If you spend any time in Ellijay, you start noticing the word before you've learned what it belongs to. It's on the brewery on River Street. It's on the bike shop up North Main. It's on the vineyard out Clear Creek Road. It's the name of a loop trail, a pizza place, a fishing report, a church, a road, a subdivision, a dozen businesses that came and went before the current ones showed up. Half of downtown borrowed the name. You don't need a guide to figure out it must mean something.
It's the river. It's always been the river.
The Cartecay rises up in the Cohuttas, somewhere northeast of town, and works its way down through the mountains before meeting the Ellijay River just south of the square. From there the two become the Coosawattee, which eventually feeds Carters Lake and then the Oostanaula and then the Coosa and then, if you keep following the water, the Gulf of Mexico. A drop of rain that falls on a Gilmer County ridge in April can be in Alabama by June. The town is named for one river and the county is named for a senator and a state and a country came after all that, but the water was here first, and the water is why any of the rest of it happened.
The Cherokee were the first people to name it. "Cartecay" is an Anglicization of a word that's been spelled a dozen ways in old treaties and surveys, and the meaning that gets passed around most often is something like valley of wild plums or place of wild fruit. Nobody can fully vouch for the translation at this point, but anyone who's driven past an orchard in bloom knows the name didn't miss. The whole valley has been growing something worth naming since before any of us were keeping score.
What the river looks like depends on which week you catch it. In early spring it runs high and cold, the color of steel, with a push in the current that makes you respect it. By May it starts to settle. By June it's glass. The shoals where it kicks up over rock and gravel turn into the soundtrack of summer around here — loud enough to hear from the road, quiet enough to sleep next to.
The first time most people actually get on it is in a tube. The rental outfits run from spring through early fall and the float is as lazy as a float gets — a few miles of gentle drift, a shoal or two to keep you honest, a tree overhanging a deep pool where somebody's cousin has hung a rope swing since the nineties. Bring a small cooler. Wear something you don't mind getting wet. Don't bring anything you can't afford to lose to the bottom. You will spend the first twenty minutes talking and the last hour in perfect silence, and you will remember it longer than you expect.
