitors to chill, and it and serves as sort of an informal community center for locals.

Today, Phillip Solomon is behind the counter. He and his wife Pascha, own the Artisun and a sister shop in Marshall, Of Wand and Earth. Thanks to a fortunate alignment of circumstances, the Solomons already had this fallback location in hand when their shop was flooded in September. They were planning an expansion to this location and had signed a lease only a week prior to the flood. They packed up their latte frothers and their goods and are temporarily doing business from higher ground Phillip estimates he saved 10 percent of the art from the Artisun and 80 percent from Of Wand and Earth.

Phillip is busy, so I decide to head back down the hill and see what’s shaking at the Hot Springs Resort and Spa.  In the Artisun parking lot, I find my imaginary pioneer family. Ma has changed her mind about the work of Mecho and has come to see it for what it is: an endearing expression of the irascible feminine spirit energy of the woods. Ma has selected a painting for her kitchen and she doesn’t climb into the buckboard until Pa has stowed it securely in the back.

Our seven mineral baths that faced the French Broad are gone. They’re probably somewhere closer to your neck of the woods. Somewhere around Douglas Lake.

Heather West, General Manager Hot Springs Resort and Spa

Down at the spa, I find Resort Manager Tommy Hicks and General Manager Heather West behind the counter. The campground is still closed but they have three tubs open and two overnight rental units. They’re hard at work bringing the rest of the resort back into operation.

“We expect to have 4 more overnight units ready over the next week to two weeks, and two more tubs in that same time frame,” says Hicks.

The town’s geothermal namesake is the only natural hot springs in the state of North Carolina. It is pivotal in the town’s history. In the late 1820’s, completion of the Bumcombe Turnpike opened the isolated mountain area to regional travel. Mineral baths were believed at the time to provide health-sustaining benefits, and in this century, when one of every seven people died of Tuberculosis, people had reason to care about their health. As soon as there was a road to Hot Springs, people jumped on it. In 1832, a swank hotel opened, and affluent elites flocked to Hot Springs for curative partying.

Since then, the hotel and the later incarnations of it have burnt, flooded, burned again, and, now, flooded again.

West took a few moments out of her day to walk with me back to the mineral bath structures.

“Our seven mineral baths that faced the French Broad are gone. They’re probably somewhere closer to your neck of the woods. Somewhere around Douglas Lake.”

PInball

These Asheville boaters show me a nice line through pinball where you pass right of a half-dome shaped rock then bust left with the stream of current. At this level, it’s bony but still fun. Much lower and it would be out of play.

Pinball is another one of those rapids that’s hard to get to know. I find it to be an uninviting rapid for stopping to look around. The best advice I’ve ever gotten on this rapid came from a luminary of the Johnson City APES club who is noted for terse, to-the-point beta: “Don’t get pinned.”

That advice would have been equally appropriate in downtown Hot Springs the night Helene came through. Videos of water rushing through downtown were heartbreaking.

This is an area used to experiencing hurricanes as a few days of overcast. Paddlers turn their eyes hopefully to the skies and anticipate the creeking to come. Helene was different. Meteorologists have impressive jargon to explain what happened: orographic uplift, Fujiwara Effect, Brown Ocean Effect. What all  of that seems to mean is that Helene carried a lot of moisture and arrived over Western North Carolina as a tropical bucket brigade from the north Caribbean. It produced record rainfall: Thirty inches recorded at Mount Michell, which, if it had fallen as snow, would have accumulated to 32 and a half feet.

Spring Creek dwarfed its banks and piled up behind Hot Spring’s main strip. It burst through the upstream windows, filled the buildings to a depth of several feet and gushed out the front-facing windows downstream. It carved a trench on its way back to itself on the other side of Bridge Street.

“We thought, ‘There’s no way. There’s just no way we can do this. Then people just showed up offering to help.”

Tim Arnett, owner of Spring Creek Tavern with wife, Amanda

“There were class IV-V rapids coming out those windows,” Turner told me, pointing across the street at Vinyl Pies Pizza.

At Spring Creek Tavern, there is no sign of the popular covered deck where patrons could watch the creek while enjoying hand-rolled cheese sticks. Tim Arnett recalls the emotional journey on the way to where he is now.

“We thought, ‘There’s no way. There’s just no way we can do this. Then people just showed up offering to help.”

On the day of my visit,  workers were busy inside. The tavern will be back, said Tim, but it’ll take a while longer.

“I’d like to think mid- to late-June. But realistically, July,” he said.

Next door, the Whisky Girl Mercantile and Event Space was farther ahead and shooting for an opening in a matter of weeks. David Wagner, whose family owned the property in the 50’s, jumped on an opportunity to purchase it three years ago. The property includes the Scout Hotel — formerly Spring Creek Hotel.

Across the street, Marty Martin was on a similar schedule to bring wood fired pizza back to the town. He opened just a few weeks after my visit.

“I lost every single thing in here except a 7,000-pound brick oven and a 500-pound mixer,” he said. “They found our propane tank over in Newport.”

For some businesses it’s hard to tell where things stand with recovery. The popular Iron Horse Station was an anchor business in Hot Springs. I’ve never had a conversation with anyone who knew the place  who didn’t start gushing over it in the same way gray-haired male paddlers gush over Eddie Van Halen.

There was no activity at the Iron Horse that day. Just a sad sign on the window: “Damn, we mill you.”

The Takeout

The rapids at the takeout are Class II janky. It’s not uncommon for learners to handle the more difficult rapids upstream, only to come to within 50-yards of the takeout and exit their boats.

Nobody swims here today.

On the bank beside the parking area, MountainTrue’s Riverkeepers are back, and now their raft is loaded up with river litter. People carry that segmented black PVC tubing in great armloads and add it to the pile behind my truck.

I was wrong earlier when I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to obstruct that pile of garbage. These guys have to go around my truck to do their work. Someone asks me to move it and I do, leaving them half a bag of dried beet chips as an apology. It wasn’t necessary. They’re not cranky. How could they be? That raft looks like a blast!

Apres Paddle

Yeah, too big.

All that plastic in the river, what’s it going to take to get it cleaned up? Is that even possible? Is Silver-Line Plastics doing enough?  I should have struck up a conversation with the guys with MountainTrue.

Too big, though.

In Hot Springs, I found a lot of dissatisfaction with the government relief but praise for their way the neighbors came together. They had community meals. Gentry Hardware still hadn’t opened to the public but was never closed to their neighbors, and everyone spoke highly of the role it played during and after the disaster. It would take thousands of words to tell their story.

Too big.

There was a guy I met at Artisun Coffee. He put in at Paint Rock and rafted the French Broad at 104,000 CFS saving lives. I should have spent the whole day with him.

Too big. Too big. Too damn big. I should have just taken a nice Class II jaunt down the Nantahala and investigated the reopening of Pizza By the River.

Maybe I’ll get another chance at those stories later. For now, the story is, Hot Springs still has a long way to go. I doubt it’ll ever be the same. But it’s already gone on being different in the important ways it’s been different all along. There’s a chicken to be wondered about, hearty country breakfasts to be enjoyed, art to be reacted to. You can soak in the mineral springs and stay at the resort if you reserve in advance. The pizza’s back. The beer is back.

After my paddle, I drive straight Big Pillow Brewing to lift one to this town.

The mood is festive here. A band is tuning up. The guy at the food stand sings out the name of whoever it is whose food is ready. There are paddlers, dogs and through hikers. It’s busy.

“It’s always busy when I’m open,” Donovan tells me. Then he hurries along his way.