Ron's note regarding evening of May 21

Tuesday morning, May 22. A couple of my “skeptics,” as I’ve come to affectionately refer to them in my head, were sort of right. “They” said I’d be lucky to make it to Ogallala on this trip. If only they’d known.

I left my camp Monday morning on a sandbar about four miles east of Lisco at 7:10 in the morning. Sunny, calm. The river had been less than fun Sunday, with such a wide bed that the water was spread thin. There is a reason why Broadwater is named Broadwater, and every canoer should take note. It’s one of those unusual places where you could wade across the wide, wide river and keep your socks dry.

Happily, within a mile or two it narrowed, and that became the story of the day—wide spots alternating with narrow spots where the current swept me along at a hair raising 2 miles an hour. I added another mile or two per hour with my pole and made the Oshkosh bridge ahead of schedule. I pumped my fist, recorded the accomplishment on my waterproof list of bridges, talked and laughed to my audience of a thousand bridge birds. So where did the bridge birds build their nests before the pioneers built bridges? In the river? They were undoubtedly elated by the coming of roads.

Lewellen. Still ahead of schedule at 4:45 PM. Forecast not great, as in widespread thunderstorms coming. But it was too early to stop, although I was so tired I wanted nothing more than to lay on the boat and sleep. In fact, I did lay on the board for a few minutes, stretched out in the water, mud and gravel that accumulates as I hop off and on in shallow places. But I got back up within a couple of minutes, knowing that if I dropped of to sleep, I’d drift onto or into something I’d regret.

The wind came up. Blasting hard wind, right in my face. It was as if my skeptics had ordered it to slow me down. Still, I wanted to get to Lake McConaughy. On a trip like this, sometimes the only thing that keeps you going besides the skeptics is setting a goal and refusing to stop until you get there. This time, that was a bad idea.

By 8:00 PM I was spent, but things weren’t looking good. Masses of clouds were building, with tremendous rumbles of thunder that shook the earth, and powerful flashbulbs of lightning. Storms like that are fun to watch from inside the house, but not nearly so much fun from a thin boat. In addition I had no idea where I was. On the Platte River, to be sure, but when would I get to the lake?

My mileage estimates to different bridges have been right on target all along, but for this section I had no idea where the lake actually started, given the long drought that has drastically shrunk it. The current was flowing at a pretty good clip, and I was at a crucial decision point: Get off the water onto an exposed bank of mud and brush, or push hard to get to the lake where Tammy might be able to pick me up and take me to a hotel for the night. I pushed on.

About 8:45 I finally hit the lake. The current stopped and the waves started. The blasting wind turned tornadic. I switched to my kayak paddle and tried to make headway, but found it nearly impossible. Paddled across to the south side of the channel for protection from the wind, but that didn’t work, so I paddled back across to the north side, worrying now. My cell phone had gone dead the day before, but a little super-charger allowed me one or two minutes of conversation. I called Tammy. Bad connection. I yelled, “If you can hear any of this, I’m screwed. Nowhere to get out. I’ve got mud and brush on all sides, it’s getting dark, I don’t know where I am and the wind and waves are throwing me everywhere. My phone is going dead, but I need you to see if you can figure out how long the lake is right now and if there is anywhere I can get off of it.” More battling against wind and waves and emergency planning going on in my head, as in “Okay, force your way into some of the brush and weeds, lay down on the board and just hang on for the night.” Little did I know that an amazing series of events were about to save me.

Ten minutes later my phone rang, and I let go of my paddle long enough to answer it. It was Tammy, yelling into her phone. “Stop where you are. Matt and Tara saw you. We’re coming after you.”

Matt and Tara? They are friends who live in Sutherland. They saw me? How could that be possible, since I couldn’t see anything anywhere in the storm induced darkness and the impenetrable tangle of brush that I had nevertheless penetrated?

It is a long story that happened in a few minutes. Through broken cell phone calls, Tammy yelled at me to go back up the channel and look for the lights of a pickup truck. The only way I could do that was to get off the boat into chest-deep water and pull it, feeling along the bottom to know I was staying close to shore. The wind had increased to sixty miles an hour, dead into my face, with proportionate waves. I was still skeptical—there just wasn’t anything anywhere that looked like a road, a car, or any hope, but ten minutes later there they were, Tammy and a young couple I didn’t know, on a desolate dirt road, lights on. We threw my stuff in the truck, drove to Tammy’s car, transferred everything and took off just as buckets of rain hit. One minute later, the road was a river. So how did Matt and Tara see me? Who was this couple that took Tammy to the one dirt road within 10 miles where I could get out of the river?
When my skeptics predicted that I’d be lucky to get to Ogallala, they were right. Except I don’t believe, in the end, that it was luck.