Our State Magazine
By Jess Clarke:
Longtime paddler Rod Baird relishes wrestling the French Broad River after heavy rain, with waves up to eight feet high. His heartbeat quickens with the current. He has to muscle his maneuvers carefully in his 28-pound kayak. As he runs the frothy rapids in Madison County, the sycamores and river birches become a blur.
People and rivers have always wrestled, retreated, and ultimately forged relationships, uneasy and irresistible at once. At times defiled by human disregard and rescued by conservationists, the French Broad now is both revived and at renewed risk. Baird sees the river from both perspectives. At his first river cleanup in the late 1970s in Asheville, he pulled parts of butchered cattle from the flowing waters. “People didn’t view the French Broad as anything other than a cesspool. Nobody wanted to be on it. You could see a lot of trash. It didn’t smell pleasant,” says Baird of Asheville. “People who fished the French Broad were considered a little off.”
With improved water quality in the past 30 years, the number of fishers and paddlers has increased significantly. But Baird also worries about the housing developments growing up to the river’s edge.
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