Terri Hardaway stood on her back porch looking at the rain. She was really listening to the rain, since it wasn’t quite 5:30 in the morning, dark as a bat cave and freezing cold. There were actually bits of snow mixed in the rain. Despite the hour, she was already deep into her third Marlboro. It was the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the last meaningful steelhead day of the season; the previous four days had already been rained out. That meant a loss of twelve guide dates per day times four days at six hundred fifty a day or more than thirty grand gone forever. Plus whatever she and Cas would have sold in the shop—maybe another thou.
Terri made her way back into the kitchen, turned on the Weather Channel, poured her coffee and another for Cas, lit cigarette number four and began calling her guides and all the guests in nearby motels to tell them the day was scrubbed. Again.
At a few minutes to six, the store phone rang. They kept an extension in the house. Cas grabbed it with a forced smile in his voice, “G’mornin’ . . . Casper’s Fly
Fishing . . .”
“This is Homer Cole. My son Chris and I have been booked on guide trips the last four days and, uh, we’ve been weathered out, as you know. Is there any chance we can do it today? It’s, uh, our last chance.”
Cas explained that the river was up about three feet, that it looked like chocolate milk. It was just too dangerous.
“Well, see, my son starts college next week at Arizona State and, uh, this might be the last time we ever do something like this,” said Cole. “Hell, I don’t care if we just go for a boat ride. We’ve both got waders, ponchos, rain hats…besides, if you look at the Weather Channel they say a possibility of clearing by noon.”
Cas put his hand over the mouthpiece and asked his wife if maybe Eddie Willow or Carmen Phillips would take a float.
Eddie Willow was in bed next to Marge. She slept. Eddie thought about missing four guide days at what amounted to the end of the season. That was a cool two thousand buckaroos at his five hundred a day plus tips, never to be seen again. Oh, there would be a few fishing days later into December and even into January, but the hot steelhead days were over. And Cas always divided up whatever dates came in between all his guides, so that meant maybe he’d get three or four until the snow. Crap.
The phone rang and Willow already knew what was coming. Another guide day shot in the hip by what the local weather guy had predicted last week as scattered showers. “Hey,” asked Terri Hardaway, “how’d you like to try a short trip, maybe a half day at full pay? That guy Cole with his kid . . . kid’s going to Arizona State on a baseball scholarship, so maybe you can give him some advice on hitting a curve.”
More of the same lame curveball humor, thought Eddie, whose Major League Baseball career had lasted less than two years because of his inability to hit the bender.
“You could goof around the shop until nine, take an hour or so to get to the top, run the upper end, putz around until the water gets dirty below the Gap and then take out at the Upper Bridge. Wadda ya say? I have to call him back.”
Eddie thought about running the Gap alone and rolled his eyes in a “why me?” manner—nobody else on the river, the high water, wind, more rain, the need to pack lunches—everything.
Marge pulled herself up, headed for the bathroom and mumbled something that ended with, “. . . dangerous . . . and we don’t need the money that bad . . .” then pulled the door to the john closed behind her.
A buck was a buck. And five hundred plus tip was even better. Eddie agreed to the trip.
He lifted the drift boat off its blocks, hoisted it and put the trailer tongue onto a saw horse to let the water drain. Willow gasped at the exertion. At 45 years of age—nearly 20 years out of professional baseball—he was no longer the physical specimen of an athlete if he ever was. Four bottles of beer a night for 20 years will do that to a guy. Eddie found his poncho rolled in a ball in the bottom of the Hyde just as wet as wet can be; so, as the boat drained he brought the raingear into the kitchen and made an attempt to dry it off using nearly a roll of paper towels. No doubt Marge would use that as an opportunity to drive 68 miles to the Costco and buy 48 rolls of paper towels, 64 rolls of toilet paper, five big boxes of Tide, two dozen frozen dinners, a few cute winter sweaters, some cute rain boots and God knows what else cute to the tune of a cute $218.40.
They met at the store at a few minutes to nine and Eddie gave them his standard greeting, the one he’s used the past eight years,:“Gentlemen, I’m your guide Eddie Willow and we’re going to have a helluva day today if we don’t turn the boat over or even if we do.”
Homer Cole should have had IBM, Microsoft or Silicon Valley nerd stamped on his forehead. It was that obvious.
The kid was tall and thin as a rail. Shortstop, figured Eddie.
“I hear you’re going to ASU on a baseball scholarship. Good luck. I played some ball myself,” said Willow.
“Where . . . when?” asked Christopher.
“Cubs, Phillies, Japan until about twenty years ago.”
“How come you quit?”
“Quit? There was no quit. I couldn’t hit a curve any more than you can jump on the moon.”
“Who’d you play with? Anybody I’d know?”
Eddie thought back a couple of decades. “Leon Durham, Ryne Sandberg, Gary Matthews with the Cubs; Mike Schmidt, Juan Samuel and guys like that with the Phillies.”
Christopher Cole just stared at him. It was obvious to Eddie that the kid hadn’t heard of any of them.
Willow asked, “Mike Schmidt? You never heard of Mike Schmidt? Hit about 500 homers . . . Gold Glove . . . MVP. And you never heard of him?”
The kid shrugged.
Eddie was about to ask him if he’s ever heard of Babe Ruth or Ted Williams or Willie Mays, Joe DiMag or Mickey Mantle, but then figured to hell with it.
They all piled into Eddie’s crew cab Toyota and headed upriver. As the river came down its nearly 200 miles to the Pacific, it got muddier and muddier where the tributaries poured in. Best shot to find relatively clear water was from the first launch site to the bridge just below the Gap, maybe four miles. After the Gap it would be like molasses. It was nearly 10:30 when Eddie slid the Hyde off its trailer into the river. He parked the truck where the shuttle crew would find it and walked slowly down to the boat and his clients.
Eddie tied a wool sculpin imitation on each 3X leader—an olive one for Chris, a gray with black head for Homer. He added a couple of split shot to each tippet, about six inches above the flies.
“This ain’t going to be pretty, gentlemen, but it might just work,” said Willow as he regained his guide patter.
He urged his fishermen to use the outhouse at the top of the landing if need be, because it was going to be tough finding a bank to pull into downriver. All three declined use of the outhouse and peed straight into the river.
As the boat moved into the current, Eddie looked upward and be damned if there wasn’t a tiny patch of blue sky.
“We’ll be fishing the right side. Watch your back-casts with all that weight and get ’em as close under the trees as you can. Strip kind of jerky-like. Make the sculpin look like it’s wounded.”
A tiny creek was tumbling into the river about a hundred feet in front of the boat. Eddie instructed his guys to be ready . . . ready . . . ready, now cast! Father and son cast simultaneously and beautifully into the clear water and one strip later Christopher in the bow gave out a whoop as a decent-sized, dime-bright steelhead brought his line tight.
The fish took off like a coyote as the teenager’s new Orvis reel clicked in outrage. Eddie did his best to back the boat into some slack water near the bank, but he nearly hurt himself on the oars. He dropped the big pyramid-shaped lead anchor off the stern and the boat settled down. The kid fought the steelie like an old pro while his dad somehow took video footage. Eddie grabbed his phone and took a dozen shots. He netted the fish—the better part of twelve pounds—and they all took pictures and video before Eddie insisted that it go back into the water.
They straightened out the boat just as a remnant cloud drenched them. Willow brought the boat back to their original run, and on the first cast the kid hung another one! This was smaller, maybe eight pounds, and the cameras recorded it for posterity.
As Christopher was fighting his second fish, Eddie took the gray sculpin off Homer’s rod and tied an olive with brown head in its place. They repeated the process of positioning the boat, and this time, wonder of wonders, the father got one, just a bit smaller than his son’s first fish, right around ten pounds.
A 12-, a 10- and 8-pounder were nothing to sneeze at, but that was it. They fished the glory hole for a half hour before resting it and eating some soggy sandwiches in the boat, then cast into it for another twenty minutes. Not a bump.
Eddie hadn’t made the run through the Gap for at least three seasons and even if he had, it would certainly be different. He could hear the roar of water as he approached, so about 100 yards above the first chasm he pulled to the left bank.
“I want you guys out of the boat. There’s a pretty good trail—it gets a little hairy around some boulders they pulled out of the river— but you can walk it. Take your rods, something to drink, be careful and I’ll see you in the little campground at the bottom.”
Homer and Christopher shoved a couple of water bottles and a Snickers into their rain jackets, stepped out of the boat and stumbled and slid around a bit as they made their way up the muddy bank to the trail. Eddie watched them and they all waved to each other.
Eddie pushed off and pulled hard backwater to position the boat. He could no longer hold it, so he let the boat drift down pretty much on its own, just touching an oar left or right to keep it relatively straight.
He never saw the rock.
The boat hung there for a few seconds, then crashed on its port side and turned over, pitching him into the drink. It was Eddie Willow’s worst nightmare come true.
In lower water, the rock would have been a foaming cup, but today it was out of sight, and just deep enough to hit the boat amidships and crack the hull like a walnut.
With his waders full of water, swimming was impossible. He tried to get his feet in front of him to take any hit from a rock, but he was like a pile of clothes in the Maytag. He had no control whatsoever—bobbing to the top, being sucked to the bottom. Over and over he tumbled; bumping rocks, a log and then a jagged boulder got him square in the face. Eddie’s nose was broken and he lost eight teeth—four top and four bottoms. There was a deep cut above his left eye. He looked the way Tony Conigliaro did after being hit in the face by that fastball from Jack Hamilton. Eddie surfaced, flailing and grabbing at everything in sight. One more E-Ticket underwater thrill ride like the last one and he would probably die.
He grabbed the limb of a lodgepole pine that had become wedged between rocks and hung there for a few seconds to try to gain his bearings when he spotted Chris and his dad sliding down the rock cliff to try to help. Eddie was about a hundred feet out into the river with no possible way of swimming ashore. Homer searched fruitlessly for something— anything—to use. Blood was pouring out of Willow’s mouth, but hanging onto the tree he felt relatively safe.
“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” shouted Homer.
Eddie nodded. “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
“Barely.”
“Take the lines off your reels and tie them together. Tie a rock on one end and toss it to me,” screamed Eddie. It took continuous repeating for a couple of minutes until the message was understood. Chris stripped the reels of their 7-weight lines, cut the backing free and tied the ends together using a double surgeon’s knot. He now had roughly 180 feet of line. The kid searched for the perfect-sized rock, not too big, just comfortable, and tied the flyline over a notch in the stone. He then laid the line in neat coils and whizzed a sidearm smoker right at Eddie’s head. Willow barely ducked out of the way in time. The kid retrieved the line and stone and looked sheepishly at Eddie. “Sorry.”
“Get a little air under that thing. I’ll catch it,” shrieked Eddie.
This time the rock was three feet over Eddie’s head, but he shoved hard into the tree with his right hand, extended his left and grabbed it.
It’s a long drive to right field, its going, going, go . . . Eddie Willow leaps up, up over the fence and pulls it in. Holy Cow. Eddie Willow saves the game and maybe the season. The Cubs win! ” shouts Harry Caray in Eddie’s mind.
Eddie took three wraps of line under his armpits and tucked the rock into his jacket. Then he let go of the tree, straightening the line and pulling Chris onto his knees skidding into the water. The boy struggled to his feet, slipping in the muck until he got his balance and began to pull slowly, very slowly as Willow dog paddled toward the bank. With four or five feet to go to land, he hit a swirl. He could see land, he could taste it, but he couldn’t reach it. It was then that Homer arrived with one of the oars. He’d rescued it right after the wreck and figured it might come in handy. Both father and son held the oar and pulled Eddie up the bank.
He made it.
Willow had swallowed a lot of muddy water. He bent at the waist, put his hands on his knees and began to puke. Blood dribbled from his nose, mouth and above his eye as he sat on the muddy bank, feet in the river, shaking violently with cold and shock. The guide pulled himself up and motioned for the father and son to follow. “Campground,” he mumbled. . . .
Her husband seldom got back from a fishing day until dark, so it wasn’t until eight o’clock that Marge began to worry. She called Terri Hardaway and asked if she’d heard from Eddie. A chill ran over the store owner’s wife, but she kept her calm. “He probably stopped in that little beer bar up the river to warm up and dry out. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”
At nine o’clock she called Sheriff’s Search & Rescue.
Henry Rodriguez was the County Sheriff and the perfect person to run Search & Rescue. Hank had worked as a part-time guide for years when he was just a patrol officer and even now could be found on the river most days during the steelhead run beginning in mid-September. He knew the river as well as anyone.
Terri told the sheriff that Eddie had two guests—a father and teenage son—and they’d gone to the upper-most put-in and were due to take out at the Bridge Ramp below the Gap. “Eddie was going to run the Gap? In high water? Jesus,” said Rodriguez.
“Well, it’s too dark now to do anything. If they’re alive they’ll have to stay alive until morning and if they’re drowned, they’ll still be drowned.”
The S&R team assembled before dawn: three mountain men, a paramedic, five volunteer guides with their boats and the sheriff.
It took an hour from town to the scenic vista lookout on the highway overlooking the Gap. They all parked next to the sign that explained how the Gap was formed by an earthquake in 1951 that poured tons of boulders off the mountain and into the river about a mile south of the Oregon border. Later, when they blew a gap in the obstruction, that’s what they named it. The Gap.
Rodriguez surveyed the scene with his binoculars and instantly spotted the remains of Eddie’s Hyde. Then he saw a Thermos and some plastic cups along the bank, an oar, seat cushion and a hat. The three mountain men and paramedics attached their ropes to the concrete barrier railing and slid over the side, rappelling about 75 feet, then slipping and sliding over the mud, rocks and gravel to the bottom. One of them soon radioed to the sheriff. “I found a fly box. Open. Got a business card on the back says ‘Homer Cole, Ph.D., Software Engineer.’”
The sheriff smiled. Eddie had put his fishermen out before trying to run the Gap; and somebody was smart enough to leave a marker.
A few minutes later there was a second radio message. “We found an open Buck knife pointed downstream . . .” And at the bottom of the rock pile came a third call, “An empty water bottle, cap off, pointed toward the campground . . .”
Eddie Willow, Homer and Chris Cole were found huddled together under a picnic table covered by some leaves and a torn poncho. During the night the temperatures had dropped to the mid-30s and the men were nearly blue with cold. The paramedic cleaned up Eddie’s face while the Coles shared a cup of coffee; the lead rescuer had already called for a helicopter. . . .
Eddie rested on a gurney as Homer Cole videotaped the transfer from the helicopter to an ambulance. “I’ve got it all—the boat going over, you in the water, tying the fly lines together, the rock—everything.”
Willow couldn’t speak. He simply waved his arm. Then Marge held his hand, kissed his broken face and called him her “flower . . . a blooming idiot.”
Great story thanks !