The path less kayaked

Every paddler has a secret spot. Ed Deal's, it turned out, was the woods of Alvin.

Really.

He set down his kayak in the winter depths of the Francis Marion National Forest, right in the tracks of a backwoods forest service road where he likes to walk his golden retriever, Jodie. The Santee River was two miles off, but from where he stood, the trail and the entire forest floor were underwater. The Santee was 15 feet above flood stage, and enough flow moved through the trees to spin a boat sideways.

Lowcountry paddlers get their pick of trips -- remote blackwater swamps in the saw palmetto, alligator-thrashed creeks, live oak rivers where eagles spook, osprey-nested cypress lakes, wide-open bays and surf-spilling ocean. But the real beauty of the place is its secrets. When it rains hard enough, there's even trail paddling.

A few steps from where Deal readied the launch, the depth was 6 feet. The scene was surreal even to the group of veteran paddlers with him. It wasn't a waterway; it was a forest. The crosscurrent waggled low-hanging twigs and reeds. A canopy of bare limbs converged into a wall of trunks. It was a paddle into the trees. Way into the trees.

"Uh oh," Deal said, tapping at the instrument on his deck. "It looks like we're going to have to do this without GPS."

"I wasn't too concerned," said Archie Thompson of Carolina Gypsy Paddlers.

"There was a road." He wasn't concerned at all until Deal paddled off the road through sheets of bamboo.

They were back where Jodie would have turned loose, running up a storm, sniffing scents and spooking squirrels. The paddlers hunkered down in the cockpits, raising their paddles to fend off branches.

Moving through the forest was unreal, rubbing shoulder to shoulder up against knobby old wizened oak and sweet gum. The hulls skipped over new-growth trees like a floating bonzai forest. Paddles caught fast in overhanging limbs. A crow heckled, and tiny birds skittered away. The gray of the trees reflecting in the stream gave the place a ghostly dimension. The only green was an occasional holly.

Deal was at home.

"A lot of people have told me I'm weird about this, but I find these areas very peaceful. There's a lot going on. They have their own strange. ... They're enthralling," he said. "I like to explore."

The paddle became a bushwhack, the boats picking their way through the growth, slipping under, around and over fallen trees. From deep in the woods, a barred owl moaned.

"I think if we'd have ventured off further in the woods, we'd have been lost. I guess we would have come back out eventually," Thompson said.

"I knew where I was," Deal said. "I use Google Earth."

Then the woods opened on a bottoms, huge old cypress like pillars with the trunks scratched by climbing raccoons, a backcountry recess that Deal never reached on foot because it was too swamped in. He had gotten someplace he had never been.

Good trip. But strange.

"Just wandering in the woods," Deal said.

"It was very weird," Thompson said, "paddling down a road for a change."

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.