Swimmin' with the Fish

As all, true river stories start:

No shit there we were…

Tatiana and Donna

Floating down the Hog Creek run of the Rogue River on a hot, late-summer day.  Ruby and Cecil were, as always, introducing new friends to the river.  They had introduced us to Steve and Donna and the Rogue when we arrived.  This time it was Bob and Shirley.  Bob was a big, brawny guy, impressing his new girlfriend with a special day.

Bob and Shirley were a picture out of an early Sawyer catalog: The beautiful, smiling couple in a two-person yellow Tahiti, both wearing the requisite lifejackets.  They were still called lifejackets then, even though they had little floatation and the PDF sides were laced to the back with a crossed stitched line, just like sneaker lacings.  Soggy sneakers was a common phrase.  That’s what we wore on our feet to be safe in the water and on the rocks.  Bob showed up in his flip-flops and with only one borrowed paddle for their boat.  They were first-timers but it was a slow, easy stretch of river so it was no big deal.   Of course if they had really been in a Sawyer catalog they both would have had paddles instead of just the macho man. 

We unloaded at the Hog Creek put in, negotiated the shuttle cars and drivers, and began pumping the various inflatable kayaks.  The water was low and the float was slow, but it was summer time and living was easy.  We were “on the Rogue again,“ for perhaps the last time that season.  Even the Salmon were finished.  More salmon than I had ever seen, before or since that summer, were floating belly up after their tiring run up the river.

Bob and Shirley were riding low and slow in the water, the yellow caboose of our Tahiti train.  The rest of the couples knew better than to share a boat.  It was a recipe for an argument, if not worse.

As the shadows grew long we paddled through the only bit of interest on the river, an unremarkable hole right above the canyon.  After going through we turned around floating backwards in the quiet water to watch the others.  Big Bob was paddling in the back of the inflatable kayak, which at this point in the day was losing air.  He followed the others through the hole.  And there he sat.  Shirley high and dry up front and Bob low in the hole, paddling like a Mississippi paddlewheel, and going nowhere.  He was sinking lower and lower in the hole as the water spilled in.  We’ve all seen it:  the back end fills with water, gets sucked in, twists and dumps every thing out.  Shirley popped up quickly and floated down to us. 

We were in the canyon and there was no shore access, only steep cliff walls.  We pulled Shirley into another boat and all watched, waiting for Bob to pop out of the hole.  But he didn’t … still he didn’t.  His boat floated down.  The Sawyer paddle Ruby had lent him was picked up.  The waterlogged “dry” bag arrived, and still there was no sign of Bob.   We waited, six inflatables in a large rock-surrounded eddy, river left.  As we waited the latté colored foam and a huge dead salmon with a glassy eyeball circled with us.  We made several attempts to push the smelly thing back into the river current, but the eddy won out each time. 

There was nothing to do but wait.   With the high rock walls we couldn’t get out to walk up the bank, and the current was too strong to paddle back up river.  Finally Bob’s head surfaced.  As he floated down, I paddled out to meet him.  He held on to my boat as we joined the others in the eddy.  He was exhausted and frightened, but all right.  The water was deep and he was too tired to hoist himself into a boat.  He floated there, resting, hanging between my boat and the next one.  His feet floated up and he laughed.  There was the flip-flop with the thong ripped out of the bottom; he was so tense his toes still gripped the little bit of rubber!

Then, out from under another boat, moving slowly but deliberately right up Bob’s very loosely fitting life jacket, ‘swam’ the stinking, bloated, dead salmon.  With a howl Bob yanked that thing out by the tail and ejected from the water into the nearest kayak!

Tatiana Bredikin