A treacherous trip on the Rogue in the rain

Last weekend Jeff and I took a very brief trip to Eugene to see my family, including my sister and her fiance who were visiting from Norway. We spent the weekend hiking, and going on a guided rafting trip on the Rogue. It turned out to be rainy in Eugene the whole time we were there, and we were hopeful that going south to the Rogue would lead us to sunshine, but no such luck-- it was drizzly and cloudy down there too. However, the rain turned out to be the least of our worries, as we had a rather dramatic encounter with a class-IV rapid.

The short story is that our raft flipped, I got caught in the rapid, and had to be rescued. The long version, if you care to read it, is this:

I was with Jeff, my mom, brother, sister, and sister's fiance, along with our guide, in a big, stable raft-- the kind where the guide sits high and uses steering oars-- floating down the Rogue. We were all appropriately helmeted and life-vested. We had successfully and smoothly gotten through our whole trip, including a class-IV rapid called Nugget Falls, and had one more big rapid-- a class IV called Powerhouse-- to get through before arriving at our take-out point. As we approached the rapid, I think that we may have been slightly off course from where we should have been. We went over the first part of it okay, but as we went down the second part, I saw that we were flipping. It happened very fast, but because I was in the back corner, in the last part of the raft to hit the water, I had a second or so to prepare as we were flipping. Later, I found out that most everyone else in the raft had not realized we had flipped, and had been totally disoriented for a little while.

Parts of what happened next, I don't completely remember. I went into the water, and at first I was near the raft-- I think I was even under it momentarily, though I don't recall for sure. The next thing I remember, the raft was moving away from me down river, and I was being pulled backwards, upriver toward the rapid. I was swimming hard, in the direction of the raft, and going nowhere. I realized that I was not going to be able to get out of this by myself, and started calling for help.

During this time, everyone else was getting out from under the raft, righting the raft, getting out of the water, and helping each other to accomplish these tasks. My mom was still in the river but against the shore; she was nearer to me than I was to the raft, but not close enough to help me. I was about 40 feet from the raft, and there was no way the raft could get to me, or I could get to the raft. There was no way I could swim forward, to get to where the water would take me downstream, away from the rapid, due to both the force of the water pulling me the other direction, and the fact that I was in foamy water (which provides less buoyancy and less to push against to try to swim forward). I knew I was going to exhaust myself quickly, swimming as hard as I was in such cold water.

I had to think of an alternative plan, and fast. I looked around, and saw that there was a rock behind me, and an area of water that was moving past that rock. I stopped swimming forward, turned around and turned over, and floated feet-first upriver, toward the rapid. When I got close to the rock I turned back over and swam toward it, grabbed on and climbed up. I was able to get to a spot where I was still almost waist-deep in water, but I was standing on a stable spot against the rock, no longer getting pulled toward a churning hole that would have surely sucked me under.

At that point, I knew I was at least temporarily safe, and I looked around to assess the situation. Jeff, my brother, and my sister's fiance were in the raft, our guide was on land, and my mom was still in the water against the shore. They were working on securing the raft, getting my mom out, and getting to me. But my sister was nowhere to be seen, which panicked me briefly. I called to my mom, she called to the raft, and then relayed back to me that my sister had been picked up by another raft (we were out with another group from the same rafting company). I didn't know until later that everyone was just hoping/assuming my sister had floated downriver and been picked up, because no one knew for sure where she was.

Eventually, our guide got to a point on the shore where she was able to throw me a rope. The rope landed on the rock, I grabbed hold and flung it over my shoulder, and got back into the water. Our guide pulled me in, and then once I had crossed over the wall of water that I had been trapped behind, I was able to grab hold of a different part of the rope and pull myself hand-over-hand to the raft. As soon as I was in reach, my brother grabbed me by the shoulder straps of my life vest and hoisted me into the boat.

Once I was in, we got moving again (with only one of two steering oars and two of seven paddles left), and paddled as quickly as we could to our take-out point, to be sure that my sister was there. She was.

It wasn't until I was on dry land that I realized how physically exhausted I was. My legs were covered in scrapes and bruises, I felt sick to my stomach, and my feet and lower legs were numb from the cold water.

In the rafting company van, on our drive back to their headquarters, our guide said that I had done great, and that someone else might have panicked, which could have been really bad. My reply to her was that it is my job to tell people not to panic. And the truth is, that even when I was in the middle of the rapid, swimming for my life, there was a part of my mind that was being a trauma psychologist. I was having the thought "What should I be doing right now? Should I be trying to stay calm, or should I be allowing my body to have it's natural fight/flight response?" And in that moment I decided I needed to do both, so I did. When I got to the rock and was able to finally relax a bit physically, I felt like I needed to throw up, and I thought to myself, "good, that's a sign my fight/flight response has been doing it's job."

Even in a potentially life-threatening situation, I apparently can't shake my nerdiness.