The Hairy Seal

Life is good until you have a brush with death.

The Hairy Seal

In the summer of 1976 I was a teenager in Northern Colorado. Longmont was a relatively small town with a population of around sixty thousand people, located about thirty miles north of Denver. There were cornfields and fields of wheat surrounding the city limits, fields that eventually became overrun with housing developments, malls, and city streets of the enormous metropolis that Longmont is today. At the time I lived at home with my mom, my sister, and two brothers near Main Street.

Main Street, where all of us teenaged motorists spent our Friday nights cruising from one end of town to the other of the long stretch of highway 287 that ran down the middle of town. Gas was expensive, eighty-nine cents a gallon. It seems that all of us just kept going back and forth, up and down Main, North and South, cruising, looking for friendly girls, looking for a party, drag racing, and spending the time with our young desires for fun; for meaning. By taking 287 North out of town, the small town of Berthed was twelve miles away, the city of Loveland another fifteen miles, and Fort Collins another twenty-two miles from there. A left turn in Loveland on Highway 34 went up into the mountains, the Thompson Canyon, and eventually it led to the small town of Estes Park. A right on 34 went to the city of Greeley.

Like most adolescents, I had some difficulties as I matured. Truancy, alcohol and drug abuse, and anger at the world I was in led to problems with the police. Mom finally had me sent to a group home in Greeley where I was forced to attend school regularly, and where I was able to come to terms with my emotions. Being from a broken home with an absent father, I was in the process of healing from getting hurt pretty bad after being hit by a pickup while on a ten speed years earlier. I was skinny, not physically strong, and sometimes had flashbacks of hearing myself screaming as the doctors set my leg. They were memories my mind thankfully repressed yet still haunted me as I grew in my troubled youth. I applied myself to my studies and spent almost two years in that house, a group home with many other teenagers whom, like myself, were dealing with adolescence. 

That summer my fellow residents and I were taken up the Thompson canyon by one of the counselors where we got to go tubing down the Thompson River; it was July 31st, 1976. It was fun, taking the old rubber enter tubes that used to be in the tires of cars back then, and riding down the river with its quick current. The water would swirl us around rocks, fallen trees, down the canyon for what became miles. As the day went by, the seven or eight of us had a blast on the river, and later in the afternoon it began to rain. Randy, the man who took us there, finally rounded us up when it started raining and we all got into his car. Driving back down the canyon road the rain became heavier.

As we drove through Loveland on our way back to Greeley, the rain became fierce; pouring so hard it was difficult for Randy to see the road because of all the rainwater. The downpour was so bad he had to pull over to the side of the road a couple of times. We finally made it back to the house in Greeley about nine at night. I slept heavily that night, exhausted from all the fun in the river. The next morning we found out about the flood on the morning news.

The dam of a reservoir below Estes Park had broken due to the heavy downpour that we were caught in as we drove down the Thompson Canyon. A wall of water over twenty feet high had rushed down the canyon, and had killed over a hundred and forty people. The television newscaster spoke about how fourteen inches of rain had fallen in four hours time, what was described as a three hundred year rainstorm where a year’s worth of rain fell in one day. The huge amount of water raced down the canyon all at once, taking with it houses, trees, and people who weren’t able to get to high ground before the wall of water swept by. There were a lot of people stranded up in the rocks of the mountains above the river, the river that my companions and I were swimming and tubing in just hours before the deluge really started.

As we stood and watched the news, images came to my mind of mangled people mashed up against the rugged rocks of the canyon. Thinking of the rain and how hard it fell, I imagined a twenty-two foot wall of water washing over us and slamming me and the other guys up against the side of one of those mountain faces at sixty-seven pounds per cubic foot. The news described some of the casualties: men, women, little girls and boys, dogs and cattle; all found dead outside Loveland after the water receded. It turned my stomach, rattled my nerves, and left me sitting on the front porch of the house I now lived in, trembling and holding back my tears. Later that day I called mom to tell her I was okay and that I was actually in the Thompson Canyon hours before the flood. She could not hold her tears back.

The summer passed, and the school year started. I endured the tedious curriculum at Greeley Central High. Because of my healing leg I wasn’t allowed to attend PE, so I focused on music and art. When the summer of 1977 came, Randy took us all camping instead of tubing. I lived for another year after that in the group home, and in the summer of 1978 I was allowed to return to my mom’s house in Longmont where I attended my senior year in high school. I’d been saving my money for a car, and was lucky enough to buy the MG.

She was a ’68 MG Midget in prime condition. Dark blue with a ragtop, it got thirty miles per gallon and would get up and go fifty miles per hour in second gear; it had four gears. It had a cassette player, nice interior, and was the finest vehicle I’ve ever driven. What is hard to remember about that car was crashing into the back of another car while I wasn’t paying attention to the road; I’d been drinking beer - DUIs weren’t as big a deal back then. It was in the MG that my little brother Budd showed me the Loveland Water Works.

Budd was three years younger than me and he hadn’t gotten his learner’s permit yet. He loved the MG, and he and I went driving in it all the time, we were very close. It was about four weeks before I had totaled the sports car, and Budd wanted to go swimming, to go to the Water Works. I had no desire to go to the Thompson Canyon, even after two years, but Budd wanted to go so we went.

He told me to head for Loveland and we headed up Main Street and out of Longmont. When we reached Loveland he showed me a turnoff indicated by a sign, and I headed down the dirt road that led toward the mountains. The road circled around the outskirts of the small city, and inclined upwards, through a thick stand of trees with wide green leaves. Finally the little car made its way to a small parking lot with a steep decline of a hill just to the side. There was the loud sound of waterfalls.

After parking and taking our shirts off, Budd and I walked to a fenced area behind some trees. There was a pretty girl at the gate who collected admission - seventy-five cents apiece to get in. The trail beyond the gate led up to a concrete platform that was shaded by more trees and above that was the top of the small hill that we climbed. A large outcropping of rock was at the top where three separate streams flowed into a chasm twenty feet or so below the rock we were standing on. I asked if the Thompson River was one of the streams flowing down but Budd didn’t know. Incidentally I had developed an aversion to that particular body of water.

The three flows of water fell into a swirling pool below. The water was white with the bubbles caused by the amounts of water spilling air down from above, and the water subsequently flowed down the hill towards the South Platte River further to the East. There was a bank formed of rock above the swirling water with three rock walls that led up to the three adjacent streams that poured down, one of which we were standing on. The noise of the water was very loud. There were some girls perched on the rocks in bathing suits near the pouring water, and a few guys were diving and jumping in, one of which was this bearded fellow with his long brown hair tied behind his neck, wearing cutoff jeans.

I watched the hairy man climb up the rocky face across from where we were standing in bare feet. As I spread a towel on the rock where we were, the guy continued to climb, making his way up and behind the waterfall in the middle, and then to the top. He walked towards Budd and me, arching his bare feet a little as he walked on the rocky top where we sat. Smiling, he raised his hand to us in greeting. I smiled and said ‘Hi.’ Suddenly the man dropped his hand and did a swan dive into the swirling, white water below.

I stood up and peered down at the water he’d just dived into. The white bubbles in the water spinned and eddied in an unmistakable strong current, obscuring anything beneath the surface to the eye. I was reluctant to jump in, not knowing if there were rocks in the water or if I could handle the undercurrent of the three rivers as they fell into one. Budd boldly jumped high over the rocks and into the water. He’d been there before, plus he was a much better swimmer than me.

As I stared at the water Budd just plunged into, I saw the hairy fellow climb up onto the lower rocks across from where I was standing, resuming his climb near the adjacent waterfall. A cool breeze blew from behind me, and shivering I sat back down on my towel, putting my arms around my shoulders to try to keep warm. Then Budd swam up from below the water, the current sweeping him over to where the hairy man was, and he started climbing the rocks as well.

It was a little embarrassing, sitting there on my towel, shivering while I watched people jump into the water, swim around to the rocks, and climb the rock face up to jump back in again. The way the center waterfall fell in such a way that people could actually climb behind it was intriguing. Watching my kid brother climb behind it and up to the top the way the hairy fellow did effected my confidence, yet I still just sat and watched; shivering. Budd eventually made his way back to the top of the rock wall, and like the hairy man, he arched his bare feet in a small limp as he walked over and sat down next to me.

“You gonna’ jump in or what, Steve?” he asked as he wiped his hair with a towel and lit up a cigarette. “The water’s great, man!”

Rubbing my healing leg, fear rose up even more. I felt awkward and frightened and excited all at the same time, watching a really attractive girl dive into the swirling, bubbly current that swirled in a counter clockwise direction.

“Sure, man, gimme’ a minute.” I replied coldly. “I’m not sure if I can handle it.” Admitting my shortcomings to Budd wasn’t an issue. The problem was displaying my inherent weakness to the other people there. There were girls there that caught my attention with their pretty hair and buxom figures beneath their skimpy swimsuits.

“Take your time, bro’.” Budd said as he stood up and tossed his half smoked cigarette away. “The current’s pretty stiff, but the water’s cold. It’s great! Thanks for bringing me here, dude.” And this time he did a nice swan dive down into the water as well.

I still felt pretty awkward as I sat and watched the water, watched Budd being carried around again in a counter-clockwise direction, and the lower rocks where he started climbing back up. There I sat smoking a cigarette, and the hairy man stepped up near where I was sitting and dove back into the water. The cigarette in my hand didn’t help warm me up as I hoped, so I resolved to give it a try. Maybe being in the water would help me warm up once I got used to it. I mashed my smoke out, stood up, and jumped.

Leaping into the air above those rocks was like stepping into a walk-in freezer. The mist that rose from the swirling water made the air much colder near the surface. As my body plunged down into the water, the icy current snatched me up, pulling me straight down. The undercurrent was a lot stronger than the apparent counter clockwise swirl of the surface water. It took every bit of effort and strength to swim to the top. The icy coldness numbed my limbs almost immediately. There was barely enough time to gasp for air before the undertow yanked me back down. The surging water below me twisted my body head over heels and I fought the force of the three streams as they joined together. That figure about the weight of water flashed through my mind again; sixty-seven pounds per cubic foot.

I curled into a ball and my body sank like a rock. My feet found the rocky bottom and I pushed myself up toward the surface. My head breached and I gasped for air. Yelling for help, I waved my arms frantically as the water brutally dragged me in the same counter clockwise direction it did with everyone else that I watched from my chilly perch above. The icy claws of the undertow started to pull me back down, for good this time, and I frantically reached up for the rock Budd climbed as my head went back down into the bitter cold bubbles.

It felt like steel fingers that wrapped around my wrist. Suddenly I was lifted up, pulled out of the water, and plopped down on the rocks like I was a great big trout. The man with the beard and the long hair tied behind his neck pulled me up with one hand, his other holding onto the rock he was standing on. It was like I was a two-year-old child that weighed twenty-five pounds instead of the hundred and forty five-pound teenager that I was.

The guy looked at me with amused eyes, and smiled. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yessir.” I answered, my eyes wildly looking at the wet rock around me. “Thank you very much, man.”

“Eh.” The hairy man looked away from me and flicked his hand toward the falling water like he was brushing a bug away in the air. Then he turned and began to climb back up to the top as if nothing happened. I sat there on the cold rock, gasping for breath, shivering from the cold.

Budd brought a towel down to me, asking if I was alright, but I ended up crouched there in a fetal attempt to alleviate the coldness. As I breathed the shivering captivated my voice in a vacuous shiver, making a ‘veh-veh-veh-veh’ sound that I couldn’t stop. After what seemed like fifteen minutes an ambulance showed up with sirens squealing, and the paramedics lowered a wire mesh litter where I was strapped in. As they hoisted me up from the coldness of the mist that clung to the swirling water, I passed out.

I woke up in the Loveland hospital later that night. Mom wasn’t there and neither was Budd, but the nurse told me that she was on her way from Longmont. All the time Budd and I spent driving around in my precious MG paid off because after they hauled me away in the ambulance, Budd climbed behind the wheel and drove all the way back to Longmont without any trouble at all. After I got out of the hospital I let the guy drive the sports car, well - until I totaled it anyway.

I never saw the hairy man after that; at least I don’t think so. His hair and his thick beard covered his facial features. I do remember that he was skinny, gaunt, like a stiff breeze would blow him over. It turned out that he admitted to the police that he was an ex Navy Seal after they hauled me away, and that he served in Viet Nam. His thin frame had no trouble at all swimming through the torrent that would’ve cleanly snipped my life out. His skinny arms, what seemed much skinnier than my own, pulled me out of the water and saved my life was nothing to him at all. He had brown eyes, his hair was bushy and seemingly coarse, and what appeared to be a long thin face.

When I was hurt by that pickup truck over five years earlier, for some reason God allowed me to live; yes, the healing process afterwards was long and arduous. Years later, when the rain began in the Thompson Canyon there came a reason to depart with the rain, thereby sparing the eight of us the carnage the twenty foot wall of water delivered to so many around us in that canyon of the beautiful Rocky Mountains three years afterwards. But when I took that scary jump from my rocky perch above the Loveland Water Works that was certainly going to be it for me. There’s no way I could have survived the chilly death the current of the junction of those three rivers had upon my weak, skinny body. I hadn’t fully recovered from the accident on the highway, and I wasn’t the swimmer that my little brother was, especially not what the hairy man was.

Sure - I was older, growing stronger, and hey; I had a beautiful sports car that was a convertible. But there I was, still alive, shivering and helpless. It seems I was kept from death once again, as opposed to those poor souls deemed to be dashed up against the rock faces by a twenty-foot wall of water, or by people who get killed on the roadways every day. Looking back there doesn’t seem to be any specific reason why I’m around after all this time, but here I am. And embracing life has become a special purpose for me that I hope to be there, able to drag seven laughing teenaged boys out of the river should it begin to rain, or to be there for a helpless skinny man with long hair and a beard, drowning in frigid undertow like the hairy Seal was for me.

SR Urie

Reviews

[Tom Benson]

As I read at first I wondered if this was fiction or autobiographical. If you'll permit the description of the style as 'rambling' I feel that was the factor that made me feel it was non-fiction. I will be reading more of your work and if I'll review it honestly - as I'm sure you would wish.
The reason I use the term 'rambling' for the style is because it comes across as the reliving of a frightening experience. I'm something of an authority on those. I've had a few. With regards to water activity I've had more than my fair share and I've had a fear of large volumes of water since childhood. Why? Nothing too difficult to understand. My supposedly caring PE teacher almost drowned me at my first swimming lesson - aged 11. Anyway, I digress. I liked the feelgood factor of the end of your story. Tom