You feel good about paddling a strange river when the outfitter tells you that if you fall out of the boat, just stand up and climb back in. You feel even better when you lazily dip your hand into that shallow river and discover it has a bracing chill. Not like the tepid stuff back in the Piedmont that'll turn you to Earl Grey if you steep too long.

Then it occurs to you: I am in the Piedmont. Only a couple of hours away from home, in fact.

You are, in fact, on the Dan River, which unless you're one of the Triangle's avid whitewater paddlers, you may not know about.

That's a situation the emerging Dan River Basin Association hopes to rectify.

"The [upper] Piedmont is not a traditional area for paddling," says Lindley Butler, who with wife, T, formed the association in 2002.

"We felt that we had these rivers here, that this wilderness couldn't last forever," Butler says. "We wanted to see that preserved, that's our basic thrust. But we also want to help build it as a tourism destination."

The Dan River's headwaters are off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. From there, it runs south into North Carolina, into Stokes and Rockingham counties, then back into Virginia before eventually dissolving into Kerr Reservoir. Local whitewater kayakers know the river primarily for a section that runs through Virginia's Kibler Valley -- runs fast and wild with Class II and III rapids when water is released from an upstream dam.

Otherwise, the Dan and its two most notable tributaries -- the Mayo and Smith rivers -- are little known among Triangle paddlers.

The Dan River Basin Association is trying to change that. Its goal is to unify counties in the Dan River Basin's 3,300-square-mile watershed to promote the region as a whole. So far, that effort is concentrated in Rockingham, Stokes and Caswell counties in North Carolina, and Patrick, Pittsylvania and Halifax counties in Virginia.

"It's amazing what these rivers are like," Butler says. "You can go 10, 15 miles and see nothing that's man-made."

Familiar, and yet ...

Nothing man-made save, perhaps, for a Confederate submarine.

As he's putting us on the Dan River at the town of Madison in Rockingham County, just after briefing us on capsize procedure, Jeff Johnston with Eden-based Three Rivers Outfitters advises us to keep an eye out for a semi-submerged Confederate submarine.

My 10-year-old daughter, Hana, looks at me in surprise. I give her the same look back.

Not. Turns out to be an old boiler of some sort that they haven't been able to wrestle from the river. The ironclad-size cast-off is of an age bordering between river trash and curious relic. It's also, as promised, one of the few man-made, or man-trashed, items we'll see on our 8 1/2-mile paddle.

It doesn't take long after putting our Mad River Explorer 16 in the water to realize that while the Dan is Piedmont-familiar, there's also something different about it.

"The attraction of the Dan is that you're getting into the foothills," explains Paul Ferguson, author of "Paddling Eastern North Carolina," the definitive guide to paddling the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. "It's much cooler weather, with elevations of a thousand feet or so. You're more into rock and rhododendron and more mountain-looking water."

That's a bit upstream of where we are. The distinguishing feature of this particular stretch of the Dan is its relic wing dams and sluices.

These periodic -- every mile or so, it seems -- rock structures date back more than 200 years. Initially, they were intended to aid navigation for shallow-draft crafts called batteaus. Today, they introduce an element of Class I friskiness to an otherwise placid river.

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