By OWEN BOSS
Staff Writer
When a friend of mine called me Saturday morning and suggested we make the most of the beautiful weather by taking a lazy tubing trip down the Deerfield River, I immediately jumped out of bed.
During my time as a student at UMass Amherst, I had enjoyed floating down the river many times and found that it was a calm and effortless way to spend an afternoon with friends.
Had I known when I got out of bed that morning that the ride the river would offer Saturday would be neither calm nor effortless and would end in a frantic search for a missing tuber, I would have suggested that we all wear life vests and probably would have rented a tube with a little more air in it.
We were unaware that this summer’s unusually rainy weather had caused the river to swell to a level that the locals we spoke with hadn’t seen in more than a decade, and that the flow, which usually runs between 700 and 800 cubic feet per second, was greater than 6,000 cfs.
Although everyone I went with that day was an experienced swimmer, when we pushed out from under the Bardwell’s Ferry Bridge in Conway, all five of us were immediately flipped out of our tubes. The current swept two of us toward the shoreline, and by the time I got back on my tube, the five of us were scattered across the river and moving far too quickly to regroup.
By hanging onto tree branches along the shoreline and kicking against the raging current, we were able to hook onto each other in a group after traveling about a half-mile down the river.
The first thing we noticed was that we were moving much faster than we had in past trips and that just staying together was a constant struggle. The boulders that we had bounced off in the past were missing, and the current pulled us through the rapids so quickly that using our arms to steer did very little. We found ourselves completely at the mercy of the river.
As each familiar group of rapids and landmarks passed, we all commented on what great time we were making and wondered how quickly we would reach the Stillwater Bridge in Deerfield, where we had left a car.
In the past, when the river was running as it normally would, the trip from Bardwell’s Ferry to the Stillwater would take us 2 to 3 hours. On Saturday, we reached the Stillwater Bridge in about 45 minutes.
When we docked at a popular beach near the bridge, which has a rope swing and is usually frequented by a large group of locals, we found that it was missing. A man standing up to his chest in the water told us that where he was standing was where the beach normally was and that in his 15 years in Deerfield, he had never seen the river like this.
Deciding not to tempt fate by swimming across the current to the rope swing on the other side of the river, we all trudged up the hill to the parking lot. There, we heard from a local firefighter that emergency responders were rescuing a group of three tubers who had been swept downriver and were still looking for a fourth member of the group.
The realization that we had ridden the river on a day when someone may have lost her life was a stark reminder of its power. As someone who was there that day, I urge all residents considering tubing this summer to wear life vests and to be prepared for a river that is deeper and running faster than it has in a long time.
Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com
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