National Nomination

Much has changed since my last entry, and I apologize for the absence. The two major changes that have taken place since Johnny-Scout Day are (1)I'm no longer a river guide, and (2)I've been nominated for a national award!
Lemme esplain....
I worked my tail off for five weeks as a guide: running the river, havin' a blast. But then I got sick for, like, three weeks and was only able to do scenic raft trips (it's kinda hard to lift an aluminum canoe when you can't even lift your own arm above your head, ya know?) But because those aren't exactly in high demand amongst teenage boys, I was doing a lot more in the office making myself indespensible to upper management. So when Dan Jones (Charles, you know him, I think?) came looking for a job for the second half of the summer, the director and I sat down and he basically said: You're amazing and you do too much for me to let you back on the river full-time.
So now Dan Jones is on the river, and I’m full-time interning. And I actually really enjoy it. Sure, it’s not as exhilarating as the river, and I’m not going to be nearly as fit and tan as last summer, but I’m learning how to do what I want to do. And I’ve unofficially been offered the assistant camp director position for next, which is way cool. The only problem is going to be finding a job between when I graduate in December, and when I need to be back up here in Jackson in June.
As for my national award nomination, lemme esplain some more…
The first week of camp was full of excitement and danger, just as every week is, but we had quite the incident. One pinned boat, an amazing one-match fire, and a broken rib later everything was fine.
We had a huge group going down Wilson (a twenty-mile canoe trip that takes almost the entire day) so we had two groups of about 13 boats launch, then me with the raft, then two more groups with similar numbers. Well, they were having a particularly hard time that day, so I ended up going faster than the canoes and eventually overtook the second group and came up on the first. I was just passing them when a boat with a mother and her son swamped, and Matt started going after them to fix the situation. I went around a bend in the river and they disappeared. I wasn’t worried though. Swamping is the most common-place thing in the world on the river. Well, we had travelled about ten more minutes down the river when a boat from another company caught up to us. They suggested we pull over and wait for our canoes, but I knew we didn’t have any reason to, so I thanked him kindly and let him pass. (It bugged me, though, because it was the guide from Lewis and Clark Expeditions that thinks he’s something else…I didn’t want to take his advice.) But a few minutes later I got the feeling that I really should pull over, we stopped our raft on an island between the main current and a random side channel. I sat there and joked around with my rafters for a few more minutes when I looked up river and saw a woman in a scout life jacket floating down the random channel. I ran over to see if she was ok, and I realized she was barely able to keep her head above the water. So I ran back and got my throw rope and got it to her in time to tow her in. Just as I got her back to my raft to sit down and tell me how she came to be floating down the river exhausted, Matt came around the bend with her son in his canoe, searching frantically for the woman.
I finally got the full story: Just after I passed Matt going to unswamp them, they got pushed down a wrong channel. The channel is one that we never take because it’s completely blocked off at one point by a huge log. Well, he got them righted and everything, but then they swamped again and ended up going right into the log. The woman got swept under and stuck in the branches under the water, while the canoe pinned the son against the log. His head was still out of the water, though, so Matt, doing the right thing, went after the woman first. He pulled and pulled at her until he was finally able to get her head high enough out of the water to let her get a breath. But the river was still pushing thousands of pounds of pressure at the rest of her body, forcing her under the log. Well, Matt quickly explained to her that her only option was to break through the branches under the water and come out the other side. She agreed and he let her go.
She was able to break through and Matt pulled her up on the other side of the log. He told her to swim to the eddy just down river from them—right in his sight—while he went after her son. She said she understood and he let her go. But she was just too exhausted to make it and the current carried her downstream. Matt had to choose between chasing her down and helping the son. He did the latter, and after a lot of pushing and tugging managed to get the canoe off him enough to pull him out. Once he was out, Matt put him in his canoe and went after the woman. But while he was helping the son, I found the woman and towed her in.
Once we had them back together, we realized that they were both shivering uncontrollably and that the son was barely coherent. I was terrified when I saw his eyes roll back into his head and when he couldn’t tell me where he was. The woman was in the early stages of hypothermia, while the son was already setting into hypothermic shock. We stripped him down almost completely and put several layers of dry clothing on him (thankfully all of the river guides eventually pulled over with us and we had tons of spare fleeces and hats). We had four or five of those space blankets on them (apparently those things actually work!) and some of those air activated hand warmers going on their feet. There was no safe place nearby to pull them off the river and have someone pick them up, so we got them into the raft and I rushed them to the lunch spot. The water had almost completely flooded the island, but I found a dry patch of cobblestone and enough dry wood to start and amazing one match fire that was blazing in about five minutes. We had them both sit next to it, and by the end of lunch they were walking around in just their swimsuits again.
It was really scary, but when we realized they were going to be fine, it was a huge relief.
We found out later that Matt actually broke a rib in the process (he’s not sure how, but he did).
Anyway, we got a package from the mother a couple of weeks later with a bag of cookies and a bag of lifesavers each for Matt, Jamie (the camp medic, who, thankfully, was on the trip), and myself. Along with that was a thank you card informing us that we had been nominated for the National Court of Honor Lifesaving or Merit award. Kinda cool, huh?
The only bummer part is knowing that we could never win. We’re river guides…lifesaving is kind of in the job description. Oh well.
So now that I’ve spent a good amount of time avoiding mindless paperwork and writing a paper for my internship, I suppose I should return to work. Yay.