Lake McConaughy May 22

Tuesday evening. May 22. A day we would mostly like to forget.

Since the beginning of what might loosely be called “planning” for this venture, Lake McConaughy has loomed large. A couple of “my skeptics” have bluntly told me that I wouldn’t make it down the lake. I myself have wondered often how my old shoulders and arms would fare trying to paddle without stopping for several hours, unassisted by any current. I have reminded myself repeatedly that a strong head wind would be the end of me—there would be no possible way to move against wind and waves in any reasonable amount of time. So today was Lake Day. Feared. Dreaded. Ready to be done with. Ironically, the worst of it ended up having very little to do with the lake.

Tammy took me back down to the scene of last night’s fiasco, down the deserted road that ran along the lake. Almost to where the boat was, she stopped because it looked too muddy up ahead. “Nonsense,” I said in so many words. Your wheels aren’t even making a dent. Let me drive.” I mean, all wheel drive and good tires shouldn’t stop a good car. You already know what happens next. I got stuck. Not just a little stuck, but so stuck that every wheel with any energy spun uselessly, throwing mud all over the car. Never mind, I’ve been stuck a lot of times before. A little digging, a little rocking, a few reeds and weeds for traction. Nada. Tammy said she’d call a tow truck and I should get going because the wind was in my favor. I didn’t think I should, because after all, this was my fault. She insisted, I left. “I’ll call,” I said.

To make my long story short, five hours later, I was at Kingsley Dam, washed clean by thousands of waves that frequently went right over the top of the boat without fazing it. For the first time on my little excursion, the wind was pushing me from behind. I was spent and elated, but Tammy was not faring so well.

Two hours along, I finally felt like I could let go of the paddle with one hand long enough to call. “I’m practicing patience,” she said. “The tow guy showed up with a pickup that couldn’t budge our car. He had to go back for his tractor, but its battery was dead, so he’d have to charge it.”
Another couple hours along, the tractor had shown up and they were hooking up a cable to a chain because the tractor couldn’t get too close because the river was rising from last night’s torrential rains.

Finally I got word that the car was unstuck, but Tammy didn’t sound cheerful. The guy had charged her $300.00 and in the process, he had wrapped the chain around the brake line, so it was now broken. She would have to call a tow truck from Ogallala to come and get her. In other words, I got to the dam before she did.

Two helpful fishermen who’d seen my story in the paper generously ferried my boat and gear around the dam, dropping me off at the hydro plant. Whoever you are, thank you beyond measure. I forgot to ask your names in the confusion, but you were very kind. “How are you going to get around the diversion dam?” they asked. “Dam?” I said, hoping it would sound more like a question than an expletive. “Oh, I’ll find a way. I’ve already been around seven dams by now and there’s always a way. Inside, I was ready for anything but another dam.

By now, Tammy was on her way to Ogallala with a friendly, helpful tow truck driver named Steve. I found a way around the dam, probably not approved by OSHA, and scurried to get some distance between me and it, since there was a big warning sign that said the gates would lift automatically when the horn sounded. I didn’t want to be anywhere where I could hear the horn. Actually, “scurry” is the wrong word, since there is no water coming through the gates on the dam right now. This is of great concern to someone who is boating. I took consolation in the pools of water left standing and headed bravely into my future. However, there are actually three more dams just below the big one. They are really huge stretches of concrete chunks piled up across the “river,” but by then I was so tired that I just dragged my boat up and over without even unloading it. I dread seeing what the bottom looks like, but it is still floating, so I’m not checking yet.

Remarkably, as I poled along I noticed that I had a bit of current. I didn’t run aground and within a couple of bends another tributary came rushing to my aid. How this works, I’m not sure, but I have come to an unshakeable faith in the power of the North Platte to regenerate itself from nothing. It happens over and over again.

Within an hour I was in sight of the Keystone dam, so I called Tammy to see where she was. “I’ve just about finished loading everything in the rental car,” she said wearily.
“Rental car,” I asked. “Why?” Well, it turns out that the repair people at Cox Chevrolet in Ogallala, led by Jeff Johnson, a group Tammy says are the absolute best there is in customer service, had learned there was only one Toyota brake line in the entire United States, and it wouldn’t be here until Tuesday, May 29. “I’ll be there soon,” she said. It was a bad time to remember that I’d advised her to cancel our rental car insurance the month before. I was doing some mental math and calculated that this was pretty much going to be a $1,000 day.
You know what’s ironic about all this? When I got in the car to show Tammy how great our all-wheel drive was, we had already passed the boat. It was sitting in the weeds fifty feet behind where I got stuck. Not my day.