The day I almost died.

A friend of mine chastised me recently for having a "thin" profile pix on my blog, that comes from 2009. Since then I have been out of running b/c of an injury, and I have put on a lot of weight. So here is a 2010 pix for my blog, which I shall make my blog profile pix, taken the day I came w/in a few seconds of drowning under a wrapped boat in a rapids on the Dolores River in Utah. It changed my life; obviously I didn't die. I no longer fear death.

A Dark Passage to Light

He plunged into the dark, cold water and drifted easily downward while he considered the situation. He was in a canal filled with water that was over his head and he must be near the bottom now.

His lower hand reached out and touched the mud at the bottom. It was time to go to the surface now but he didn't want to suddenly thrust up in the water and get his feet mired in the muck.

He rolled over and tried to orientate himself so that he could propel himself upwards without having to kick out behind him. Although he was relaxed, it was definitely time to get to the surface.

But the coldness of the water and the slow turning of his body had disoriented him and he was suddenly acutely aware that he had only a single breath of air. An urgent note of finality characterized his actions.

He felt that he had only one chance to attain the surface now. He hoped that he was pointed upwards because he didn't want to dive headfirst into the bottom mud and have to wrestle around down there getting reoriented while his single breath waned.

He pushed off and his eyes opened to light and he sucked in a breath. The dim luminescence of dawn was filling his bedroom.

He lay under the sheet considering. He'd been dreaming, and perhaps a little bit of acute sleep apnea was involved.

His dream sequence was eerily similar to being trapped under the boat in the rapids last month. He remembered that when he'd described his near-death experience then to his sister afterwards, she'd used the word reborn to characterize his escape.

He thought about the dark, lonely place under the boat, with nothing but fluid surrounding him in his confined space. Then he had pushed off downwards to launch his journey into the unknown, which he feared might lead to him being pinned by the current against the rock that the capsized raft was wrapped around.

But there had been no other choice then because it was time to leave, and he had traveled under the stern of the boat and come out into light and air, before being plunged down the rapids in a wild ride where he had to fight for his life. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

That's a wrap

I was telling Maria, a friend of mine in Colorado, that I went rafting on the Dolores River in Colorado and Utah last month when she informed me that she was a river guide and had traveled down the Dolores River plenty of times herself. Since I almost drowned when the boat overturned in a rapids and I became trapped underneath it, I asked her how you get out from underneath a capsized boat.

"Keep ahold of the boat and let it pass over you," she said, "by using your hands to pull yourself upriver as it floats downstream. Use the air pocket under the boat to breathe, and when you come to the back of the boat, duck under the gunwale and come out behind the boat, holding onto to the boat until you can determine whether you want to stay with it or take your chances swimming down the rapids."

She added that you don’t want to come out downstream so the boat is pushing you, because it might hit a rock and pin you between it and the rock. Better to emerge upriver and have the boat pull you, so you can let it go if need to achieve separation.

"Maria," I said, "there was no air under that boat. The current had pinned it against a rock and it wasn’t moving."

"Oh, you were under a wrapped boat," she said. "That’s different and very dangerous. You have to get out from under a wrapped boat any way you can, although you still want to try to get out upriver, in case it suddenly starts moving." (Right: A wrapped boat.)

I got out from under the wrapped boat downriver, on my third try with my life hanging in the balance, after failing two times to get out upriver. Maria is the first person I have talked to about the situation I was in who immediately understood that there was no air pocket down there, which gave my efforts to escape an air of immediacy which fully garnered my attention.

Luck is the lady that he loves the best

We didn’t get onto the river on the fourth day until noon because J had to patch where he had slashed the bottom of his boat to let water out the day before when he got caught on rocks in the rapids and the river had poured in, threatening to capsize him. G had to patch the bottom of his boat too because it was leaky and full of small tears.

J used a sewing needle, floss, rubber patches and cement to repair the holes he found whereas G just smeared shoe glue over several suspect points. Both approaches seemed to work just fine.

Finally, an idyllic day on the Dolores River! We all just floated downstream in the brilliant sunshine with an occasional pull or push on the oars.

I took a turn for an hour on the oars and it was quite strenuous work as well as being nerve wracking as we bounced and scraped over rocks in the river while I tried to get the hang of pushing oars to propel a boat in a strong current. There was one more rapids to pass through and I relinquished the helm to G when we approached it.

Slider Rapids looked formidable enough, a solid class III, but after scouting it out from shore and endlessly palavering about possible routes through it, we all made it down just fine. We were all veterans by now, combat-tested.

We pulled into camp early that evening, about seven miles from Dewey Bridge in Utah, the end point of our third annual Bucket Trip. That night we enjoyed sumptuous beef burritos and had a sing-along around a campfire, with the best rendition being performed by J as he sang the title song to the old fifties TV series Maverick. (Right: Row, row, row your boat...)

Ridin' the trail to who knows where,
Luck is his companion.

A Boat Recovery

G's boat had gone down the No-Name Rapids by itself after it capsized and, amazingly, lodged against a huge standing rock in the Dolores River below. Once all ten of our rafting trip entourage had been safely accounted for and the rest of the boats secured below the rapids, our two river men, G and J, who are brothers, went after it in the largest boat and I went along to lend a hand.

G and J fell to intense bickering like brothers do even as they performed incredible physical feats and at one point I had to tell them to quit arguing as we attended to the boat recovery. We went by the hung-up boat once and missed it in the strong current and had to be hauled upriver by everyone on shore pulling on our tow line for another attempt at beaching on the mid-stream rock with our oar boat.

On the second pass J grabbed the capsized boat's floating bowline as we went by and somehow. by holding onto it, pulled our heavily-laden boat into the lee of the current behind the large boulder. G scrambled onto the rock then and started working on freeing the stuck overturned boat.

At one point our boat started floating away and G, standing on the steep rock, held our towline in one hand and the other boat's bowline in his other hand and I couldn't believe the strength, or will, he displayed in not letting go. He freed his boat alright, but let go of our towline in the process and we drifted away and his boat started floating away too.

The first rule on the river is to stay with the boat and J shouted to him as we floated off, "Jump in and grab your boat!" Which is what G did, executing a prodigious leap into the river for the second time within the hour, this time all the way to his escaping boat, which he grabbed onto.

We oared over to him, took the bowline and pulled the upside down craft to shore. Then, after securing the large boat to the bank, the three of us got in the shallow water and tipped the overturned boat right side up. (Right: Drying our stuff at camp that evening.)

Dress to swim and rig to flip. Incredibly, all the baggage and equipment, except for the oar which A had already retrieved, was still with the boat. (Left: We had a lot of stuff.)

Water had invaded all our dry bags though, and our sleeping bags were wet. It meant for an uncomfortable night for G, Jy and I when the nighttime chill settled in but hey, we were alive and our third day on the river, the most incredible day of my life, finally drew to a close.

Giving thanks

I went to church today for the first time since my life-altering moment under the boat on the Dolores River in Utah on Cinco de Mayo, to give thanks for discovering the strength within me when I was in the river to get out from under the boat before I drowned. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you know?

I was relating my nascent faith to a friend today and she pointedly asked about me delaying for two Sundays after I got back before I made it to a service if that's how I now felt about it. She's actually not much of a believer herself, and views my belief with skepticism.

I just laughed. Two Sundays ago, today, it doesn't matter really, not to me anymore. (Right: Tough times on the river. We all came out alright, thank God.)

I think I've changed a little, actually. Tomorrow, for all my non-readers out there, we'll recover the overturned boat and learn the truth about "dry bags" as the cold night descends.

Let's speed this account of a single hour on the Dolores River up...

So we got the second boat out of its predicament on the rapids by utilizing tow lines, which is ropes used to haul the boat downstream while it is in the river. T was instrumental in this, as were others; I helped out a little by being a stout leg T could grab onto for support while he perched on a rock and extended a rope out to J, H and C who were laboring in their stuck boat in the river. (Left: Tow lines.)

J had had to slash holes in the bottom of his raft while the river was pouring in to let water out when he first got stuck in the rapids so his boat didn't capsize like ours did with potentially deadly effect. Once J's boat got free and navigated the rest of the vicious No-Name Rapids, T and I, with G acting as captain, brought the third boat through this nasty little rapids on a wet and harrowing ride. (Right: T, Jy, B, Ju and A.)

G justified his 100% safety record by bringing the small paddle boat through flawlessly. T's score sheet also read 100%, but at this moment he wisely deferred to the leadership of the vastly more experienced G. Me, I was just crew. (Left: Happy to be alive on the river, thank you.)

Meanwhile down river A chased a floating oar from G's overturned boat a mile and a half downstream and then dived in, swam to midstream and brought it back. This became very important later when J's boat lost an oar in a subsequent rapids, his boat having already lost its spare, and our boat was able to lend its spare oar to J.

The river below the rapids had a current of around seven miles an hour and A ran the floating oar down at her standard marathon speed of about eight minutes an hour. Yay for runners. A and her husband T are heroes of mine.

Now we had to recover our capsized boat. Incredibly, it was hung up a quarter mile below the rapids on the only free-standing rock in the Dolores River between the pernicious rapids we had just passed through and California.

The Dolores River

May 5th, about 2 pm, on the Dolores River in Utah was the most incredible hour of my life. I almost drowned under a boat, lived through a harrowing journey down a raging rapids and then immediately had to plunge into a lengthy rescue mission.

So what is the most incredible hour of your life? Coming out of the womb?

I feel close to Jy because he went down the same rapids I did, and had to work hard to survive his passage. Meanwhile, G leaped astonishingly to safety.

G is an American hero of mine, an amazing mountain man. You would want this man in your foxhole! His late father went on combat patrols in Normandy in 1944 and walked by German patrols in the dark.

Yeah, not much matters to me anymore. So how was your summer vacation?

A self rescue

Cinco De Mayo this year was the most incredible day of my life. For the rest of my life, I will celebrate each new one I attain as a gift of life. The events which I have been describing in the last several posts all occurred on the Dolores River in Utah on Wednesday, May 5th.

I escaped from being trapped underneath the overturned boat and survived my passage down the powerful rapids. G and Jy managed to shove the upside-down boat free of the rock but its sudden departure, still-capsized, down the rapids left them stranded on the rock that had upset us, twenty feet from shore. (Right: Our boat gets away, wrong-side up, never a good thing.)

Jy was unable to crawl up the rock and slipped backwards into the water. He disappeared down the rapids.

Another of our boats was trapped on submerged rocks forty feet behind the standing rock where G was. It was a hell of a mess.

G walked around the rock, obviously hesitant to go into the river and be swept downstream. From the shore where I was, I gripped a stout sapling branch in one hand and waded into rushing water up to my chest. (Left: Jy and G are in extremis.)

Steadying myself on my anchor of the branch, I extended myself fully, my free hand open, my back leg on the bottom near the shore but my forward leg dangling in the deep water, and urged G to run off the back side of the rock, jump upstream as far as he could and try to catch my free hand as the current carried him down the rapids past me. The extension of my body bridged about half of the gap from shore to rock.

G went to the top of the rock, turned and ran off its back. He made a tremendous leap and splashed upriver into the water. (Right: Jy was gone and G contemplates going into the river as well. Behind him, J, H and C are in distress on their boat.)

He stood up, in waist high water. His astonishing jump had carried him past the swift current into the calmer water nearer the shore.

G had executed a self-rescue. At about the same time, Jy showed up from down river, wet and shivering but safe and unharmed.

Now we had to go rescue the boat in the middle of the river, find our boat, and get the third boat down below this hellacious No-Name Rapids. The day was far from done. (Right: Carefree days on the Dolores River.)

Downstream, B was running after A and yelling at her not to go into the water as she chased after a paddle in the river from G's boat. Since she is a Boston Qualifier and he is not, she was pretending not to hear him as she outdistanced him and then plunged into the river.