Note: The following is a true story that I use as an example for my students when they write their own narrative essays.
It hit me like a ton of bricks the day that David Butcher died. I was at Morehouse Park fishing for whatever would bite in the Straight River, dropping a hook loaded with corn to catch carp, or perhaps casting a spoon purchased at a bait shop on one of our family fishing trips in order to hook a northern pike. We didn’t really know what the commotion was all about until police cars and ambulances lined the streets and suddenly the banks of the river, which usually had enough room for everyone to have plenty of space and privacy. They were now teeming with people milling about and asking what had happened.
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| The Morehouse Park dam in Owatonna, Minnesota. |
My mom tells me that she was frantic and scared when word came on the radio about the death. She knew where I was and she is the type of person that believes it is fine to hope for the best if you are prepared for the worst. She was preparing herself for the worst news she could think of and wasn’t going to rest until she knew for sure. On that day, she loaded up my older brother and sister along with my youngest sister in the mint green, 1977 Chevrolet Malibu Classic with only an AM radio, and sped down the road to the park to find out if it was her son. When she found me, she scooped me up, loaded me in the car, and drove home. Along the way, I thought about my last excursion to the river a few weeks earlier.
I remember it seemed like a good idea, and a fun one at that. During the canoe races early in the year, we had all seen the paddlers shooting down the water, which was high in the early spring thanks to all of the runoff. In fact, the water was so high that the paddlers could shoot right over the dam without even the normal 10-foot drop. That was why a couple of weeks later when Scott Bedard asked if I wanted to go ride over the dam with him I jumped at the chance. It seemed like fun and would be quite an adventure that none of the kids back in school would believe. Scott was always good for doing new and interesting things — smoking a cigarette, sneaking out at night, or maybe shoplifting here and there were all some of his favorite pastimes. Sometimes he could get me to go along with these things. I made a note to myself that my mom did not need to know just who I would be with on this day. She knew Scott, too.
The day of our excursion was sunny and bright and seemed to be just another day. Scott showed up along with Nick Swanson and Matt Helgeson, making it four of us who were going to ride the rapids over the dam. The idea that the water level and conditions could have changed over the last few weeks was the farthest things from our minds and the thought of going down and checking out the dam and water level would have probably elicited a comment of “pussy” out of the other adventurers — if we would have even thought of it. No, we felt no fear and no concern about our adventure that lay ahead. After all, we had endured beatings from older brothers, getting kicked off of our bikes by older burnouts on State Street, and suffered massive wipeouts coming off of the jump at “The Mountain,” a dirt track built on a pile of leftover construction dirt in a large vacant lot. How bad could this be?
My first answer to that appeared when Scott pulled out an inflatable raft instead of a canoe. “What the hell is this?” my 10-year-old self spoke, testing the waters of this new method of emphatic expression that would have earned me a smack across the face at home. “Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh,” Scott replied in his nasally laugh, rapid fire. “Are ya chicken?”
No. No I wasn’t. After making sure the raft was fully inflated, we loaded up about 50 feet upstream from the dam with Scott in front, Nick next followed by Matt, who we all called Helgy. I was the last one in the raft and we shoved off from shore with our hands and used the same to paddle toward the middle of the river to let the current take us over the dam. As we neared the dam, I started to have some misgivings about this adventure as I saw that the water level had returned to normal over the past few weeks. We must have let out a collective “Oh ****!” as we started over the dam and the only thing I could even think to do was close my eyes when I saw the raft literally bend in half at the middle as we were pulled over in a quick jerk.
My eyes opened and every pain receptor in my backside screamed to life as I cracked my behind on a rock on the way down, about eight feet. Miraculously, as I looked in front of me in the raft, all of us were still in it and floating along down stream. “I think I broke my ass!” I yelled, half in pain and half in exhilaration at the monumental thing we had just done. Eventually the current slowed and we made our way to shore and headed home to parents who had no idea what we had done. And we weren’t telling them.
The day that David Butcher died is the day I realized that things don’t always make sense. While we all made it out of the waterfall ride unscathed and alive, albeit with a sore bum, we probably shouldn’t have. See, David Butcher was simply fishing below the dam, something that kids and adults have done for as long as I can remember. He was trying to get out to water that was a bit deeper by stepping on the rocks that broke through the surface, also something that local fishermen often did. On this day, however, this boy who was just a few years older than me slipped on the mossy surface and fell into the water near the dam, almost noiselessly going under and not emerging until his body was found a couple miles downstream a few days later.
I’d like to say that I have never done anything stupid since that day, but that would be a lie. However, the experience certainly changed me as I began to ponder my mortality. What if it would have been me? What would my family have done? What experiences would I have missed? Why was it that boy and not the four of us brave, mindless, stupid kids?
If our experiences help shape who we are, David Butcher’s death has made a subtle and important impact on me. It is morbid to think about, but everything we have and hold dear can disappear in an instant. Things do not always make sense, especially when luck is involved. Luckily, I am able to have this revelation. David Butcher wasn’t.
