Flirts with death: Write on the edge
By: Alan O'Hashi, Views Behind The Lens
Tags: Storytelling, Life Lessons, Death And Dying, Writing, Near Death Experiences

Big Thompson Flood — July 31, 1976

By Alan O’Hashi — from True Stories of a Mediocre Writer

Not that I plan for it, but I’ve had flirts with death every 15 to 20 years. I view them as hedges against the unknown, at least until my luck totally runs out.

My latest close call began in earnest after Thanksgiving 2013. I wasn’t getting any better, but getting worse. During the previous six months, I was mostly in denial about how sick I was to avoid being scared about it.

December 16th, the day after a holiday party at my cohousing community, I called 911. The ambulance, fire truck, and police car pulled up in front of the house, loaded me up, and hauled me away.

That night was a miserable one in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). I was ill with an oddball lung disease that kept me flat on my deathbed for six weeks.

I must have slept some, but the air flowing out of the respirator reminded me of when I climbed into a Chinook helicopter when rescued from the Big Thompson Flood, which was my first close call with death in 1976 when I was fortunate and only lost my car.

That summer, I worked for the U.S. National Park Service at Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO) in Colorado.

I don’t know if this had any influence, but I befriended a former U.S. Congressman (D-CO) named Wayne Aspinall, a guest scholar at the University of Wyoming political science department when I was in grad school there.

He was the former chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.

Back in those days, I was a College Republican. The Congressman and I had some spirited discussions in class, like why the phone company should be a monopoly and not broken up into individual service providers.

As side notes, I still think telecommunications would have been better off with Bell Telephone still classified as a utility than opened up for free-market competition. The internet has become as necessary as phone service, and those should be nationalized.

Despite our ideological differences, he offered to write a few letters of recommendation to the U.S. National Park Service to support my job application to work as a park ranger.

I was told ranger jobs were hard to come by and applied all over the country. I ended up being hired at ROMO, my first choice. ROMO was the radio call sign for park headquarters. My idea was to work summers in ROMO and winters in warmer climates.

I lived that summer in a rustic cabin as the ranger overseeing the Glacier Basin Campground. When the weekend rolled around, I drove my pea-green Ford Pinto to Cheyenne Frontier Days (CFD) the last weekend in July.

It’s a big rodeo and celebration known as “The Daddy of ’em All.” There were a couple of other seasonal rangers who covered my shift while I was gone.

I met up with a few of my friends for a weekend of jocularity. The Mayflower Bar was still open, and Downtown Cheyenne was still a happening place during CFD.

It was Saturday night, and rather than crash on a pal’s basement couch, I chose to drive back to Colorado over the very logical arguments posed by my friends to stay over.

I just didn’t want to go out on the town that night. My campground shift began at 11:00 a.m. I would have made it in plenty of time had I stayed over in Cheyenne.

It was an uneventful drive until I turned onto U.S. Highway 34 into Loveland. The horizon was crimson red and solid black. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” I thought, and the remaining drive should be no problem.

After a straight shot through town and meandering the high canyon walls and two-lane highway with no shoulder known as “The Narrows,” a caravan of cars, trucks, and RVs headed east on U.S. 34.

“Why was I the only one heading west toward the park?” I said to myself when a Colorado highway patrolman stopped me.

“There’s some bad water ahead. Turn around at Drake,” he advised. I didn’t make it that far.

There were a few inches of water streaming across the highway. I slowed down to drive through. Suddenly, I saw something in the middle of the road that I couldn’t recognize.

Then, uprooted trees, unrecognizable junk, and debris floated by. I expected to see the Wicked Witch of the West, Miss Gulch, and Toto, too, hover by.

The car careened into the rising wall of water. Suddenly the deluge slopped water over the hood of the car that stalled the engine.

A family in a sedan headed in the opposite direction had the interior lights on, illuminating the terrified faces of the passengers.

That car with LV Loveland license plates floated to the edge of the road and then swept away into the canyon’s darkness.

In the middle of the road, the unknown thing was a porta-potty that floated over and caught my bumper. It was a rudder that steered my Pinto towards the canyon wall and not into the torrent.

I couldn’t open the car door. After hearing and feeling thumping boulders banging into the car body, I climbed out of the driver’s side window and waded to higher ground.

What seemed like a few minutes later, an orange-painted Colorado Department of Transportation truck pulled up with a bunch of other people.

I climbed up, and we were all dropped off at Rainbow Bend, where we were allowed to crash in the guest bungalows there.

I can sleep through anything.

The next morning, when the waters subsided, the road was totally washed out. Trophy-sized fish lay on what was left of the highway.

When I woke up and looked around the area, I came upon a human corpse covered with a sheet of black plastic. The canyon wall was plastered with pine trees, crumpled trailers, and cars. Maybe mine was among them.

The little store at Rainbow Bend sold convenience store-type food. I bought a pack of cold hot dogs. The guy I befriended picked up a pack of bologna.

We thought about walking to Estes Park but heard Lake Estes near there was ready to crest.

Besides, it would have been a 15-mile walk on a good day. We instead hiked up to higher ground above what remained of U.S. 34.

The stranded folks in my area must have been a low priority for evacuation. We located a few cans of house paint and marked a big “X” on an open spot where the helicopter could land.

It was the afternoon by the time a Chinook helicopter was visible. The “whop-whop-whop” of the churning chopper blades came closer. Upon its descent, the circulating air blew dust and debris all around.

After loading up, we were dropped off at the makeshift Red Cross relief station in Loveland.

The only thing I rummaged from the high school gym provisions was a dry pair of socks from a huge box, and even though I don’t drink coffee in the afternoon, I grabbed a steaming styrofoam cup of warmed-over Joe.

All the phone lines were down. I couldn’t contact anyone. My parents caught wind that I was stuck in the canyon and drove down from Laramie to look for me. Meanwhile, I caught a ride to Cheyenne and dropped off at my friend Tad Leeper’s house. My folks eventually caught up with me there.

After the Big Thompson Flood event, I thought I lived on borrowed time and plummeted through life a bit recklessly while earning my chops in wild and crazy Gillette, Wyoming, at my first job out of graduate school.

I later altered my perspective that my Big Thompson Flood adventure gave me another chance at a good life rather than my last chance at a risky one. I’d write about that, but it will be better told after the characters are dead to do the story justice.

The ICU nurse was messing around with the whirring respirator blowing air all over the place. That woke me up. During those six weeks, beginning in December 2013, my life passed before my eyes.

The visit from Charles Dickens’s “Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come,” who visited Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843) and later myself, was a huge moment of clarity about needing to be in better touch with friends, family, and myself through storytelling.