High water, high risk: A big, fast river’s no swimming hole to walk into or flip out

In almost 60 years of living here, it occurs to me that I have never looked at the Chattahoochee River and thought, “I think I’ll go for a swim.”

I’m talking about the main channel, of course, not a friend’s dock on a Lake Harding slough or any backwater on the Russell County creeks we grew up swimming in – Hatchechubbee Creek, Bluff Creek, Briar Creek, etc.

Back in the 1970s, we not only thought Hatchechubbee Creek was safe to swim in, we thought it was safe to jump into off the Highway 165 bridge in Cottonton – which is VERY DANGEROUS, by the way, so don’t do that. One guy got really drunk and tried to do flips, and he hit the water face first, four or five times (he kept trying), blackening both his eyes.

Even back then, when I was young and more reckless, I never saw the main river as a swimming hole, and wouldn’t go in.

In the late 1980s, I thought fishing from the bank downtown would be fun, so I bought some cheap Kmart tackle, went down under the railroad bridge, made one cast, hooked the lure on a sunken limb and broke the line.

The lure was only feet away, in clear, shallow water, and I probably should have retrieved it – because leaving fishing tackle in the river is VERY DANGEROUS – but even as a wild 20-something I thought, “#@$% that. I’m not going into that river.”

This was after several years of working the police beat and writing about people who walked into the river and drowned – including a guy on the Phenix City side who waded in to untangle his fishing line, slipped and went under.

It almost always happened that way: People just walked in and drowned. Every now and then someone had a boating accident, and occasionally someone hit bottom head-first by diving into shallow water, but most of the time the victims were wading along the bank or walking in to swim.

This was long before we built the whitewater course, back when the river was dammed downtown, so it looked a lot different. It didn’t look like the kind of river in which you would find a body. It looked like the kind of river in which you would hide a body.

In fact bodies are what some locals expected us to find, when we breached the dams and drained the backwater for the whitewater course: They expected skeletons of soldiers dropped into the river down chutes from trap doors in Phenix City gambling joints.

We don’t know where people get these myths, but they’re very entertaining, and that’s why we repeat them in the newspaper, so people don’t forget.

The thing about the river now is that it doesn’t look so foreboding, most of the time. It looks like Six Flags, or one of those big water parks with names like “Splashbrats Family Adventures” or whatever.

But it is not, because we still pull bodies out of it.

Afterward, we offer the usual lecture about wearing a life vest on the river downtown, as required by law, and remembering that guided whitewater trips are safely monitored, so don’t scare the tourists, and yada yada yada.

But even with all that, we’ve still got to respect the power of the river, especially when the water’s high. We don’t call rivers “mighty” to sound colorful. We call them that because a lot of water carries a lot of weight and force, and it can sweep you away or pin you under or hit you with a dead tree, no matter what you’re wearing or how well you swim.

Just because the Chattahoochee looks a lot nicer than it used to doesn’t mean it’s going to be nice to you. So don’t just walk into it.

This story was originally published August 5, 2018 at 3:51 PM with the headline "High water, high risk: A big, fast river’s no swimming hole to walk into or flip out."