THIRTY-SEVEN: “Tragic Luck”
We should have lost more people that morning. As Danny ran down the road towards Captain Eddie, I was screaming at him to stop. No way he could hear me. But Cameron was screaming at me to get back in the truck, and I could hear him fine. As the driver, I had to do what was asked of me, or I could put us all at risk. I knew that, but that was my son running towards the people trying to kill us. Never taking my eyes off Danny, I crawled back into the truck as slowly and grudgingly as humanly possible.
From the front seat I watched Cameron follow Danny down the road towards the captain. What was going on? I didn’t take my eyes off the scene through our back window. I saw the door open on one of the jeeps and then slam shut again. Then I saw the driver door open, some sparks fly, and a large man tumble out of the jeep and down the riverbank. Was that the captain? I wanted to get out of the truck and at least see what was going on, or turn the truck around and try to give Danny some cover, but for some reason no one was shooting at Danny. And for some even stranger reason, Danny didn’t appear to be paying any attention to the jeeps he was approaching. There had to be someone in the river, and knowing which truck had ended up in the water, I was convinced the only person who would make Danny disregard all safety and common sense was Hayley. I couldn’t stay in the truck any longer.
I opened the door and stepped out as a bullet hit the back of the truck. I raised my hands but didn’t move, ignoring the conventional wisdom to seek cover, watching from several hundred yards as Cameron stood in the middle of the road with his gun pointed at the jeeps. I heard Cameron yell something back at me that sounded like, “Some other fish, Ryan!” The words meant nothing to me. I stayed where I was. Another man had dismounted from the jeeps and was pointing his gun at Cameron. Danny was nowhere in sight.
A couple minutes later, I saw Danny climb up from the river with a body in his arms. I wanted to run, but Cameron’s hand held up towards me and the fact I’d just been shot at kept me in my place. I knew it was Hayley, and as soon as I saw the man get back in his vehicle and the jeeps turn around and drive away, I ran towards Danny to help.
Danny handed her to me, and I carried her back to the truck. He said nothing more than, “Get her warm, Dad.” Then he was off again. Jenna and Kate made room for her in the back of our truck, and Jenna—being our resident nurse—began the process of warming her up. I turned my attention back to Danny and Cameron as they tried to figure out some way of reaching Wes’s truck in the water, on the other side of the river.
Mom and Dad’s truck was still safely on the road, about three hundred yards north of us. The flash flood had left a wide, debris-filled river in its wake and effectively cut us off. There were easily two hundred yards of churning water between our truck and Dad’s. From what we could see, it appeared as if the wall of water had descended from the eastern canyon. It had to have caught Wes by surprise, carried their truck across the river and slammed it into the far canyon wall.
It seemed there was only one way to get to Wes’s truck, and it would involve basically making a full circle. Whoever went would have to go north from our truck to Dad’s, then somehow west across the canyon before coming back south along the steep cliff walls above Wes’s truck. If everything went as intended, they’d rescue whoever was in the truck still and eventually end up back at our truck. I was pretty confident the rescue party would be Danny.
Fortunately, we had plenty of high quality climbing rope. Four sixty-meter packs in fact, a little over two hundred and fifty yards. The problem was, half the rope was in Dad’s truck and the other half was in ours. Somehow we needed to connect the two halves.
About a half-mile upriver, the sudden rise in water had washed out the base of a canyon wall, which had crashed into the water, creating somewhat of a natural rock bridge that reached partially across. Danny signaled his grandpa to take the rope in the back of his truck over to that point. Dad could easily handle the thirty pounds of his two packs on his own, but Tara helped him anyway. Mom and Emily stayed back in the truck.
Danny stopped to talk to Blake for a minute. Blake got out of his truck and pulled his pack out of the back end. Danny’s letting Blake do this? He dug through the pack for a minute and then handed Danny three of his climbing carabiners. Danny clipped them onto his belt. Nope. I was right. Danny’s going. Danny grabbed a life jacket out of the back of Blake’s truck; then he, Cameron and I headed off to meet Tara and Dad.
As we walked towards the rock bridge Danny told us Wes was gone. Hayley said he’d been swept out the door with her and never seen again. We were stunned—devastated—and walked the rest of the way to the crossing in silence. Unbelievable.
Across from us, Dad tied their two packs of rope together, and Tara used her roping skills from the farm to form a big lasso on one end. She flung the rope out into the river, upstream from the intended crossing point. After several attempts, she managed to get the lasso far enough out in the river so Danny could hook it with a long branch. He pulled the rope up on our side and secured it to our two packs. He then scaled the canyon wall behind us to tie the rope to a tree. Danny instructed his grandfather to fasten the other end to the base of a tree on their side. I watched Danny put on the fluorescent orange life jacket and take the large carabiner off his belt. He clipped it to the rope. Grabbing onto the carabiner with both hands, he invested all his faith in their knots and slowly zip-lined from our side of the river to the other. Clever. Insane…but clever.
When Danny landed safely, Cameron untied the rope on our end, and Danny pulled it all across to the other side. Danny hauled all sixty pounds, two hundred-fifty yards, of rope up the other side. He stopped at Grandpa’s truck long enough to grab the harpoon gun he’d picked up in Fort Collins. I saw him say something to Dad and Tara and saw Tara cover her mouth. Must have told them about Wes. He slung the gun over his shoulder and tied an end of the rope to his belt. I watched as he walked briskly north to a trestle of a bridge on the Big Thompson River, now mostly underwater. Danny shimmied his way across the trestle and then lunged through the last twenty feet of water to the other side of the river canyon to our left.
As Danny climbed up the canyon wall, he gradually disappeared into the forest. He reemerged five minutes later, about thirty yards directly above Wes’s truck in the water. He fastened one end of the rope to the harpoon and fired it across the canyon towards us, but just over our heads. The harpoon struck the wall of dirt behind us, but didn’t stick, and Cameron tackled the rope before it went back into the river. After Danny had secured it to several trees on his side, above the river canyon, we secured our end of the rope to the two trucks. We then pulled the vehicles a little further away to make the rope as taut as possible.
Danny chopped off the fifty or so excess yards of rope on his end. I watched through binoculars, as he appeared to yell something down at the truck, nodded, flashed a thumbs-up, and then quickly began tying knots in the rope every several feet. What was he doing? I’d counted on him creating another makeshift zip-line, after seeing how effective the first one was, but that didn’t seem to be what he had in mind now. Or did he? Having completed the knots, he was now tying each end of the short rope to a carabiner. He clicked one carabiner onto the rope just above his head. He then took off his life jacket and attached it to the carabiner on the other end, lowering it down to the truck in the water. We saw the first signs of life in the truck at that point, as an arm reached out and grabbed the life jacket, pulling it inside. Danny yelled something down towards the truck again, but I couldn’t read his lips and we couldn’t hear anything across the river’s roar. As the short rope tightened, it seemed someone below was anchoring it to the truck. Another thumbs-up from Danny suggested they had accomplished whatever he’d communicated. Next thing we knew, Danny was sliding down the short rope, using the knots he’d tied as footholds. Brilliant. He reached the base of the rope and stepped gently down on top of the truck and then slowly lowered himself inside it.