Who the determined carver was who crouched at the head of a stormy 3-foot cascade to chisel it is long forgotten, but it's there still, a hardy survivor of more than two centuries, at the tip of a tiny island that splits a remote stretch of the James in Albermarle County. Blacks crewed most of the big craft, poling them through the river's flat water and muscling them through the rapids that punctuate its meandering course to the sea. In a modern canoe I have to stay alert while swirling through Goosby Island Falls, picking my way past rocks, fighting the powerful pull of the water. I reach an eddy below the island, drag the boat onto dry ground and walk back upstream to the island's head, eyes peeled for copperheads. Cicadas thrum from the shore.
Dry leaves rustle in the gusty breeze.
When I reach the island's head, I look downstream, to the path the batteaux took, and try to imagine such ungainly wooden tubs, heavy with hogsheads of tobacco andfarm produce, squeezing between the rocks, barreling down the chutes. It seems impossible, but they did it every day, negotiating the toughest falls in sluices cut by hand through earth and rock in the 18th and early 19th centuries, before the James River and the Kanawha Canal took some of the danger out of travel on the river. There, rock walls 200 years old mark artificial channels that end-run the whitewater. I paddle to the north bank to admire the Hatton ferry, one of only two people-powered ferries left in the continental United States. It's a throwback to the river crossings of two centuries ago, when at least 140 ferries broached the James and other Virginia rivers, and such cities as Buchanan and Lynchburg were getting their starts as ferry points.