Days Gone By

                When I was 26, I had a broken heart and sought solace working as a whitewater river guide in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. I was a fairly competent kayaker and had some river rescue skills but I was far from an expert by industry standards. I went there believing that if things got bad, someone would know what to do. That someone wasn’t there and I realized I had to be that person.

               Over the course of two years, I became a much better boater and learned how to rely on myself, not only on the river but also on the River of Life. I learned how to listen to that voice inside of me even though it seemed to be telling me to expect the highly improbable.

               Most of the guides went in the rafts with the customers. I paddled a kayak and carried rescue gear: rope, carabiners, pulley, first aid kit, throwbag, etc. It was my job to retrieve paddles and sometimes people. All the raft guides believed I would save them, which I might or might not do. To them, I was the person who knew what he was doing and could be counted on in an emergency.

               Tiny Andy McKee, mother of three, found out the hard way that was not exactly true. She was too small and the rafts, and river, were too large.

               To access the Hudson River, we rode the Indian River to reach to the confluence of the two streams. The Indian River is a raucous ride and Andy fell out many times on this section. Most of her guests would get tossed overboard and I would always save them first and her last. The Indian has two rough sections, each a mile and a half long. She usually swam at least of mile of the whole stretch.

               To this day, I can still hear her yelling my name, “Omar,” that was my nickname at the time, “save me!”

               I love the river. I love the water. I’m a guy. I didn’t look at her predicament in a way that, in hindsight, maybe I should have. I was on the swim team in college and swimming back to the raft seemed like fun to me; I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t doing it. I realize now that her lifejacket was too bulky and she was wearing wool undergarments beneath her full-body wetsuit and a wool hat beneath her helmet. The only thing she could do was float, or, in this case, somersault down the rapids, being dragged over rocks by the very strong current.

               We started rafting in early April, while there was still a lot of snow on the ground. By the end of May, Andy had had enough. I remember her last moments as a river guide at the confluence of the Indian and Hudson Rivers. She had just taken another long swim, yelling my name in vain, tumbling over the rocks and waves and now she was looking like a drowned rat.

               Her face was ashen-white. Her demeanor was that of a person who had been humiliated and broken. She was giving up and now she had to tell the person whom she had thought would be there to rescue her, that she could not go on. It was a poignant moment in my life but I’m sure it was a much more vivid one for her.

               I hid my kayak in the woods and took over her raft. That night, I hiked in three miles and got my boat, then carried it back out. That was the difference between me and her. I lived on the river. I had nothing to do but paddle and hike into the gorge to retrieve a kayak for work the next day. She was a mother of three. When she got home, she would cook dinner and change diapers. She didn’t hate me but I’m sure she felt I could have given her a ride on my kayak, at least once when she needed it.

               What I regret is that I treated her just like a man. Men and women are different. I think, if I had given her a little help, she could have been a good river guide, but I was young and still learning how to listen to that voice inside of me, telling me to this very day to save her.

               A year later, twelve months without TV, radio or other distractions, I could hear the sounds that were really important to me: my inner voice, the river and cars on the highway. I was a much better kayaker by then and the guides came to trust me to a much greater degree than the previous season.

               One cold day in the Adirondack Mountains, near Old Forge, NY, as our outfit prepared to descend the Moose River at just below flood level, our top guide, Jimmy Jett, a Vietnam veteran who’d seen a lot of action, came up to me and said he had a bad feeling. It was his birthday, he said, and bad things always happened to him on his birthday. He wondered if I wouldn’t keep an eye on him and his raft that day.

               The old me, pre-Andy McKee, would have lied, told him I would and then forgot about him. I was older and wiser now and truthfully assured him I would.

               A third of the way down the river’s rapids, at a section known as ‘Rooster Tail’ for an extremely large wave, sometimes growing to heights longer than the 18’ rafts we threw our guests in, I was getting ready to descend the rapids to a spot where I could keep an eye on the ten boats in our group. The monstrous wave looked very much like the tail of a rooster. Jimmy was close behind in his raft, his eight customers paddling four on each side and him in the back, steering.

               He didn’t want to get too far away from me, just in case he needed my help. I could have easily gotten ahead of him but that inner voice told me not to and I listened. Steering my kayak into an eddy, behind a small boulder at the top of the rapids, I waited for him.

               He wasn’t taking the usual route through this section and I guessed he was trying to avoid the rooster tail wave because it was easily big enough to overturn his boat. I was positioned, looking downstream, in a part of the river that was over 100’ wide.

               I saw Jimmy’s raft hugging the far left shore, a sheer rock cliff. This was a route untried by anyone I knew but figured he’d be safe because he was our most skilled raftsman. His boat passed me and I turned my attention to the other boats in our flotilla, looking for any other unusual behavior.

               Once they all passed me by, I turned my stern into the current to peel out of the eddy when I heard Jimmy yelling my name, “Omar!” 

               I aborted the maneuver and stayed in the calm area behind the rock. Turning my head, I could see his raft was trapped in a large wave called a hole. Holes are depressions in the river where the wave recirculates upon itself and acts like a vertical washing machine.

               Jimmy’s raft was being spun around clockwise on the surface of the water and his customers were all hunkered down in the middle of the boat, away from the outer tubes. The entire raft was filled with icy-cold water. If anyone got near the upstream edge of the raft, the hole would probably suck them out and they would have to swim through the rapid and then get 'dunked' by the rooster tail wave at the bottom. This was not desirable because it was early spring and the water temperature was less than 35 degrees Fahrenheit. A swimmer would likely be hypothermic by the time they were rescued.

               My fellow guide stood on the outer tube on the downstream-side of the raft. As the river twirled the boat around, he would run around the outer edge to quickly get to the downstream-side of the craft again. It would be a comical sight if the water weren’t frigid and the raft wasn’t in danger of flipping over at any moment if the river volume surged unexpectedly, as it often does.

               Scanning the water’s surface upstream of my position, I spied a rock that was closer to the middle where I could possibly reach him with my throwbag. It was a tough paddle, ascending the current like a salmon, but I did it.  Somehow, I managed to climb out of my kayak and onto a tiny boulder, without falling into the water. I secured my boat so it wouldn’t float away.

               There was just enough room on top of the rock for me to stand with my legs spread for stability. I pulled a three-foot length of rope from the orange cloth bag and readied myself to toss the bag end of the rope. The bag acted as a weight to help carry the line towards it target. If I was unsuccessful, I would have to recoil the rope and try again. A used throwbag is harder to throw and more difficult to aim with accuracy.

               With a heave, I tossed the bag and the yellow line appeared behind it from inside the bag as it flew towards Jimmy’s outstretched arms. He was standing on the boat’s bow, if the current spun it around, he would miss the bag and probably fall into the water. It was a perfect toss and the bag went right through his hands as he grabbed the rope.

               There was not much line left in the bag, another four feet and he would have been too far.

               Pulling with a steady pressure, I was able to use the river’s energy to steer him out of the hole to safety. He managed to make it to a rock where he stopped his boat to bail before he proceeded to navigate the rest of the rapids.

               Ever since that day, I’ve made a point to listen to my inner voice. There have been times when it has been a struggle. I resisted it all the way into my initial attempts at dancing but gave in completely once I found tango and have no regrets.

                In tango, the voice often says, “Dance with her again. There is something you missed.”

               That voice hasn’t been wrong yet.