Ron and Duke don’t seem to be the sorta fellas who are gonna let a good fishing trip plan roll over and kick its li’l feet in the air and expire.
Of course, they DO seem to be the sorta fellas who you read about in the paper- all about how they went on a fishing trip and drowned under odd, but not controversial, circumstances. And possibly rolled over and kicked their size 13s in the air as they expired.
Don’t nobody make a “Hey, Y’all, Watch this…” joke now, you hear?
Look. Unicycle riders get enough stupid comments as it is. This yahoo ain’t helpin’. Click HERE for the story.
Where was I? I was at the bottom of a crack in a gorge wall. I shared the crack with an incline train… quietly sitting in its little station. Traitorous damned train. Anyhow, what’s a guy to do but climb? So I started off on the direct route and got a pretty good way along.
The natural world is an inconveniently arranged place. I mean, occasionally it works out- the way that wind and weather caused the heads of four presidents to erode right out of a mountainside in South Dakota. And a parking lot to form on the other side of ice cream vendors from the heads. Now that’s miraculous. The pyramids, forming right where the Egyptians needed them. Lucky chance, there. But normally, the Earth and all its forces are out to get us. Like, say, Winter. Or in this case.
I don’t know how to climb. I’ve been to climbing walls since this happened, as if that was going to help retroactively. But while I was down in this huge crack in the rock, I discovered that comparatively smaller rocks were wedged between the walls. Now, when I say “comparatively” I’m saying that this was a 1200 foot tall crack. “Comparatively small” can mean a rock the size of a storage building. And in this case, does. I couldn’t climb past it. Didn’t have the skills. Going to climbing walls in a few months wasn’t going to suddenly teach me to get over this boulder right now. Something to do with time and space. I dunno. %$#@.
I turned around and looked back down the way I came. I could go back and start all over, as there seemed to be a high ledge that’d get me past this boulder. Did I mention that I was hot, sweating like a potato in tinfoil and that my head was cooking? In that condition the idea that I was going all the way back down to the train station and starting over didn’t sound like a great option. There was a tiny little ledge going up from where I was, though, It angled back down the crack, but up toward the ledge that I wanted. Cool!
So I started inching my way up this little ledge, belly pressed to the wall, toes tight in my little river shoes. ‘Bout halfway up, the little ledge was playing out quick. I was trying to recall anything I could about climbing, which is a natural thing to do when you’re sticking like a treefrog to a massive rockface and you’re out of handholds, toeholds and skills. I got a memory of a panel in a Huey, Dewey and Louie comic book about toeholds and not relying on your hands and arms. I got a memory of my brother talking about climbing and how you could lock your thumb over your fingers in a hold to strengthen it. I got a memory of that dumb-assed Sylvester Stallone movie where he loses his grip on an actress and she falls about a bazillion miles to her messy death. I got nothing about being halfway up an actual ledge on an actual rock wall and what to do about it. Comic books, movies and my brother’s inexplicable failure to teach me everything I would ever need to know in an emergency had let me down.
Back to the bottom for ol’ Greg. I inched back down the little ledge and returned to the spot where I could have, should have, decided to start all over, and I started all over. I shlepped back down to the bottom of the crack, giving a dirty look at the dead train and another hopeful glance to the top. I was up there a year ago, and dammit, it was crawling with tourists. Crawling with themepark employees and all. Was there REALLY no one up there? The heat and the distance was still keeping me from making out anything particular up there, and looking straight up was only going to give me a view of the bottom of the Royal Gorge bridge- not a view of a helpful face looking downward, locking distant eyes with mine and mouthing “They’re sending a helicopter… wait where you are!” Nope. Nothing. There could be a circus going on up there, and down here I was getting lonely, overheated and possibly trapped.
Trapped. Well, there’s a happy thought.
More on that next time.
So there I was, on my back and feet out in front of me (like you’re supposed to be when lost in the whitewater) My buddy Greg Raymond is shouting something at me from behind me. Greg is one of those amazing paddlers who can do everything. I’m concentrating on keeping relaxed, moving to the left bank of the river, and hanging on to my boat. I could have sworn Greg yelled to forget the boat and as it was slowing me down, I let it go. That’ll be important later.
Before we talk about later, we should talk about earlier.
That morning, as we were preparing to get on the Arkansas river, we watched as the commercial raft companies piled all their stuff onto their trucks at the put-in. You read that right. Put all their stuff ONTO their trucks at the put-in. Instead of, as usual, taking it OFF the trucks to PUT IN to the river. You see, the Arkansas had JUST hit flood stage or whatever they call it when commercial rafts can no longer legally put a boat in the river. We were private boaters, and we weren’t covered by such rules. There was a park ranger there, and she explained that she couldn’t tell us not to get on the river, but she just had to ask what our level of experience was. Greg Raymond assured her that we’d all been paddling for ten years, more or less.
Before we go on, we should talk about earlier. Two or three years earlier. When I first got in a kayak. You get the idea.
Anyhow, Greg knew the park ranger’s father somehow- the connection between this girl in Colorado wearing a uniform and Greg Raymond’s Memphis TN life is something I don’t remember exactly, but I think it had to do with the Bluff City Canoe Club. This reassured the ranger. It didn’t reassure me one damn bit.
The river was big and pushy and we got out a lot to scout and set up throw ropes and it was great. I saw big honking waves that were daunting. I saw big holes that you paddled up the following wave to exit, and then slid backward- returning to the hole you were trying to leave. I saw waves form and explode. It worked on my timing, you bet. I paddled the biggest stuff I’ve ever paddled, possibly even counting a 16 day trip down the Grand Canyon- a trip where I was sure I’d find my boat slipping backward down waves, but never quite got stuck the way I did on the Arkansas at flood.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, I’m on my back in the water, keeping relaxed, and watching Greg come up on my right, ready to drag me to river left. It needed to be done quick-like. I remember there were more waves to be dealt with just downstream of us, and I didn’t want to deal with them out of a boat. I grabbed the stern of Greg’s boat and kicked, he got us into what was left of an eddy. I gasped and gargled and did all the usual things I do when I’ve been dumb enough to exit my boat and had to vigorously swim in stuff that isn’t designed for swimmin’ in. Greg kept yelling at me to get all the way out of the water (there are cases of people who get to shallow water and stop working to save themselves, only to be swept back out. I could easily have been that stupid, considering) but I was planted pretty good in a couple of inches of water and just sat gasping and shooting dirty looks at the downstream waves. You couldn’t see anything beyond the nearest waves. That had been my biggest worry on the river that day- you couldn’t see past the next wave- they were honkin’ huge! Now my biggest worry was where I would go from here. My paddle, then my boat had gone on to enjoy the river without me. Even if Greg or anyone else had retrieved my gear close by, the chances of getting it back to me were slim and would only put someone else in a tight spot.
But I was just a bit downstream of a concrete wall, remember? That was was the base of an incline train that travels… up to a theme park! Ah. Greg and Dennis Rhodes, if I remember rightly, did some head-to-head figuring (It had to be head-to-head, you couldn’t have heard thunder in that river. Speaking of which, Greg had NOT been telling me to forget the boat. He’d been telling me not to give up, to keep my head in the air… lots of good advice. The bit about the boat might have been in there, too, I dunno. Like I said, you couldn’t hear thunder.)
and Greg came back up to me, parked finally out of the chilly water on the bank. “You can go up the train and wait in the parking lot or follow those train tracks into that tunnel and downriver to the take-out.” There was, of all things, a set of train tracks a couple of feet higher than the water. They went along the river. Downriver, they went into a tunnel. “Which… ah… which way do you suppose the train goes on these tracks, and when do you suppose it might be running?” I asked, looking down the tracks. I could picture a train on them coming at me pretty easily. I could not, however, picture where the heck I could go to avoid such a train. Greg looked down the tracks, too. Then he looked back at the jauntily painted lower end of the incline train. “It’s your choice.”
So. It was either walk an undetermined distance down some dangerous railroad tracks, hoping that my gear was retrieved somewhere downstream and I could rejoin the run. Or ride a carnival colored tram a thousand feet or so up a crack in the side of the gorge and wait patiently in a parking lot while my friends finished the run and came to retrieve me.
I didn’t know it yet, but my boat would be found a mile or so farther down the river, and my paddle was shortly to be seen by one Dr. Alan ‘Sonny’ Salomon as it end-over-ended down the river past the take-out and on toward the far South.
I also didn’t know the damned incline train wasn’t working.
I’ll get to that next time.
The Royal Gorge, in Colorado, is home to, I think, the highest suspension bridge in the U.S.
http://www.royalgorgebridge.com/
The bridge is over the Arkansas River.
I lost a paddle there, mostly because I’m stupid, but that’s another series of stories.
I kept my life, though, and got a story out of it. You get to decide if the story’s worth telling.
I once told it around a campfire for an hour or more. The story was aided by others around the fire with me- folks I can’t ask to come here and help me type now. Maybe I can keep you as entertained as they seemed to have been with tales of scootching and cussing and swimming and all. It involves kayaks, a hat, a paddle, some fine friends, a flooding river, a black tailed deer, an incline train, rocks, a ladder, and an expensive dry top. Ready? Here we go:
On a motorbike trip around the West, I watched my father’s favorite hat sail off his head and drift aaaaaaaall the way down from the Royal Gorge Bridge to the Arkansas river far below. I timed it. It took 91 seconds. I’d like to point out here that throwing things off the bridge would get you a $50 fine. Losing your $50 hat off the bridge to a rogue breeze is free. The few of us on the motorbike trip watched carefully until the minuscule black speck hit the water far below. I was the youngest in the group and had 20/15 vision back then, and I was the only one comfortably able to still point to it as it hit the water and was instantly gone.
A year later, I was back, only I was in a kayak and looking up at the underside of the bridge. I thought it would be funny to go back and tell my father that I had been right there in the spot where his hat hit the water, so I was looking off to the river-right hand bank, scrutinizing the area for the spot where the black hat hit the white water. That’s why I didn’t see the diagonal wave. That was the wave that shunted me to the left bank and smacked me up against a concrete wall. The concrete wall was the base of the incline train that travels from the river to the bridge and the theme-park area that snuggles parasitically up to it.
When your boat is being shoved sidewise into a concrete wall (especially if it’s a flat bottomed boat like, say, Perception’s Corsica Matrix…) and then becomes upside-down, you discover that rolling up on the open side of the boat makes the flat bottom slap uselessly into the concrete wall, whereupon you flop back over into the water- a classic low-oxygen environment. The ideal thing to do would be to, of course, roll up on the OTHER side of the boat, thus using the direction of the rushing water to help you right the boat and you can then paddle away into the frankly disturbingly large rapids that you’re about to sweep into. But I did mention that big concrete wall, right? Rolling up on the left side of the boat would have been ideal but for the vertical concrete slab. If I were one of those hotshot boaters we’ve all seen, met, and wished we were, I’d have calmed down, wedged my paddle between the wall and the boat, and muscled the boat upright until the force of the water ceased working against the boat and suddenly would work in my favor. I didn’t do that. I floundered around, trying to get the paddle turned correctly for another right-hand-side roll, lost the paddle, got seriously concerned about whether or not the boat was now headed for the rapid and not at all pinned against the wall any more, and I did that thing I usually do in the worst situations. I came out of the boat.
Now that I’m sweeping powerlessly and breathlessly down a flooding river toward a largish rapid without the aid of a boat or paddle… I’m going to take a break. We’ll come back to the exciting part in a day or so…
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