In the 1980s in Summersville, West Virginia, after coal mines close and the mining jobs that supported the town are lost, a former miner named Kelly becomes a local legend with his success as a whitewater rafting tour guide along the Gauley River, starting his own company.

One day, the protagonist, a former miner, and a group of others who idolize Kelly are watching Kelly take a tour group down the river when the raft flips. He and most of his passengers are saved but two--a high-school-aged girl and her father--are lost downriver, presumed dead. Kelly says he only had one beer at their lunch stop and one of his passengers accuses him of having had three, then disappearing. The girl's dead body is later found.

After the incident, Kelly sells his rafting company and gets a job running a dozer at a strip mine. In December, Reed Judy, one of the men who found the girl's dead body, encounters Kelly by the road, looking down into the river's gorge at the damn. Kelly identifies Reed as one of the men who found the girl's body and asks if she looked ok; Reed denies that he was. Kelly is later seen with his hands on the overpass rail. The men take bets on when he'll kill himself.

The Congress passes an act to enable use of the dam for whitewater rafting creating "Gauley Season" and drawing tourists. Fish are dropped into the canyon by helicopter. The whitewater rafting tourism industry flourishes.

A year later, Kelly joins the other men at the rock where they watch the falls. He tells them a story of how, on that fateful day, he and the girl and her father went on a hike during the lunch break. Her father didn't want to climb the last fall, so it was just him and the girl alone. At the top, he kissed her--a melding of worlds, the tour guide and the wealthy tourist. But her father came up behind them and saw. He planned to kill her father and flipped the raft on purpose. He adds that she wanted to get rid of her father; she hated him and didn't care if he saw her with Kelly. Then he says she told him this just yesterday--that you can hear it in the river.

The men call him a liar, scared by his insanity, and they beat him up and fling him into the river. He crawls out bloody but alive.

They give up their spot on the rock to the rattlesnakes and Kelly, who sits and watches every tour boat pass.