Prologue

    Most children are told fantastic stories, which they gradually come to realize are not true. As I grew up, the fantastic stories I’d heard as a young child turned out to be true. The more I learned the more fantastic and true the stories grew.

    They were unlike the stories other children heard. They were gruesome, improbable, and sad. I didn't repeat them because I thought no one would believe me. They were the stories of a young man falling out of the sky. Unlike Icarus, who had flown too high, he had not flown high enough. At 27,000 feet, his wing was blown off by a German Flakbatalion, which was firing 88 millimeter anti-aircraft shells over the rail yards outside of Dusseldorf. And unlike Icarus, he's still alive as I write this.

    The young man, my father, was a 23-year-old First Lieutenant. He was piloting a B-17 for the Eighth Air Force near the end of World War II, when that organization had evolved into a marvelous machine for turning young men into old memories. He was on his twenty-fifth and last mission, which he was eager to complete, because he and his buddy, David Swift, were going to sign up to fly P-51 Mustang fighter planes, the knights of the sky. My father was like that, despite having been shot down before. He'd enlisted in the last cavalry outfit before the war. He rode horses at a full gallop while emptying the clip of his .45 Model 1911-A, reloading while turning to come back and hit the targets again. When the war started, the cavalry was mechanized, and he began searching for the next best thing. He discovered airplanes. He went out for fighters, but they needed bomber pilots, and as his commanding officer told me 45 years later, “Your dad had a flair for flying on instruments.”

    When his B-17 was hit, January 23, 1945, he was the lead pilot for one of those enormous air raids the U.S. was conducting then. The Commandant of the 398th Bomb Group, Colonel Frank Hunter, had asked my father’s regular co-pilot to stand down so that he could fly right seat in the lead plane and see the action. The bombers had taken off in great waves of smoke before dawn, formed up, and churned out over the English Channel from Nuthampstead Base.

    They’d reached the target area and were on the bomb run when ground fire from the flakbatalion cut the left wing of my father’s B-17 in half just inboard of the number one engine. It was rotten luck.

Bending the Map

    When Ken Killip set out on the trail at Milner Pass in Rocky Mountain National Park at dawn on August 8, 1998, he had the nagging sense that he should not have come. A group of friends had planned the three-day back country hiking and fishing trip, but the others had gradually dropped out until only Killip and his friend John York were left. Killip, a firefighter, wondered if he should drop out, too, but decided to go ahead with the trip. From the trailhead, their route would follow the Continental Divide south for four miles, climbing 2,000 feet to the top of Mount Ida. There, at an altitude of 12,889 feet, they'd turn east, descend into the Gorge Lakes drainage, and hike two miles to Rock Lake. While six miles doesn't sound like much, hiking with a full pack to nearly 13,000 feet is serious business. In addition, Rock Lake sits at the edge of Forest Canyon, a densely wooded wilderness in the Big Thompson River valley. And as the local district ranger would later say, "It's one of the most remote areas in the park. It's pretty unforgiving."

    Killip had plenty of outdoor experience. He had been with the Parker Fire Protection District just south of Denver for twenty-four years. He'd even had some survival training in the military. But Killip had never been in a place quite so rugged as this. And now the terrain, the altitude, and the heavy pack were taking their toll. He'd already given the tent to York to carry. York, a fellow firefighter and strong outdoorsman, repeatedly had to wait for Killip to catch up, and after five or six hours of that, York grew impatient and left Killip to fend for himself. Mismatching the abilities of people in the outdoors is a sure way to get into trouble. People routinely fail to realize that they have to travel at the speed of the slowest member, not the fastest.

    Killip had been following York, who had been there before and knew the way. And although Killip had the map, York had the compass. They'd begun on a trail, but beyond the top of Mount Ida, it was a trailless wilderness, where you need both map and compass. Now, as he watched York disappear into the approaching weather, Killip didn't comprehend the insidious processes that were taking place. The world, though constantly changing, was the same as it had always been. The processes that would betray Killip were all taking place inside of him.

    ...a storm was rolling in, and Killip did not want to be the tallest object on the ridge. Grasping at the wished-for reality, Killip concluded that all he'd have to do was hurry on ahead, and he'd find York. When at last the lightning stopped, Killip pressed on in a driving rain, intent on salvaging the trip.

A Gorilla in Our Midst

    The Illinois River in southwestern Oregon has thirty-five miles of class III to IV rapids with a class V, moss-covered gorge in the middle. That section is known as the Green Wall. Gary Hough, a minister on holiday, knew that the Illinois could only be run at flows between 900 and 3,000 cubic feet per second. He also knew that half an inch of rain would be sufficient to bring the flow above 4,000 cubic feet per second, at which volume the Illinois would be too rough for even the most prodigious paddler. Conditions looked right, if just barely, that Saturday morning when his group began the trip. The flow was 2,000 cubic feet per second. Although a storm was predicted for late Sunday, Hough estimated that they'd have enough time for the three parties attempting the run to get through. He was willing to accept a certain level of risk for the reward of the trip. He had a clear idea of the dynamic forces involved in the environment he was about to enter. He had a reasonable conception of his ability to deal with it, and he knew what changes in the system would overpower his skills.

    Shortly after Hough’s party set out on March 22, 1998, it began to rain. He did the right thing: He ordered the craft pulled out and had his group make camp. It wasn’t much like the kind of fun they had planned. But then again, the water was rising so fast they had to move their craft several times to keep them from washing away. Conditions in the real world, the objective hazard level, had exceeded the risk Hough was willing to accept. The environment had changed, and he adapted. Using his reason to manage emotion and emotion to inform reason, he survived.

    Between March 21 and 23, 3 inches of rain fell, melting snow in the Siskiyou Mountains, adding even more water to the flow. The river rose 15 feet and the flow reached 13,500 cubic feet per second. According to Charlie Walbridge’s River Safety Report, “this surge caused havoc among weekend river runners.”

    “Anybody who's paid attention to a flooding river will know it,” Hough later said of the sound that woke him the next morning. “There’s the roar of the full-throated river, but on top of that, as if it’s a layer you could pick up and remove, there’s the hiss. That hiss basically says, ‘Keep your distance.’”

    That hiss was enough for Hough. “When the river has been coming up a foot an hour all night, when it’s gone from clear to chocolate milk, when there are no more eddies and there are 18-inch diameter trees going down at 15 miles an hour, it’s just not a tough decision,” Hough said. But as John F. Kennedy once remarked, “There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.”