PART 2 — THE RIVER
Mrs. Larson lifted a framed photograph out of her picnic basket and turned it toward Gordon. It was a boy, maybe ten, grinning on a dock with a fishing pole.
That is our son, she said. Last July we took him rafting on the Clark Fork with a tour company. At a rapid called Tumbleweed, the raft flipped and he went under and got pinned beneath it. The current was dragging him toward the next drop. We could not reach him. We thought we had lost him.
Then a guide from a different company saw it happen, jumped out of her own boat into those rapids, and pulled our boy out from under that raft with her bare hands, seconds before the drop.
The woman Gordon mocked for paddling tourists down a creek had thrown herself into Class IV rapids to pull a drowning boy out from under a raft that was not even hers.
We spent a year trying to find her to say thank you, Mrs. Larson said. All we had was the name of her company. Then she looked across at Anna. When we set up at the next table today and I saw her face, I started to cry. That is the guide who saved our son.
The picnic went silent. Gordon, who had brought his own sparkling water, lowered his can of LaCroix.
Anna just handed her nephew another hot dog and said any guide on that river would have gone in. But the Larsons shook their heads. Only one did, Mr. Larson said. Yours.
My daughter paddles tourists down a creek, her uncle had joked. One July she went into the rapids after a boy who was not hers to save. That is what the life jacket is for.