When I was a youngster in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was not uncommon to hear my older siblings talk of swimming the river from Ohio to West Virginia and back. Nowadays they would wonder how foolish they were to attempt such a thing. Granted, the river is a bit different now. When they swan the river, it was a few feet lower because the Greenup Locks and Dam had not raised the normal pool three feet higher than what old Lock and Dam 27 kept it at. But people today still say the river is too dangerous for swimming.
I wouldn't know. I've not attempted it. While I like being on and along the river, and over it on a bridge, I've never been comfortable in it. You never know when the current will change or where the dropoff is.
A newspaper photographer I once worked with said he used to have to go down to the river every summer to watch people search for drowning victims. With the construction of public pools, fewer people swam in the river and drowned, he said.
Around here, public pools are a threatened species today.
I feel for the families of the two people who are missing. And I hope the anguish they are going through is not repeated many times this summer.
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And what most people these days do not realize is that those three feet vertically equates to about fifty to seventy-five feet more on each side of the river horizontally.
Back when I was a kid I could swim the Guyandotte back and forth across it twice before I started getting tired. But that is not a far distance along most stretches of that river. In fact, many tines it could be waded and not get your knees wet. But there were places where it was four to six feet deep most of the way across.
But the current, except when the river was up, was rather sluggish. It would carry you away, but slowly.
Even as a kid I don't think I would have tried the Ohio, because then the current in it was stronger than now, even though the horizontal distance was considerably less.
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