Cover Story: Naked on the Chattahoochee

Somewhere between the back-to-nature craze, San Francisco-style psychedelia and Southern rock 'n' roll, Atlantans invented the movable wet party.

Every summer weekend in the late 1970s, thousands of people rented cheap rafts from stands in front of gas stations near I-285 and the Chattahoochee River. They'd string the rafts, like big yellow balloons, on top of their cars, load up with beer, and head for a put-in behind a parking lot at Powers Ferry Landing.

Most people who even remember those days seem to think the old Ramblin' Raft Race was the high point of the floating party. Few realize, however, that the precise apogee — the high-water mark for bacchanalia on the Hooch — was reached early in the summer of 1976, the day my high school buddies and I partied with three naked women and their husbands on the banks of the river.

Now, things are — how can a put it? — a bit tighter. Certainly when compared to the days you pretty much did what you wanted from the time you put your raft, canoe or kayak in the water until you took it out at a dirt lot just before the Highway 41 bridge.

Today, you'd tempt fate (or maybe a park ranger) if you yelled, "Hey, Ted: You and Susan bring rolling papers to the Party Spot," over the crowd to your buddies on shore. But that's what Randy yelled that day as he, Jam, Fred and I launched our canoes through a maze of rafts at the put-in (the names have been changed, to protect the guilty).

We were snobs. Unlike the drunks in the rafts, we actually knew what we were doing with our paddles. Most weekends, we went canoe camping with some of the best boaters in Georgia. Some of us even guided rafts professionally on the Chattooga River. And since we attended the Downtown Learning Center — an independent study school for wannabe hippies — we got to pretty much take every afternoon off on the Chattahoochee to hone our paddling skills.

We'd lash our beat-up aluminum boats to the top of my dad's Dodge Dart or Ted's mom's Buick Skylark. We'd head up to the river with friends we'd made at the DLC, and we'd basically teach them our strokes on the piddly rapids of the Mighty Hooch.

If I recall this particular trip correctly, I was 17 years old, school had just let out for the year, and our weekend canoe trip had been canceled. So we were in a familiar place during an unfamiliar time: the Chattahoochee on a summer weekend.

So much for wood ducks and great blue herons. The Hooch was so packed with yellow dingies and inner tubes that anyone who mustered the energy might have hopscotched across the whole river without getting wet. Except for the spilled beer.

It felt as if our semi-wilderness retreat had turned into a floating Charlie Daniels concert.

We headed down toward the left channel of the first rapid and tried to do what we usually did: show off. Either Jam or Randy was in my bow. I angled the canoe sideways as we slipped over the first drop, and Jam (or Randy) executed a perfect cross-draw. The bow dropped into an eddy — a calmer spot behind a rock — which normally would cause the canoe to spin effortlessly around, setting us up to push in one smooth move back upstream into the current, where we could take a nice ride on a wave.

But this time the river was too crowded. We plowed right into a spongy raft that was stuck on a rock. Another raft bumped us from behind, toward the bobbing heads of partiers from the first raft, who apparently had decided they might as well swim since their raft wasn't moving.

This wasn't our river anymore. It was packed with strangers, bank-to-bank and put-in-to-take-out. The mellow, natural scene had been smothered by hootin' and hollerin', by boom boxes blaring Marshall Tucker and Led Zeppelin, by idiots screaming "Watch this!" as they took cranium-cracking dives into shallow water.

Forget paddling. The most entertaining thing to do today was people watch.

On most runs down the Hooch, we'd stop about a mile in at a place called Diving Rock.

It's actually an interesting spot geologically. The river turns sharply right when it hits a high ridge formed by something called the Brevard Fault. Just after the turn, outcrops along the ridge form dramatic cliffs. Two of the lowest of those outcrops form the diving rocks, one about 10 feet above the water, the other maybe 15 feet.

From that point, the water flows southwest along the fault line, all the way down to the Alabama border, where it breaks through the ridge and turns directly south again, toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Most folks on the river that day weren't interested in geology trivia. There were guys screaming as they jackknifed off the lower rock. Others were bombing rafts with unopened beer cans. Drunken men were egging on drunken women to dive. Drunken women were laughing at drunken men every time one slipped off the rock and bounced into the water.

But the most amazing sight, the spectacle that got everyone to quiet down and observe for a while, was a slender blond woman in blue bikini bottoms (and nothing else) staggering along the bank. A bronzed brunette in black bottoms followed closely behind her.

We were impressed. We were amazed. Hey, this wasn't the French Riviera. As we floated past Diving Rock to the next rapid, nude women became the topic of conversation.

Maybe, someone suggested, we should head out to the Chattahoochee on more weekends. I looked over at Jam or Randy (or whoever was in my bow) and wondered whether I should try to upgrade. Actually, I was kind of depressed by the scene, but I don't think I told my buddies: Why couldn't I get a beautiful half-naked woman in my bow? After all, I thought, I'm a better paddler than any of the guys in her raft were.

We knew we shouldn't move too quickly because we were planning to meet our friends, Ted and Susan, at this place we called the "Party Spot." So the four of us played a little in the next little rapid. Way over near the Cobb County bank, we spun the boats niftily on ripples at the bottom of the chute. Then, we used the surfing action to carry the boats over toward the Atlanta shore. For a boater, a simple ferry like that can be a small piece of ecstasy.

The Party Spot was a small, muddy, cleared bank on the Atlanta side of the river. Today, a road leads down to it, and there's a small National Park Service parking lot. In those days, though, you couldn't drive to the Party Spot. You had to either float to it or hike down from Whitewater Creek Road in northwest Atlanta.

Because Ted and Susan had to walk, we drifted as slowly as we could. As we got closer, it looked as if they had other people with them. Was it? Could it be? Yes, it was — miracle of miracles — the naked women!

Three of them were frolicking on the shore with Ted and Susan! Yeah, sure, there were three burly men sitting there with them ... but ... wow! Of all the big-time revelers on the Chattahoochee River, their wives had chosen us to party with! We were honored.

Susan and Ted didn't seem to know what to do with our visitors. Since we were all underage, we were happy to drink the beer they offered us. And before we even tied the canoes up, Randy was too excited to stand still. He jumped out of the boat and waded ashore. He immediately went to work on the brunette who, within a few minutes, had taken off her bottoms.

About the only people who weren't being entertained by the scene was a middle-aged couple, who arrived by foot with two young kids soon after we'd gotten out of our boats. The man was wearing baggy shorts, a Hawaiian-style style shirt and sunglasses. He was carrying a straw picnic basket. His wife was holding the hands of their children.

Fred swears that as soon as the man saw the naked women, he instinctively stuck his hand over his wife's face to block her vision. The way I remember it, they quickly turned around and headed back up to the road.

We thought that was funny.

I wish I could say that something more satisfying occurred on the shore that afternoon — that one of us got laid or even lost our virginity. But we weren't having as much fun as we thought we would. It turned out that the women were in no state to do much of anything. Within an hour, Randy was whining desperately, a captive of his own temptation.

The blonde in blue bottoms was the main attraction, especially once the bottoms came off. She jumped into the water next to our canoes and, in the midst of showing off many things about herself, started to stumble.

She was a beautiful woman. But at that moment, as I tried to admire her while she grasped at my canoe to try to regain her balance, a faint realization penetrated my teenage hormones: This brand of partying wasn't entirely pretty. It was debauched. There was something disgusting, in fact, about three husbands who were more interested in joints and beer than the fact that their wives were wandering off into the nearby woods with men they'd never met before.

I snagged Blondie as she started to fall — more to prevent her from tipping over my canoe than to save her from slipping into deeper water. I suggested that she get back up on the shore, and I took my seat back down on my spot while she started to ramble. A few minutes later, a man came wandering out of the woods, holding — of all things — a three-foot rattlesnake. He was holding it correctly, by the head with the jaws open so that it couldn't bite him.

"Look what I found," the stranger called out as he trotted toward us.

Blondie immediately ran over to him and cooed: "Can I hold him?"

The man looked as if he was about hand the animal to her, but just in time, Ted yelled, "Don't do that!" The man pulled the snake back — as if a naked woman running up to him on who-knows-what drugs wasn't signal enough that he shouldn't hand her a live rattlesnake.

We made our polite exit soon after that moment — the high point, or low point, for partying on the Chattahoochee River, depending on your perspective. And, for a passing moment at least, I could kind of see the point of that father whose first instinct was to cover his wife's eyes with his hand.

Then, we started looking for more naked women along the banks.

Floatin' down the river

A self-guided float trip down the Chattahoochee River is easy, but you should take a few safety precautions: Make sure you have life jackets, be certain that you have a water craft that floats, and know that the river's swift current, cold water and occasional pollution make it better for floating on top of than swimming in.

• You can put-into the river at Johnson Ferry Road or Interstate North Parkway (near the I-285/Northside Drive exit. You should take-out just before the U.S. 41/Northside Parkway Bridge.

• The trip from Johnson Ferry takes four to six hours; the trip from Interstate North Parkway takes two or three hours.

• High Country Outfitters (3906 Roswell Road, 404-814-0999, www.highcountryoutfitters.com) is a reputable place to rent rafts, although you can usually find rental stands near the Interstate North Parkway put-in.

• More info can be found at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area website (www.nps.gov/chat). Parking at the put-ins costs $2.