Shootin' the Hooch

ISSUE #69

The Chattahoochee is Atlanta's resident river, and they call it the Hooch, a name as appropriate as any for our 69th issue. It's no Mississippi: it's only about 500 ft. across instead of 2,000. You can barely boat in it, but it's perfect for tubing—you blow one up and float on down, drift past the herons and the humming green of the ashes and Georgia pines.

They call that shooting—same verb as putting something in your veins—because with the Hooch, you're in nature's veins. It's weirdly apt: rivers are Earth's primordial arteries, vessels of life, before they were supplanted by railroads and highways. Running water is in our genetic memory, our prehistoric home that still calls back to us. We once followed rivers like we followed the stars.

We plug back into this when we float or raft. It's the ultimate relaxation: being enveloped in water is amniotic, a perfect anxiolytic, a molecular embrace. Every inch of your skin is being held.

In a river, you're also never stagnant. You're in the transitive phase of the water cycle: it was raised in clouds, it experiences the adolescence of rain, and from there it's just trying just to go back home, to the ocean and the great beyond. It's nature's poetic reflection for the journey we all take.

That's why it's the subject of so many songs; I've tried to compile the best of them here. These songs are seemingly written by all those folktale characters you meet in a hammock on an August evening, with bare feet and a banjo, somewhere near an upturned canoe, drifters guided not by wind, but by water. It’s silly Americana, but I have a soft spot for it

Some of it’s just silly, like Alan Jackson’s Hooch anthem. Just imagine a fifth grader reading those lyrics as a report on what they did for their summer vacation.