He mapped 3,000 miles of NC rivers, recording every joy and hazard

For the last 20 years, I’ve carried around a battered, dog-eared guidebook smeared with the mud of 20 rivers — a manual for dodging rocks in the Eno, shooting through rapids on the Haw and spotting the herons on Great Coharie Creek.

Anyone who ever shoved a canoe into brown Tar Heel water did so with the aid of “Paddling Eastern North Carolina,” a tool so comprehensive it includes the exact GPS coordinates for when the Black River becomes snake-infested swamp, requiring a boater to get out and walk.

An engineer by trade, Paul Ferguson has floated every inch of navigable water east of Chapel Hill, logging 3,200 miles and feeding every bit of useful information into his tape recorder:

• the safest place to launch on the Neuse when banks rise 40 feet high;

• the downed trees blocking passage through the Tar River forests;

• the whereabouts of dams — both man and beaver-made, on the Deep;

• and most crucially, the minimum amount of water to keep a boat from scraping bottom — a constant threat in summer.

Paddlers who know and love him joke that Ferguson would try to map a puddle of spit on the ground, and on Friday night in Pittsboro, they celebrated the great dean of North Carolina rivers, who at 81 has finally slowed down his paddling.

“It took forever,” he said of his work, “but it was so much fun.”

The state’s most avid small-boat enthusiasts, those small-boat nerds who still own dented aluminum canoes from Sears, applauded another paddling luminary: Bob Brueckner, who with a tenure of four years, holds the record for longest-serving president of the Carolina Canoe Club.

Since 1987, Brueckner has taught hundreds how to manage a kayak through rapids, collected and hauled off thousands of pounds of river trash and navigated the complex bureaucracy that goes into making land friendly for self-propelled boats.

One by one, his admirers stood to recall his watery folklore: building a wooden canoe with his father and then wrecking it on the Eno, inventing a concoction called “Twisted Miss” made from Swiss Miss cocoa and rum, then spitting it into a post-paddling campfire for pyrotechnic effect.

“When I have any money, I buy paddling gear,” said his sister Ann, quoting Brueckner’s unofficial motto. “If I have any left, I buy food and clothing.”

Rivers in North Carolina are notoriously unpredictable, and a tranquil float can turn disastrous in a hundred ways.

The water gets rocky west of Raleigh, and a boulder lurking just under the surface will grab a boat by the bottom and spin it around backward, filling it with water. I lost my wedding ring on the Haw escaping this exact scenario.

To the east, the steep river banks get slick with pudding-thick mud, and a paddler trying to climb over them will slip around like Scooby Doo getting chased by a ghost. Trees growing in this gooey soil fall over and block the entire river — an obstacle you often discover by rounding a bend and smacking into it.

I cannot count the trees I have scrambled over while dragging my boat behind, but I can count the number of times I’ve fallen off them into neck-deep water: twice.

Ferguson knows these hazards too well.

In 2004, he tried to beach his canoe above a dam on the Haw River, but instead got sucked into the current and tumbled backward over a 15-foot drop to the boulders below.

He cracked two vertebrae in his neck and broke his leg in the fall, and waited in the cold water while his paddling companion ran for help. Medics dragged him up the hill in a stretcher, shooting him full of morphine until a helicopter could arrive.

The point of celebrating these paddling icons is to hand the next generation access to their considerable work, giving curious new explorers the treasure maps that are starting to yellow with age.

There’s a reason so few people have camped on the wooden platforms perched on the Roanoke River and heard the bobcats screech at night, or floated past the 2,000-year-old trees on the Black River and thought they had stumbled onto a set from “The Lord of the Rings:”

They’re crazy-hard to reach, and anything crazy-hard to reach requires a good guide. In Pittsboro Friday, that guide sat at the head table in a room full of fellow explorers, listening politely to the stories he inspired.

Toward the end, one of them stood and offered this toast:

“If you were ever asked, ‘Who would you rather share a campfire, tall tales and a bottle of bourbon with, your answer should be ... ?”

The whole room said Ferguson’s name.

Uniquely NC is a News & Observer subscriber collection of moments, landmarks and personalities that define the uniqueness (and pride) of why we live in the Triangle and North Carolina.