River Power

Many years ago, working as a naturalist for the National Park Service on the Buffalo River, I would tell people at evening programs about the strength of the river, and how that strength multiplied with every inch of water gained during heavy rains. It had been something I learned at a young age, growing up on the Big Piney, camping on gravel bars since I was a youngster. And I would constantly pass on information which I hoped would perhaps someday save a life, but so many times, you knew you were talking to people who were in a world they knew nothing about, and they could not visualize the danger. The summer Buffalo looked so peaceful and tame.

It is very easy to not recognize any danger at all when the river is normal and the weather settled. A tent set up on a gravel bar with a nice campfire popping and crackling, the whisper of flowing water over a nearby shoal as the river goes lazily floating by. What danger? Gazing at a sky full of stars, listening to a whippoorwill calling nearby… who would worry. But twenty miles upstream in the middle of the night, a strong summer storm dumps three or four inches of water into the headwaters, and several feet of water turns the gentle river into a raging brown torrent in a matter of hours. If you are asleep, and you pulled a canoe up on that gravel bar and didn’t tie it, you may not hear the river take it away. You may not hear the hiss of your campfire coals as the current rises closer to your tent. And when you awaken, everything is fine until you realize that the dry low ground behind you is now a flowing channel that the rising river has claimed. And you are stranded on a shrinking island that once was a nice big gravel bar.

On the Buffalo, I saw it happen several times just like that. There were two or three different occasions when inexperienced floaters camped on a low gravel bar with a dry channel behind them, just as I described. No one ever drowned in such a situation that I remember, because a report would come in, and park rangers would head out in big johnboats with motors on them to rescue the campers. But some of those campers lost all their gear, and some were even found clinging to willow trees as the river rose around them, in an absolute panic.

The scariest situation I remember was a time when I was asked to go along because of the danger. A man and his two children were clinging to willow trees with only their upper bodies out of the water, and the water was so swift we couldn’t get the boat in to them without swamping it on those willows. We ran two big heavy ropes across the stream, got life jackets on them, and a park lifeguard and I carried the two children to safety on those ropes with that current pulling us under as we did. It was one of the scariest situations I have ever been in.

I have written before about the two ladies from Little Rock who tried their first float trip on the Buffalo as a storm hit the river, and one was trapped by her ankle between a submerged canoe which wrapped around a willow tree on a shoal as rising water threatened to drown her. After I wrote about that, one of the ladies involved sent a letter to me recalling in vivid detail that terrorizing day. We freed her foot as the river rose to her chin. I was just a young kid at the time, an old veteran Park Ranger by the name of Chuck Brooks directed that frenzied life-saving operation, by using hacksaws to cut and break apart the aluminum canoe.

All of us who have spent our lives on the Ozark rivers we love so much have always known how dangerous those gentle streams are when their waters swell and become unstoppable torrents of tremendous power. Finally, what I always dreaded might someday happen, came to pass in Arkansas last week, in the Ouachita mountains on two rivers I floated several decades ago. In those narrow valleys, the Caddo and the Little Missouri are such beautiful little rivers, almost too low to float in late summer, but with much more drop per mile than our southern Missouri streams.

The horror of it is too terrible to think of, the loss of twenty lives or more, campers who were taken by surprise in a tremendous flood. In the darkness, with inches of water in a tent awakening frantic campers, they step out into the darkness with a flashlight, and everywhere they shine the beam, there is flowing water. How do you remember where to go to find safety?

I look back and recall dozens and dozens of times I have been caught in heavy storms on the rivers I float, times in the night when there were rises of several feet between dusk and dawn. On the Kings River one spring, the Postlewaite brothers and I packed all our gear and two johnboats up high banks into a farmers field during the dark of night to escape a ten foot rise that no riverman in his right mind would try to navigate. On the Big Piney, I spent many a night in a cave somewhere high above the river, watching a raging storm end any chance I had of floating on at daybreak.

So I will say what I have said as long as I can remember in pages of newspapers and magazines I write for… Ozark rivers are not to be feared, but respected. Don’t take the slightest chance when dealing with flowing water which you do not have the experience to tackle. And when the rains swell the current to a certain point, none of us have the experience or the knowledge to not be in danger. If you are a grown man and want to risk your life in such a manner, it is your decision, but don’t put a youngster in danger. Leave a flooding, or rain-swollen river be, don’t take risks. And if you camp along any stream, camp reasonably high, with high ground behind you, which cannot render your camping- spot an island. When you are on the river or lake with a child, please keep a life-jacket, or some kind of quality flotation device on that child.

There are other things you might do… be someone special and make it so that there is no one who follows along behind you who would ever know you were there. If you leave trash along the river, or in any natural setting you relegate yourself to the lowest of humans, a miserable being who deserves very little in life. Someone who goes along in life flinging cans and plastic bottles along roadsides or river-banks runs the risk of having a life of little value. The earth may well benefit more from his passing than in his short existence.

Last week's pictures from Canada didn’t make it onto my website due to a technical problem, but they will be there this week. Take a look if you have a computer… the website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail lightninridge@windstream.net