A river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men.
Mark Twain
Hedge funders, Jerry and Judy were on a bucket list, family dream vacation, on the Salmon River in the Frank Church Wilderness in central Idaho, an untrammeled wilderness the size of Connecticut, ‘where man is just a visitor, who leaves’. A-list, Baby Boomers relaxing effortlessly on a sunny summer day in the lap of luxury on a top-shelf, commercial river trip, Jerry was suddenly and ignominiously tossed from the boat as it entered an inconsequential, unnamed rapid. Immersed instantly in a brand-new underwater environment of cold-water waves and rocks, bubbles and sediment, fish and algae, he struggled to get to the surface, unsuccessfully. His industrial-sized life-jacket tugged ineffectively at his shoulders as the river drove him incessantly down to the bottom.
‘Relax,’ he thought, this happens all the time
and the guides know what to do,’ as he stretched his legs downstream as
previously instructed, not quiet knowing which way was up or down. Running out
of breath quickly, he tried to swim to the surface time and again, only to get
sucked down into the gloam before he could even get a gulp of air. ‘Something is radically wrong here,’ he
thought, I should be doing the backstroke on the sunny surface and looking for
an eddy or the boat.’ ‘It is time to
panic with all my might.’
The boats were rowing and positioning
for the save, scouting the rapids for a bobbing head, with a throw-rope, family
members in the bow and stern, trained just a few days before. The kids were increasingly horrified as time
ticked by, looking for any sight of dad.
After a long while Judy began to think half-heartedly, ‘these kids are
orphans.’ Meanwhile Jerry continued to
churn randomly in the gloom of the killer rapid, washing machine, keeper hole,
fighting for his life, suspended between the surface and the rocky bottom of
the river, thinking, ‘Holy crap, I’m drowning.’
Fighting with all he had, he battled the maelstrom, stressing and
straining, circling and recycling in the same endless loop. In the cold water
he battled hypothermia and started to care less and succumb.
When his strength, will and air were
about to runout and he was about to give up, he felt the hand of a
counterintuitive God nudge him down and encourage him to swim out the
bottom. With nothing else to lose, he
took off his life-jacket and swam toward the dark bottom. Miraculously he caught a current along the
river-bed that whisked him quickly downstream, out of the chaotic turbulent,
keeper-hole into calmer water that settled with organized laminar flow.
Regaining his natural buoyancy and screaming for air, he exploded through the
surface into the clear, calm, blue light of day, gasping violently for oxygen,
well downstream of the boats and his family.
They could not see or hear him yet, so he slowly swam towards the eddy
by the shore and hauled his sorry ass out on to the beach, hugging the warm
sand, glad to be alive. He could hardly yell or be heard above the roar of the
whitewater. When his eldest daughter
spotted him and the boats eventually caught up, his youngest son said, ‘Dad you
don’t look too good.’ When Judy embraced
him long and hard they were both shivering with tears in their eyes. Jerry was strangely calm, knowing that it was
not his day, with a newfound appreciation for the power, persistence and
recklessness of water.
Jerry and Judy had experienced,
firsthand, a keeper hole rapid that occur naturally in rivers and below
man-made diversion dam structures,. The
river transitions from deep and slow water above the rapid into the shallow,
faster water of the rapid to dissipate energy of the steeper slope. It then jumps back again quickly to the more
efficient slow water when the slope flattens, creating a counter-clockwise,
upstream flowing hydraulic, rotating back on itself. If the river is flat enough and there is sufficient
backwater, this hydraulic-jump can become submerged and out of sight, creating
a vertical back eddy flow. These
dangerous hydraulics now kill more than 100 people a year in the United States
alone.
Over the last thirty years there has
been an effort to address this problem by identifying and inventorying these
occurrences, mitigating and removing them while educating and alerting
recreationalists and the public. These
efforts have met resistance at the Federal or State level by legislators and
uniquely qualified dam regulators, saying it is an unfunded mandate that they
have no authority or funding to address.
‘It is not my job,’ they claim.
Over this time more than one thousand people may have been killed.
These periodic occurrences fall short of the
catastrophic emergencies needed for us to notice, act and assume
responsibility. The private sector has
chipped in to help but there is not much money to be earned in this pursuit of
unidentified owners and uninterested politicians. Academia has helped generously with an Ai
inventory from aerial photos showing thousands of these structures nationwide,
mostly in the mid-west where the rivers are flat and the hydraulics are
submerged. This effort inspired funding
for a full national inventory with ground-truthing, but the effort has stalled
as funding has been cut by the latest Administration. Dam safety organizations
efforts at public relations and a nationwide education program with consistent messaging
and warning signage has also been helpful, but ultimately not enough and has
fallen short. As we remain lost in the
process, churning around as if caught in a keeper hole hydraulic, we realize
that it is up to the water people in the know to demand action. Saying it is not my job does not cut I
anymore. If the people lead, the leaders
will follow. We must take off our safe
life-jackets and swim down and out of our process cycle, to rise to the
surface, breathe again and flow freely like water.
