“What happens if we can’t reach it?” another client said.
“Then you assume the safe swimmer position—on your back, feet together, legs pointed downstream. But remember this; never stand up in moving water. The river will drive your feet under a rock, bend you over, and force your head below the surface. Then it’ll drown you.”
Sanders’s crew just stared at him.
“If I can’t pull you out,” Sanders said, “swim for shore, but don’t walk away from the river. You’re miles from the nearest road. Stay right where you are. Now tighten those chinstraps. Brain buckets don’t work if they’re not on your head.”
Carlyle glanced upstream. He knew that the wall of water surging through the sluice gate at the Abanakee dam and down the spillway would soon wake up this crew.
As Sanders’s raft slid into the basin just upstream of the Indian, he said, “All ahead, easy.” The raft crawled across the calm water. “Now, give me two quick ones.” It leapt forward. “Stop. Back on the right, forward on the left.” The raft spun on its axis. “Now reverse it. Keep it going, keep it going. Okay, now stop.”
Sitting next to Sanders, Carlyle said, “Don’t tire them out. Just make sure they pay attention to your voice.”
Sanders told his crew that for the first forty-five minutes of the trip, they would be on the Indian. Then the Hudson, after dropping south through the terrain like a scar, would come barreling in on their left. The combined rivers would plow eastward before cascading into a six-mile gorge.
“The nearest road is three miles away. Those mountains you see right ahead of us? They’re with us the whole way down. Once we reach the canyon, the only way out is by this river.”
When Ryan Marshall raised his paddle, Sanders yelled, “Here we go! There’s no turning back now.”
The full snowmelt wasn’t expected until mid-April, but the river had already been transformed. Water the consistency of a daiquiri was surging down the Indian, just a sample of what waited for them in the gorge later that morning.
White-tipped waves quickly surrounded the boat as it rushed down the Indian. “Mixmaster’s just ahead of us,” Sanders said. “It’ll swallow this raft if we get too close.”
Five hundred yards downstream from the put-in, the boat sidestepped two big waves, plunged over a granite ledge, and headed straight for Mixmaster, a twenty-by-twenty whirlpool lying at the top of Staircase Rapids. Sanders would have been taught to skirt the edge of Mixmaster and pray that his crews didn’t panic when they saw what lay in front of them.
The hydraulic could neither be avoided nor finessed. Sanders would have to steer them toward the lip of a wave coming off a boulder and surf the edge of the hole, inches from the thrashing of their lives. Carlyle liked the kid and hoped he’d do well.
Sanders handled his fear of the river by getting into a zone, a cocoon of white noise, as he neared each difficult set of rapids. It was the only way he could cope with the realization of what would happen if he made a mistake.
Knowing that his crew might freak out when they spotted Mixmaster, Sanders leaned out and over the back of his boat and shoved his guide paddle into the Indian to give him better control of the raft.
He looked up for a second and saw they were three feet too far to the left. He could have asked his crew to help him, but they were focused on their fear and paddling clumsily. So he did the only thing he could. He leaned back and extended his arms another six inches over the stern of his boat, letting the current swallow his hands.
He was completely vulnerable now, the top half of his body outside the raft. His left foot, wedged under a six-inch wide piece of webbing, was the only thing securing him to the boat. But in five or six seconds, if everything went as planned, they would be past their first test of the day.
Then, just when he thought he was out of danger, Sanders toppled backward into the Indian, his body doing a cartwheel just before he hit the river.
His ordeal began the moment he tumbled into the enormous hydraulic below Mixmaster. The river scraped his body along the bottom and up toward the boil line on the far side of the hydraulic. Then the recirc wave threw him, like a child in a Kansas tornado, back to the base of the rock. Sanders got recirculated three times in twelve seconds. He was strong and well-trained, grabbed a breath each time he hit light and air, and didn’t panic.
Remembering the lessons he learned in rough surf during Seal training at Coronado beach, on his fourth pass through the hydraulic, Sanders lunged for the bottom, under the boil line, and then up to the surface.
Turning on his back to see what lay downstream, he waited for someone to haul him in. But once the Indian had him, it never gave him a chance for redemption. It flushed him downstream another fifty yards, scraping his body across rocks and gravel. Then the current hauled him across a submerged tree, opening a three-inch gash over his left eye and dislocating his right shoulder.
When Sanders thought the Indian could damage him no more, it tossed him toward a boulder, one whose underside had been scraped clean by the spring snowmelt. Then the remainder of his good luck, which had carried him from a shooting war in the Middle East to this unspoiled wilderness, ran out.
As he neared that boulder, Sanders, exhausted and disoriented, attempted to stand up. The river immediately wedged his right foot under the rock as fifteen hundred cubic feet of water a second began working at the back of his thigh like a pit bull on a poodle. Then the Indian grabbed his other leg and pinned that one, too.
Although they appear as disobedient as
