The Last, Great Chattahoochee Raft Race

Our crew knew, as all young men know, that a public event with drinking and bare-breasted women is a fun event, and one without is less fun than it might otherwise have been. The Ramblin’ Chattahoochee raft race was a fun event, but not just because of the debauchery. A hard lesson learned when the race was at its peak in the seventies was that hedonism cannot be the centerpiece of an occasion (though it usually makes a great compliment). Themed and homemade rafts drifting down an idyllic north Georgia river gave this Memorial Day affair a raison d’être; booze and boobs made it a festival. The event ran from 1969 until 1980 and, at its peak, put about a quarter million ramshackle rafts on the water.

On the Friday afternoon before the last race, my brother, the roommate, and I stood in our Decatur driveway perplexing over the raft we’d just assembled. Two 4X8 sheets of plywood braced together on the underside with a half dozen 2X4’s formed a deck and three rows of emptied and sealed five gallon paint buckets lashed with chicken wire between the 2X4 braces comprised the flotation system. Three-Mile Island was still fresh in the public mind so we’d chosen a nuclear theme and built a decorative cooling tower for the raft. It was made of plastered chicken wire on a wood frame and stood a tottering, top-heavy six feet tall. No way was this going to fit in my roommate’s Pinto station wagon. It took some time and a few beers before we admitted what we already knew, but by 5:00 PM we had deconstructed the raft, strapped the pieces to the roof of the car, and set off for the launch site with the cooling tower riding on top like a big turbo crown.

We turned onto the entrance-ramp and cued up in a line of cars, each waiting its turn to make a kamikaze dash onto the high speed, churning parking lot that is I-285 at rush hour. When we accelerated down the ramp, the Pinto swayed and yawed like a jet on takeoff. The congestion turned out to be a good thing for it slowed the flow of traffic to 65 mph - down from the midday pace of 90 mph.

"Hey Jim, watch this", my roommate said, and twirled the steering wheel back and forth.

The Pinto’s front wheels were nearly off the pavement (owing to the cooling tower’s unique aerodynamics) and the car did not respond at all – fortunate since we were in the center lane sandwiched nose-to-bumper between a Plymouth Duster and an eighteen-wheeler.

The trip up to the launch site was slow and I worried that we’d run out of daylight before we had a chance to put our craft together and give it the shakedown cruise. I can’t remember anyone on the highway paying any particular attention to us, and that strikes me as a stark example of the difference between those times and these. All through the sixties and seventies people had become accustomed to outlandish and improbable antics. Such things are seen today only after they’ve passed focus group screening, and there is usually some kind of permitting involved. We pulled into the wooded river-side park in Sandy Springs just before 7:00.

The woods were packed with tents, coolers, and rafts and we had to drive around a while to find a spot. The idea was to set up camp, put the raft back together, and give it a river trial – a sound plan and one that a sober and serious crew would have executed. A large group of neighboring campers, however, mistook us for people they knew and invited us over. It looked like fun and we didn’t mind being called the wrong names, so we put our plans on hold.

"Hey Squint, [my new name]", one of the girls said, "What’s on top of the car?" I explained about the theme and she nodded and pointed us to the margarita bowl – a large galvanized bucket. Daylight was fading fast and golden glowing islands of light appeared around new campfires all through the oak and pine woods. Tiny crimson sparkles swarmed through the woods like fireflies, emitting sweet and acrid smoke. They were, of course, the lit ends of hand-rolled joints, as marijuana cigarettes were called back then. Curiously, the reefers broke the bonds of ownership as soon as they were lit and followed a random path for all of their short lives, passing from hand to hand to lip, and then on to the next person without plan or destination. Sounds outrageous now, but this was before Nancy Reagan had decided it would be a good idea to empty prisons of psychos and murderers so that we could fill them with pot smokers.

Race morning was a mad-scramble for those of us with unassembled rafts, yet we somehow managed to re-construct our craft not long after the horn sounded. My fiance and the roommate’s girlfriend drove up to join us, completing the crew of five, and after we cut a couple of pine steering poles we were ready to launch. The raft’s design had just enough buoyancy for the crew and cooling tower, and in what proved to be the weekend’s only example of sound contingency planning, the roommate threw an inflatable raft and pump on board.

Steering proved awkward since you could only go to the edge to pole without tipping the raft if someone else moved to the opposite corner. We worked out a system however, and were soon drifting downstream sipping beers and enjoying the sights from the middle of a ramshackle flotilla. A Viking ship with fully outfitted oarsmen passed us and we passed a floating Tiki hut surrounded by guys and girls in grass skirts. We turned a bend and saw a highway bridge over the river about a quarter mile downstream. It was packed with people, and as we approached, we could see that they held signs and cameras and had a party of their own going on. They grew especially animated as we approached and at first we thought it might be the cooling tower, but then realized it was the three girls in a raft following us. They had had shed their tops. The bridgers hooted and shook their signs (some which were shaped like breasts) and threw beads in the New Orleans Mardis-Gras tradition.

The roommate spotted the girls first and started waving and throwing beers to them. He‘d not recovered from the night before so his throws were wide and beer cans floated along until other rafters retrieved them. With my fiance on board, I could not overtly stare back, but the roommate was unfettered. He was a collector, and like all collectors, suffered the curse of blind infatuation with the yet unattained collectible, one that was bound to lose its luster the instant as it was acquired. The roommate collected brief and physical relationships. The girlfriend on board was an anomaly in that she’d lasted through weeks that now numbered in the double digits. The relationship’s endurance was clearly a testament to her tolerance as his behavior apparently had not changed at all.

A roar rose from the bridge above and with a quick and furtive glance, I saw that it was because the girls behind were applying suntan lotion. I don’t think that the girls had planned or staged the show – it was just incidental. It may sound unlikely, but this was a time before beautiful women were always posing and cool guys always strutting. As we drifted under the bridge, sounds of tires squealing and horns blaring told us that bridge crowd was racing across to the other side to watch the girls emerge.

A little further down the river I noticed that my steering pole no longer touched bottom and that the river was running faster. An untimely release from Lanier, a large, upstream lake, within minutes had turned the river into a torrent that swept the homemade rafts helplessly along. We were carried to the fast water on an inside bend where overhanging tree branches knocked the cooling tower off the raft. There was no retrieving the massive structure and we had to watch it follow us down the river. The Viking ship came by again, but this time it was backwards and the frantic oarsmen seemed unable gain control.

We came upon a part of the river where shoals would normally form a stone stepping path that one could use to hop across the river. Now the rocks were submerged and we felt several rake the bottom of our boat. I felt water on my feet and looked down to see that the deck was just at water level. Looking back upstream, I spotted a five gallon bucket following us, and as I watched, another popped up.

My brother, for all of his life, understood truths that no other humans could ever grasp. He, however, understood them intensely and one of the truths he knew was that people could not maintain themselves on top of a body of water – the laws of the universe forbade it. Consequently, he’d never learned to swim, float, or even sink slowly. When he saw that we were sinking, he grew silent, widened his eyes, and moved to center of the raft. The roommate inflated his contingency raft and he and his girlfriend shoved off to improve our buoyancy. It worked for a little while, but the buckets kept popping up behind and we were soon at water level again. My brothers anxiety turned to panic and he abruptly jumped up and took a running leap at the roommates two-person raft, ten feet off to starboard. He missed and we watched as a current took him spinning and thrashing downstream. He bobbed under but somehow managed to grasp a small tree growing from a rock-island. The cooling tower caught the same current and followed my brother, who tried desperately to clutch onto it for flotation, but the plaster was wet and slick so it slipped past and disappeared around a bend in the river.

Our raft drifted into the current and when we swept past my brother, he leapt back on board and nearly knocked my fiancé into the river. She and I decided to take to the water and hold on to the sides of the raft as it floated along a few inches below water level. We finally reached Chattahoochee Park near the Vinings and managed to pull ourselves and the remnants of our raft from the water.

We learned later that one rafter drowned that day - a tragic event that many claim put an end to the race. I take a different view. The eighties ushered in an era of self-absorbed conservatism that urinated on the dying embers of unregulated outdoor festivals. Loosely scripted, mass parties became a thing of the past and though I regret their passing, I can’t be bitter. I, at least, partook of the fun in my youth and feel bad for those that came later, when all spontaneity was carefully scripted. Mass parties became policed events with corporate sponsors demanding that the venues pass moral muster. Except for celebrities and politicians, society has zero tolerance for pranksters and renegades, and the grand, raucous public spectacles of my youth, like our raft’s cooling tower at last sighting, have disappeared around the bend forever.