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Treehouse accommodations provide canoeists the opportunity to camp in style on the Edisto River.
Photo by Alice Tubley
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The author embraces the adventure of paddling the Edisto River despite overcast conditions.
Photo by Peyton Howell
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The murky waters of the Edisto—the longest free-flowing black-water river in North America—appear somewhat lazy on the surface, but the undercurrent is strong and steady.
Photo by Peyton Howell
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After their overnight canoe adventures, guests end up where they started—the outpost of Carolina Heritage Outfitters.
Photo by Peyton Howell
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The author and his uncle launched their canoeing expedition from Carolina Heritage Outfitters with all the essentials for a successful camping trip.
Photo by Peyton Howell
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Anne and Scott Kennedy run Carolina Heritage Outfitters, renting canoes and three treehouses to Edisto River explorers.
Photo by Milton Morris
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Treehouse No. 2 was a welcome respite from a looming storm.
Photo by Peyton Howell
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The balcony of Treehouse No. 2 provides a scenic overlook on the Edisto River.
Photo by Peyton Howell
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On sunny days, a hammock strung over water is just as welcome.
Photo courtesy of Carolina Heritage Outfitters
“The canoe,” John C. O’Reilly wrote in his 1890 book Athletics and Manly Sport, “is the American boat of the past and of the future. It suits the American mind: it is light, swift, safe, graceful, easily moved; and the occupant looks in the direction he is going, instead of behind, as in the stupid old tubs that have held the world up to this time.”
Over 120 years later, our canoe was no different really—light, swift, safe, graceful—a 16-foot Old Town Guide 160 to which we lashed a weekend’s worth of provisions: sleeping bags, water bottles, bream poles, muck boots, beer and food coolers, maps, an anthology of canoe stories, a guitar, harmonicas and all the other usual camping fare stowed away in dry bags.
My uncle Peyton and I had rented the canoe in Canadys at Carolina Heritage Outfitters, the riverside outpost and home of Anne and Scott Kennedy. Our aim was similar to the hundreds of adventure-seeking people who rent each year from them—to paddle 13 miles down the black waters of the Edisto River and reach one of the three treehouses that Scott Kennedy has built on his 150-acre nature refuge.
On a late-March morning that threatened light breezes and warm rain, Kennedy shuttled us in his van across the Colleton/Dorchester county line, to the put-in on Highway 21.
Everything about Kennedy—his long, white beard, his quietly even-keeled demeanor, his dog named Bear riding along with us in the van—suggested a man with decades of river-guiding experience, yet he is originally from the south side of Chicago, and he only found a quieter life as an outfitter in Canadys, after coordinating an outdoor recreation program for the Navy in Charleston.
“About 20 years ago, we bought the land so that we could provide our customers with the ability to camp for two days,” he remembers. “My assistant manager down at the Navy program came up, and we were looking around. I was going to build camping platforms at first, and he kind of suggested that was mundane, that I should do something a little more attractive. Thus came about the treehouses.”
Building the treehouses was no easy task, especially since there are no roads, but also because Kennedy likes to approach things with authenticity.
“We wanted to do it in a real original manner,” he says. “So we actually bought a sawmill, cut our trees down, sawed them into lumber we could use. It was very labor intensive. Just harvesting the trees was one challenge, then, of course, operating the sawmill to turn them into lumber was another one, and then transporting it all to another site was another one. We rafted two canoes together, put a 2-by-4 platform together, and floated all the wood in.”
Despite what could be taken as a laid-back attitude, Kennedy remains vigilant when it comes to safety. At the landing, he instructed us in the potential hazards of our journey—the “physical hazards” (fallen trees, current), the “biological hazards” (snakes, gators, wasps, poison ivy), and the “environmental hazards” (thunderstorms, hypothermia from capsizing).
The talk had an essential sobering effect on us. The black waters of the Edisto—the longest free-flowing black-water river in North America—appear somewhat lazy on the surface, but the undercurrent is strong and steady, dependable for capsizing canoeists who are caught unawares. And right at the put-in, you must navigate the Whetstone Crossroads bridge before you can head into more scenic and meandering stretches.
This section of the Edisto is singular—a result of the confluence between the South Fork that originates near Johnston and the North Fork that originates outside of Batesburg—and the beautiful black waters before us (which get their iconic color from cypress leaves that steep like tea bags in the water) zigzag over 250 miles to the ACE Basin.
The water pushed us along at nearly four miles an hour with light paddling, and although there is no whitewater in this stretch, the Edisto can make for a fun, technical paddle as you maneuver around fallen limbs.
Canoeing is, unlike kayaking, essentially a teamwork sport. You have to find a rhythm with your fellow paddler in order to keep the boat straight, and you learn soon enough how to pitch items to one another—a sandwich, sunscreen, a cold beer—without tipping the boat too far to the side.
Without a cell phone or a laptop or a television or any other electronic distraction, our entertainment became watching the water, watching the banks. Birdlife is one of the best spectacles: cormorants, warblers, ospreys, egrets. Because we knew we were in celebrated gator and moccasin country, every floating log became a gator’s head and every floating stick became a cottonmouth wrinkling the surface. But as we got closer, the true nature of the object revealed itself—a stick, a stump, an old tire or jug.
We paddled through warm rain and light fog, past ramshackle hunting camps and duck boxes, marking our mileage, sidetracking just once to paddle up into an oxbow lake and look, unsuccessfully, for alligators. Just before the heavy storm arrived, as if on cue, we saw what we were looking for—a yellow paddle lashed to a river birch—the can’t-miss marker of Treehouse Island.
There is something magical about treehouses—a sense of returning to a childlike innocence, an elevation that allows you to spy on the world below. Our treehouse, the medium-sized No. 2, preserved this feeling, and yet it also had something of a luxuriousness to it, equipped as it was with a propane grill, a covered deck, a sleeping loft, rocking chairs, tiki torches, a dining table, a two-burner stove and a remarkably clean privy.
We cooked Cornish game hens, immersed ourselves in the cold water, played river songs—“Proud Mary,” “Down by the River,” “Black Muddy River”—and hooted and hollered like river men late into the night.
Dawn broke gray, threatening more rain, so we packed up after a breakfast of eggs and bacon and runny grits, then paddled upriver to the primitive site where we had planned to camp on Saturday night. We were pleasantly surprised to find that it had a covered, open-air structure beneath which we could store our gear to keep it dry, and then doubly happy when the sun split through the clouds and remained there for the rest of the afternoon.
This lightened up the canoe, and our moods, considerably, and it allowed us to paddle quietly into the still waters of the nearby oxbow lake. We were looking, on Kennedy’s suggestion, for any of the nine gator broods he said he could call by playing his primitive ostrich-bone flute. Finding none, we used a cinder block to anchor down for bream fishing, climbed into cypress trees, ate lunch on a stump.
Later that night, by the fire, I read aloud from O’Reilly, who summarized our day: “Boats are for work; canoes are for pleasure. Boats are artificial; canoes are natural. In a boat you are always an oar’s length and gunwale’s height away from Nature. In a canoe you can steal up to her bower and peep into her very bosom.”
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Get There
Carolina Heritage Outfitters is located in Canadys, four miles from Interstate 95, exit 68. The outpost is on Highway 15, one mile north of the intersection of Highway 61. Renting a treehouse and canoe costs about $170 per person for the first night, $85 per person for the second night and $60 per person for a third night. For more information, call (843) 563-5051 or visit canoesc.com.