More than once in my more adventurous days of outdoor fun I experienced a brush with potential disaster. Lucky me, it turned out okay every time.
There was the time my dad took me fishing on the Red River, which borders North Dakota and Minnesota. We were night fishing on a really cold, windy North Dakota night, and halfway through the trip we sheered a pin on the outboard motor and had no spare pin. We were at the mercy of the current and the weather for a while, until we got lucky and another fisherman spotted us and towed the boat to safety.
Just a few years after that my uncle wanted to try out a used boat he was thinking of buying, so he, my dad and I launched the boat on the Mississippi River near our hometown of Caruthersville. It was probably a little too late in the day to be launching the boat, and sure enough, the motor quit about dusk in the middle of the mighty Mississippi.
It started raining. It got cold. We used one paddle and anything else we could get our hands on to try and get the boat to shore. Fighting the wind and the current wasn’t easy, but we finally made it to a small island. We got a fire started, despite the rain, but it did little to protect us from the elements.
After a few shivering, coatless hours that seemed a lot longer, a neighbor of ours who owned the local Mississippi River ferry sent a few of his men out looking for us. The ferry was equipped with a gigantic spotlight, and they finally spotted our small fire and cast the spotlight on two men and a boy in trouble.
To make matters worse, the ferry couldn’t get close enough for us to hop on board, so we had to wade chest deep into the river before the crew reached down and lifted us to safety. To make matters even worse than that, I was wearing a full leg cast as a result of banging up my knee during the current football season.
I’ve also been capsized in a canoe on a lake during a Minnesota thunderstorm, stranded on a cold March night without a tent on the Current River and lost in the woods near Searcy, Ark., too.
Anyway, I thought about those nights last week when I heard David Decareaux of Millstadt, Ill., and his two boys died from the cold Jan. 12 while hiking on the Ozark Trail in Reynolds County. They left for a 6-to 8-hour hike, apparently missed a turn, and fell victim to Ozark weather that can take a deadly 180-degree turn in minutes. Light jackets weren’t enough to save David and his boys when it went from 60 degrees and sunny to raining and freezing so quickly.
That could have been me years ago, I thought. When you take on the outdoors, no matter how safe you think it is or how experienced an outdoorsman you are, the elements and mistakes in judgment can be horrific. You read about it all the time, but in the Ozarks, it is rare to see something like this happen.
The Decareaux family rented a cabin at Brushy Creek Lodge and Resort, a surprise anniversary gift to David’s wife, Sarah. An avid hiker and Cub Scout leader, David Decareaux had been on many hiking and camping trips.
No matter your level of experience, the outdoors can be unforgiving. Deadly. Call it fate, or call it luck. Reading about the Decareaux family makes me thankful that a fisherman, then a few ferry-boat drivers, were around to literally save my day.
