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Rollin’ On the River
An Ode to Atlanta’s Late, Lamented
Chattahoochee Ramblin’ Raft Race
Atlanta Magazine, June 2005
If you spy rafters drifting down the Chattahoochee on
the first Saturday of this month, chances are they’re part
of The Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper’s “Back to the
Chattahoochee” race, which has grown in popularity every
year since its inception in 2003. But for any Atlantan who
lived here in the 1970s, there will always be only one real
river event: the dearly departed Ramblin’ Raft Race.
Atlanta in those days was a young, freewheeling city,
full of twentysomethings living in post-collegiate/pre-carpool
Never-Never Land. And for the entire decade, the Chattahoochee
Ramblin’ Raft Race was their annual floating Woodstock, a
beer-soaked, Southern-style summer kickoff.
Each Memorial Day weekend, tens of thousands of
Atlantans gathered at the river, gorged themselves on
substances legal and illegal, and set off on an armada of
rafts. They’d spend much of the day (and sometimes evening)
floating from Sandy Springs to Vinings, drinking beer,
listening to Skynyrd and Mother’s Finest, and violating as
many of the Ten Commandments as humanly possible.
“It started out as this very lighthearted little
race,” says Jerry Hightower, a National Park Service ranger
who’s been connected with the Chattahoochee since the days
of the race. “But by the mid-1970s, it was a major
international event. It’s amazing now to think how many
people were out on the water.”
The
race began in 1969 when Georgia Tech student Larry Patrick
organized a fraternity outing. It quickly became the most
popular spectator sporting event “in the world,” according
to race organizers, drawing up to 300,000 people to the waters
and banks of the Chattahoochee.
“People
would come from everywhere to see these unbelievable rafts,”
Hightower says. “Rafters would spend enormous amounts of
money constructing these complex rafts, like this paddlewheel
riverboat that came back year after year.” As at Mardi Gras,
the showpiece rafts drew cheers from the throngs along the
banks.
And
with good reason—the rafts were manifestations of that
peculiar Southern genius for spare-parts engineering. They
ranged from inflatable versions of hamster wheels to
Cuban-refugee-style floating cars. Some, like the perpetually
half-sunk Titanic raft, were two-story, wood-and-rubber
marvels; others floating archipelagoes of hundreds of inner
tubes. Some of the inner tubes would hold coolers, while
others—tethered to the main craft by a long rope--served as
de facto outhouses. (Hey, all that beer had to go somewhere.)
Every
race featured a thousand stories where a promising day went
horribly, hysterically wrong. In one of Hightower’s favorite
incidents, organizers once decided to stretch a rope across
the entire river at the finish line. The theory was that
rafters who reached the promised land could simply grab hold
of the rope and reel themselves onto shore.
At
first, the plan worked flawlessly; the riders of the tiny,
two-to-four-person rafts that always led the procession
arrived at the finish and grabbed hold of the rope. But they
took their sweet time getting out of the river. Barreling down
behind them, in the grips of a current that could take them
straight to the Gulf of Mexico, came the “battleship”
rafts. At the finish line, those behemoths bulldogged right
over the little craft, strewing the water with coolers, beer,
radios and rafters, and leaving the downstream banks looking
like a redneck version of Lost.
By
the late 70s, the race had grown into a legitimate national
phenomenon. “Dan Rather mentioned it on CBS, and a French
documentary on the river included clips of the race,”
Hightower recalls. “We had people coming from literally all
over the world to be a part of this.”
Of
course, anyone who remembers Freaknik can guess that not
everyone was pleased with the event. Property owners along the
river despised it, and complaints of public drunkenness, drug
and alcohol use and nudity became as much a raft race
tradition as sunburns and hangovers.
In
what must be deemed a minor miracle, there were few serious
incidents arising from the race itself. One person drowned the
day before the race in 1980, and there were countless
drunk-and-disorderlies and trespassing violations, but overall
the race was the public safety equivalent of falling down the
stairs and landing on one’s feet. “From a sociological
standpoint, the race set a terrible precedent,” Hightower
says. “This isn’t Six Flags on the water—the river can
be very unforgiving, and a lot of the people who had
overindulged on chemical compounds [on race day] were very
lucky they didn’t get hurt.”
Surprisingly, Hightower discovered during studies for
the Georgia Wildlife Foundation that the raft race itself
wasn’t actually harming the river to any significant degree.
“The cleanup wasn’t as bad as people might envision,” he
says. “There was almost no intentional littering. The only
mishaps came when people had overindulged and just forgotten
to pick up after themselves.” Hightower laughs that the
volunteer crew never had to buy beer, since there was no
shortage of unopened cans collected during cleanup.
The race’s spectators actually posed the larger
environmental threat. “You had people trampling fragile
vegetation along the banks,” says Sally Bethea, executive
director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. “There were
no [restroom] facilities available. It was far too many people
in a fragile environment, with not enough policing of
behavior.”
Eventually,
the race became a victim of its own success. By 1980, the
race’s last year, the National Park Service had to budget an
extra $50,000 to bring in rangers from as far away as
Washington, D.C. to handle the crowds. Fulton County towed an
estimated 4,000 cars. Following that race, the overextended
park service informed race organizers that if they wanted the
event to continue, the sponsors would have to pony up the cash
to pay for security and cleanup. The sponsors balked, and the
race vanished into history.
“Rafting was a fad, much like backpacking was a
fad,” Hightower says. “Its time is over. Things move a lot
faster now. The idea of just sitting around on a raft all day
drinking beer—that doesn’t appeal to as many people now as
it used to.”
So the next time you’re wandering Music Midtown
angrily searching for your long-past-curfew teenager, just
remember that it could be worse—those crazy kids could be
out on the water.
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