Everthing's A-OK.

My umbilical hernia repair went well and I am on the mend. I have been walking every day since the surgery, and I still think I could have walked home after it.

I don't know whether they merely stitched the hole in my abdomen or inserted a mesh. There is an incision below my belly button that looks like the grin on a smiley face.

I talk to the doctor in two weeks and hopefully he will clear me for a rapid return to running. In the meantime, I've been grabbing plenty of bed rest which means reading.

I read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. What a fabulous little book, so rich with fascinating dialogue.

It had a passage in it depicting David Balfour being washed overboard in a raging sea that reminded me of my involuntary swim down the rapids in the Dolores River in Utah a year ago.

I went down, and drank my fill, and then came up and got a blink of the moon, and then down again. They say a man sinks the third time for good. I cannot be made like other folk, then; for I would not like to write how often I went down, or how often I came up again. All the while I was being hurled along, and beaten upon and choked, and then swallowed whole; and the thing was so distracting to my wits, that I was neither sorry nor afraid. ... And then all of a sudden I was in quiet water and began to come to myself.

That's pretty much how it went for me, too.

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.

A lot to say

I sure had a lot to say about the third day of my recent Bucket Trip down the Dolores River in Utah, when our boat capsized in the rapids. A friend who reads my posts said, "You tend to go on and on."

What, half a dozen or so posts concerning a single minute on (in?) the river is going on too long? Well, maybe.

But since I returned, I have related the story of my minute underneath the overturned boat to a few select friends, and have had the good fortune of receiving in return two excellent commentaries about travails on the river. The first one is from J, a running buddy of mine.

J was tubing on the Snake River many years ago, and because he was much younger and less wise, he wasn't wearing a life jacket. He can't say for sure, but he might have had one or two.

The rushing river took him straight into a large rock, where the current swirled around and around in front of the standing impediment creating a fierce mini-maelstrom. Perhaps you have never truly been on (in?) a river; but I can say from close experience that the incredible power of the water is both unrelenting and unforgiving. It can kill you like that.

The whirling well of water drove J down and he could feel the inner tube he was gripping being torn from his hands. An inner tube has buoyancy and is likely to return to the surface at some point whereas a human body might stay submerged within the center of a deep, rotating pool of water for a long time.

J held on for dear life as he was swallowed up. A few seconds later the inner tube was ejected from the whirlpool and discharged downstream, with J still clinging to it.

To this day J credits his death grip on the inner tube's handles with saving his life. In a subsequent post I'll relate what I learned from a river guide friend of mine.

Incidentally, J was practically the only person who gave me unbridled support after I ascended to the presidency (short lived) of my former running club last year and vicious board infighting broke out. He watched my back when I stood up after my last board meeting and I was, um, closely confronted by four belligerent young alpha male board members who had been disruptive throughout the meeting.

Livin on jacks and queens

Friday, May 7th was the last day of our rafting trip in Colorado and Utah, an uneventful day spent gliding down the Dolores River (which means river of sorrow) past its confluence with the Colorado River a short ways, which brought the third annual Bucket Trip to a close. On this trip I had undergone the most incredible day of my life on May 5th when two of our three boats got trapped in a rapids, with one overturning with almost deadly results. (Above: We're all still here. Trip's end. Photo by B.)

We had all survived, and become stronger for it. I brought home from the trip a gimcrack I picked up at the Denver airport, a magnet that has a Native-American saying on it.

The courage inside us is the strength that guides us. I put it on my refrigerator with magnet momentos from other trips because it reminds me of the minute that I spent underwater trying to escape from underneath the capsized boat.

The first BT was the trip of a lifetime, rafting on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The second BT was a wonderful sailing trip through the Florida Keys, gliding through the Everglades some and venturing out into the Atlantic a short way.

The trip on the Dolores River was unbelievable, an adventure that I will never, ever forget. My heartfelt thanks and admiration go to Guy and Joe Vinyard of Colorado for keeping us all alive, and to my other Sewell Hall friends, Amy, Barry, Carolyn, Harrie, Jimmy, Julia and Todd, with whom I shared this difficult and very intense personal experience.

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.

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.

Another Ride Down A Rapids Without A Boat

Our third annual Bucket Trip was the gift that kept giving, the trip from hell. The adventures kept coming at us non-stop and they weren't through yet.

On the afternoon of the third day of our trip down the Dolores River in Utah on three rafts with 10 persons, Jy had skippered our boat into a huge standing rock in the middle of a rapids and it had flipped over. After a harrowing escape from underneath the boat, I had gone on a wild ride down the rapids to the bottom.

After I shakily pulled myself out of the river, I had gone back upriver to see if I could help out with our capsized boat. I hadn't seen Jy or G, the other man in our boat, since I had been dumped unceremoniously into the frigid water.

I hoped they were both alright.

Well, they were, more or less, at least for now. When I arrived on the bank across twenty feet of torrential rapids from where the rock was, the scene was shocking.

The overturned raft was being held fast by the current against the rock we had crashed into. Jy and G were out of the water pressed against the rock themselves, standing atop the higher pontoon of the boat, shoving against it with their legs trying to get it to move off the rock.

Forty feet behind them was our largest boat, tilted precariously in the river, hung up on rocks in the rapids while its three occupants scrambled about the boat deck and stepped into the seething water which was pouring over the barely submerged river rocks in their attempts to free it. Just like our capsized boat, it was stuck tight.

On the bank with me were the last four members of our trip, both couples that had been in the 4-person paddle boat. When its captain, T, had heard the approaching rapids, he had judiciously put in on shore to scout it on foot before embarking down it.

We watched helplessly while the five persons in the river worked frenetically to free their boats. There was no getting out to them, the river was too deep and the current too strong.

The two women on shore, Ju and A, accompanied by B, went downriver on foot to try to collect anything that might break free from the boats. This is called recovery, not rescue.

We all hoped it wouldn't be bodies.

After many long minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour, G and Jy had made some progress in shifting the position of their boat. It moved downstream ever so slightly while they shoved against it while keeping their backs pressed against the vertical wall face of the standing rock they were leaning against.

Suddenly the current caught the boat and it broke free of the rock. With a shout, Jy and G scampered about trying to scramble onto the raft before it left them on the rock in the middle of the rapids.

This proved to be impossible because it was still upside down. Down the rapids it went, sunny side down, sucked down the same vortex that I had been sucked into when I got out from under the boat.

It left its crew behind as it disappeared from sight.

G, being an experienced river man, crawled higher on the tall rock where its angle was less severe and gained his feet. He climbed to the top of the twenty-foot rock and looked off downstream at his disappearing boat.

Jy, not being used to such things, was clinging to the rock face with his river shoes barely out of the water. He pressed his belly against the smooth granite, his fingers dug into a couple of slight crevices.

"G, help me, I can't get up the rock!" he called out. G kept watching his boat. Behind them, the crew of the other stuck boat were oblivious to the drama on the rock as they frantically worked in their own little island of chaos to free their boat.

Down river, A was having her own adventures, which involved going into the river to its midway point. Her status as a Boston Marathon Qualifier enabled her to save our trip from further, possibly irreparable, disaster.

Jy was aware of my presence on the bank opposite him. He had been visibly relieved, as had G, when I had showed up, because it meant that I hadn't been killed or severely injured. Jy also now had proof that a passage down the rapids was survivable.

"G, I can't climb this cliff! I'm going to swim down the rapids. Do you think I should?" Jy had a life jacket on, as did we all.

G grunted. Life on the river is tough.

He was clearly worried about the boat, which was his possession and contained all our stuff. Jy slid backwards into the raging river and was gone down the rapids in a flash!

Jy was on his own now. There were persons down below who could possibly help him if and when he emerged from the rapids.

Did I already say that life on the river is tough? (Left: Jy disappears down the rapids on a lonely ride. Good luck, buddy!)

I hadn't read the trip brochure closely enough before I came on this trip. At the last second, I almost gave in to my vague unease about it and went off to Custer's Battlefield instead. Talk about last stands. Look at them all! Don't let any escape!

Jy had vanished down the rapids. G was atop a standing rock in the rapids, twenty feet from safety across a rampaging channel of churning, frothy water.

J and his crew were caught in the rapids in the middle of the river. They had already lost their spare oar the day before when their boat got stuck at Stateline Rapids, the supposed "tough" rapids on this trip.

Unbeknownst to me, A was diving into the river at about that moment down below after a long run in pursuit of one of the paddles from G's boat. This trip was five days on a remote section of river, devoid of serviceable roads nearby and without cell phone service, and every oar was precious.

My boat, with all of its baggage, had floated away downriver upside down and was out of sight. The only possessions I had left were the soaked clothes I had on.

I had almost been drowned under the boat and then killed in the rapids.

There was the paddle boat upstream, our smallest boat, which still had to make it past the rapids.

Night would come soon enough, with its 40 degree chill.