by one of the stuntmen for the movie, Dr. Claude Terry. He was my scoutmaster. Been through just about every rapid in the movie. We had a special troop meeting just to watch the movie.

I’ll never forget pulling into some backwoods gas station near Clayton in our scout bus, after the movie came out, and a very deliverancy-looking local came out of the shop. “Whatchall need?”, he asked with a smile, and before our driver could answer, one of the smarta$$, bouchedag city-boy scouts yelled out the window, “A couple quarts of whatever’s in your hair!”, to which the local replied, still smiling, “You got a real purty mouth on ya, boy.”

You could have cut the tension with a knife, but everybody busted out laughing, business was transacted, and it was purty obvious that the locals were more sophisticated than they let on.

Summer Camp in an abandoned bluegrass park just up the road from Bull Sluice. When we weren’t hiking or running the river, we’d go down to the crossing to watch people run the rapids. One afternoon, we got there, and unbeknownst to us, some guy had failed to appear at the base of the rapids.

We had just hauled in a huge aircraft innertube from the river below the bridge and were pondering what to do with it, when one of our patrol, who had gone to check out the rescue commotion upstream, came running back and said in a low voice, “keep the tube down here and hide it in the woods. It’s the dead guy’s tube!”

We hid the tube and went up to check, and sure enough, there were three cable guy-looking fellas, each with their own giant tube, and they were standing on the bank watching kayakers with ropes paddling around in the hydraulic, looking for their buddy.

After what seemed like hours, an ambulance and sheriff’s deputy appeared on the scene, and we decided that they might come looking for the tube, so we split the scene. We took the “Dead Man’s Tube” back up to the blugrass park later that evening and spent many hours that week rolling in it across the fields.