Nature

“The water’s not cold at all!” Harlow shouted encouragingly to the athletes huddled at the edge of the water. “I’ve been swimming in it for weeks.”

For years, actually. A triathlete since he was 10, the now 26-year-old Harlow says he hates pools and swims in them only when he has to. So, from early March to late fall every year, he trains in the river. “It’s so much better than a pool,” he says. “It’s so dynamic. It changes. It keeps your attention all the time.”

In our ever-more manicured, micro-managed and market-tested society, the river’s unpredictability is, for some, the essence of its appeal. For any two different people, or on any two days, or in any two different places, the James can be entirely different rivers. Here it might be placid and slow-moving, there it tumbles wildly through a fun-house of rapids and boulders. Now it’s crowded with pleasure craft, water skiers and people fishing from johnboats, and later it’s as wild and empty as it might have been when everything west of Richmond was open frontier. If you paddle Balcony Falls, west of Lynchburg, you know it in a different way than if you shoot the whitewater in Richmond, and a different way than if you regularly take the Jamestown-Scotland ferry. If you’re plucking monster blue catfish out of the tidal waters near Hopewell, you’re fishing a different river than if you’re angling for smallmouth bass along the rocky, burbling western reaches of the James and its mountain tributaries.

And sometimes, the river’s just a scenic backdrop for the fun. On a warm Saturday afternoon in May, a field of knee-high grass fills with cars and the sound of dueling radios, with a mostly country twang. Pickup beds and car trunks are surrounded by tight packs of tailgating friends. It’s the 28th annual James River Runners chili cook-off at Hatton Ferry (the proceeds to benefit the Scottsville Volunteer Rescue Squad), and hundreds of revelers clearly have marked it on their calendar as the first serious party of summer.