Something comes over a kayaker after hours on the water. He starts to count blue heron and examine freshwater clams. He wonders how tall the banks were before dams, how swift the current before man interrupted its flow. He thinks about the river, the water, the way humans have tamed and, sometimes, trashed it.
So says Thomas Allison, a 19-year-old Brevard College student from Hickory. He is part of the Voices of the Rivers program taking 11 students and two professors from the Catawba River in Burke County all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in Charleston, S.C. It's more than 400 miles over 18 days.
Allison was born and raised in Hickory but went to boarding school in Buffalo, N.Y., leaving behind the Catawba River and Lake Hickory, where he learned to catch bass and bluegill.
The trip reintroduced him to the waterway. He's getting to know the Catawba again, more intimately this time.
"It's not like being in a motorboat and going breakneck across the wake," he said. "I'm seeing it from a whole different perspective. I don't think you appreciate something until you see the whole magnitude of it like we are on this trip."
Allison was two days into the trip when he realized how important the water is and how big an advantage it was growing up near the Catawba.
The lessons will not stop there for him and other students on the trip.
Professor Robert Dye thinks they will all remember that in the same day they passed sewer treatment plants and drinking water intakes for cities.
Kayakers also get six hours of college credit and are expected to read and discuss literature along the way, said Kristina Holland, a literature professor accompanying the group down the river.
Monday, when they camped in Hickory, students were reading and talking about "Goodbye to a River," the story of a man canoeing down the river of his childhood before five new dams were set to go in.
That correlates because of the series of dams and lakes along the Catawba.
Another book, "Saints at the River" will introduce students to the idea of a river imperiled and the emotions that run as high as floodwaters around it.
American Rivers recognized the Catawba as America's Most Endangered River in 2008, largely due to development along its shores.
"Any literature is about the human condition," Holland said. "It is about heartaches and challenges and experiences that are real. The more you can connect that to your own life, the more likely you are to go out and make a difference. Literature just as fiction is not the same catalyst for change."
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