Sweeper

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Maxims (1665)

Rivers are an interesting sort of border. They join parts of the same watershed, higher ground to lower. They are roads, food troughs, and coffins. They can divide life from death in a wondrous number of ways. Which is what this story is about.

Sweeper is the name rivermen have for a downed tree or other obstacle in a river where the water flows through, rather than around, it. Sometimes they're called strainers. They are deadly fixtures of running rivers, whether in a canoe, kayak, rubber raft or even float tube.

Bill Mason, in the canoeing classic, Path of the Paddle, describes sweepers: “They often are located on the outside of a sharp bend where the shore is eroded away by the current. If you allow the current to carry you around the outside of a bend, you are a perfect set-up for entrapment on a sweeper. The water flows through the branches leaving you and the canoe pinned. There is the possibility that you could be pinned against the branches underwater, or pinned against the branches by the canoe. If your efforts to avoid the sweeper fail, your best defense is to climb up onto the tree as you hit it. Recovering the canoe if it becomes wedged in the branches is extremely difficult.” The force exerted by the canoe against the sweeper in an eight mph current, says Mason, can go as high as two tons.

The South Fork of the Stillaguamish from Granite Falls to Arlington beckoned from the map. It looked like a good first paddle for canoeists tired of muscling along lakeshores. Even though none of us had yet mastered all of the steering strokes, pivot strokes, running pivots, running crossdraws, sideslips, braces, hanging strokes and back paddling, we were getting fairly good at getting the canoe to move in a straight line.

So one day last week we hauled the canoe to the put-in east of the bridge on Jordan Road and sent my wife, daughter and daughter’s husband Clarence, down river. After all, the South Fork was just recently the venue for the ‘Paddle’ part of Arlington’s Paddle, Pedal, Puff team marathon. Someone said the winner paddled it in 23 minutes and that it would take about an hour to travel to the Haller Park take-out point. No mishaps were reported in the race. The Washington Atlas rates this stretch a Class I, the easiest whitewater rating. It was a brilliant sunny day. I took them at their word.

I took my time getting to the Jordan walking bridge. I thought I would wait there until the canoeists paddled by. There were a few sunbathers on the far bank and some kids and adults swinging into the river on the rope swing at the bend.

But after an hour the canoe hadn’t appeared. I thought I might have missed them so I went farther down to River Meadows Park and walked out into the middle of the river. It is shallow and wide there; it never got over my knee. I waited. No sign of the canoeists. No word on the river. I went to the office in Arlington expecting a call from the cell phone they had carried with them. Nothing.

Four hours and several drives up and down Jordan Road later, I was worried. But they finally called. The trip had been long, with many shallow spots demanding carries, and they were learning how to navigate moving current. They were slightly sunburned, but happy and laughing.

“We would tell Clarence to paddle left. LEFT! we would shout. Then finally, the OTHER left!” There was a snake or eel appearance that left my daughter curled and gasping in the bottom of the canoe.

No problems. Great fun. Family adventure.

I should have known better.

Clarence and I decided to do the South Fork again two days later. We would put in at River Meadows to eliminate the worst carries. If we felt good we would go clear to the take-out west of Marine Drive.

We had negotiated only four or five turns in the river when I looked ahead from my seat in the stern of the canoe to see the snaggled branches of a cottonwood blocking the deepest channel of the river. I looked at the stretch of river rock on the right shore and thought briefly of carrying past.

“How did you get past this when you went down before?” I yelled to Clarence in the bow seat.

“I don’t remember. I think we went far to the left and then let the current shoot us past it.”

From where we sat at water level it was impossible to see how the current ran in relation to the snag. But we were already in the surprisingly strong grip of the current now so I steered to the left. Too late, I saw the current moving through the limbs of the cottonwood rather than parallel to it. Then things began to happen very fast.

“A sweeper,” I yelled. “We’re going to hit! Paddle hard!” All too late. We hit the tangled branches broadside. The current immediately tried to tip the canoe. Water rushed in. Clarence and I leaned with all our combined weight toward the white, now horribly skeletal appearing tree limbs, to right the canoe. I yelled to Clarence to let the canoe go and get onto the tree, which is what I was trying to do. Clarence was trying to shove the canoe downstream along the sweeper but it finally dropped its upriver gunwale and immediately filled with water. Our big plastic storage box jammed on a limb. Clarence was swept out and downstream from the sweeper but managed to grab the prow handle and pull the canoe forward.

As he did he realized he was leaving me pinned against the sweeper but there was nothing he could do. I was on my own. I was half under one branch and half over another. The current was pinning my body with a tremendous force. My armpit was the only thing holding me above water. My head was bobbing up to air and down into the current. Fortunately I had managed to loop my feet above a limb. I knew I did not want to go down into the water in front of the sweeper. I raised my left arm and did a half turn. The current pushed me under the first limb for one frightening moment and then onto the top, above water, of the second limb where I clung with an adrenaline grip. I let myself move downstream along the limb until I was out of the worst of the current. I seemed very focused on the task of moving down the limb without slipping into the current. It was only when I was able to move off the limb and into the slower moving current that I realized I had managed through all of this to hang on to a paddle!

The canoe had dumped all of its contents into the river. Clarence had let his paddle go but had also managed somehow to grip our shallow water push-pole. Our waterproof bag was floating with his paddle and the extra paddle further downstream in an eddy. Our PFDs, unworn, were floating with the paddles.

There was a slow motion sequence where we retrieved the canoe, emptied the water from it, gathered up the gear, reloaded everything, got back in and continued down river. We were eventually laughing and gasping and retelling our two versions of what happened. We wondered whether to tell anybody what happened.

“Do we tell them we had a hilarious wet capsize, or a close brush with death?” Clarence laughed.

I was going to answer back but I noticed I was having a hard time holding the paddle.

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