Pay to Play

Late the next afternoon, we beached the boats to fish another salmon-choked pool, and in less than a minute we were shoulder to shoulder, working a quadruple hookup. Lysne cackled as my king ran under his bent rod.

It was a fine place to camp and a good time to call it quits, but I’m not fond of camping above a hairy rapid. Just below the pool, a pair of fallen spruce trees leaned over the main channel, then the river bent hard, the bank combed with strainers.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “We can celebrate when there’s clear sailing ahead.”

“Sure,” Wood replied. “But we were first on the last horrible, terrible, death-for-certain river bend. You’re up.”

The next half minute, Wood would later say, seemed to last an hour. Entering the river, Lysne and I lined up with the route we’d hashed out. Once the laden canoe sliced into the main current tongue, however, it was propelled downstream with terrifying speed. Draw strokes didn’t budge us. Pry strokes and stern rudders proved useless. I lost my hat as we rocketed under the timber. The craft arrowed into a wall of downed trees and suddenly we were tangled in branches, broadside to the current, water boiling against the hull.

“Don’t lean upstream!” I screamed. Lysne didn’t, but in the next instant the river swarmed over the gunwales anyway. The boat flipped, violently, and disappeared from view.

The current sucked me under. I caught a submerged tree trunk square in the chest, a blow buffered by my PFD, and I clamped an arm around the slick trunk.

I can’t say how long I hung there. Twenty seconds, perhaps? Forty?

For long moments I knew I wouldn’t make it. With my free arm, I pulled myself along the sunken trunk as the current whipped me back and forth. But the trunk grew larger and larger. It slipped from the grip of my right armpit, and then I held fast to a single branch, groping for the next with my other hand. I don’t remember holding my breath. I don’t remember the frigid water. I just remember that the thing that was swallowing me had its grip on my shins, then my knees, and then my thighs. For an odd few moments I heard a metallic ringing in my ears. A vivid scene played across my brain: It was the telephone in my kitchen at home, and it was ringing, and Julie was walking through the house looking for the phone, and I suddenly knew that if she answered the call—was the phone on the coffee table? did the kids have it in the playroom?—that the voice on the other end of the line would be apologetic and sorrowful. Then the toe of my boot dragged on something hard, and I stood up, and I could breathe.

Wood crashed through the brush, wild-eyed, as I crawled up the bank, heaving water. I waved him downstream, then clambered to my feet and started running. Somewhere below was Lysne.

The big-handed hockey player had gone overboard farther midstream than I had and vanished beyond the strainers. Stumbling through brush, I heard Wood give a cry, and my heart sank. I burst into sunlight. Wood was facedown on a mud bar, where he’d catapulted after tripping on a root. Aguilar battered his way out of a nearby thicket. A few feet away, Lysne stood chest-deep in the river, with stunned eyes and mouth open. In his hand he gripped the bow line to the canoe, half sunk and turned on its side, the gear bags still secured by rope.

Our ragged little foursome huddled by the river, dumbstruck by the turn of events. For a long time we shook our heads and tried not to meet one another’s gazes.

Wood finally looked at Lysne. “I can’t believe you saved the boat.”

“It was weird,” Lysne said, his voice rising. “I popped out of the water and saw another strainer coming for me, and I just got pissed off. I was yelling to myself: I ain’t gonna drown! I ain’t gonna drown! I went crazy, punching and kicking my way through the trees. Then boom: I saw the rope, grabbed it, and started swimming.”

I’d lost a shotgun, two fly rods and reels, and a bag of gear, but everything else that went into the river came out.

Aguilar sidled over, quietly. “You okay? I mean, in your head?”

Only then did I feel the river’s grip loosen from my legs. I began to shiver, and no one said a word.

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Tags: Alaska, canoeing, fishing, float trip, salmon, survival

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 | RSS 2.0 feed.