Deceptive Beauty

One morning in 1993, an old codger — let’s call him “Dave” — leaned back in his restored 1950’s fishing boat, basking in the solitude and early morning glow of Vallecito Lake, a small reservoir in the San Juan Mountains, near Durango, Colorado.

Sport fishermen came to Vallecito to battle the Steelhead but Dave was a bit less ambitious. His excuse for firing up the old Evenrude and easing out onto the lake was to snag a pair of Trout for his evening meal. His real motivation was to enjoy the quiet beauty of nature which continually reminded him that life is good.

Vallecito Lake was off the beaten path and, apart from Summer weekends, was a quiet place to live. The lake, fed by snowmelt was fairly small, exceedingly cold, and deceptively serene — hiding a strong undercurrent that followed the path of Vallecito creek, bisecting the lake.

Most of the year, the lake was inhabited only by a few locals, but Summers brought tourists, and weekends in particular, brought out the abrasive young adults from Durango. On this weekday morning Vallecito was silent, calm, and crystal clear.

Dave could even make out the contour of a metal lawn chair on the lake bottom, twenty feet beneath him. As he pondered the history of that chair and how it had come to rest below the lake, Dave’s peace and quiet was shattered by the laughter of two rowdy teens paddling a rubber raft out from one of the rental cabin docks.

Shaking his head at their naivete, Dave kept a wary eye on the boys. More than one inexperienced visitor had been lost to the deceptive beauty of Vallecito — mostly by underestimating the difficulty of swimming any distance at all in the forty-five-degree water. Dave began reeling in his line. Fishing and peacefulness were over for the day.

As if in response to Dave’s wariness, both boys jumped into the middle of the lake and neither of those dumb-asses was wearing a life jacket. Dave squeezed the fuel bulb to prime the old engine’s carburetor, tugged the starter rope twice and motored towards the boys, hoping he would reach them in time.

A Different Perspective
Andrew and Greg were cousins on summer vacation with their extended families. They’d been having great fun sampling the summer activities around Durango. The Alpine slide at the local ski resort had been an exciting adventure and the raft trip down the Animas River had given them a taste of the cold local waters. They’d even explored a real ghost town up the mountain from Silverton.

On this quiet morning, everyone else in the group was either recovering from yesterday’s rafting or off on some other trip the boys saw no need to join. Paddling out from the pier, the cold of the lake seeped right through the bottom of the rubber raft. Looking back on yesterday’s dip in the Animas under the watchful eyes of the raft guide, they’d experienced what it was like to swim in snowmelt so they began daring each other to dive in.

They agreed to dive together. After all, they had the raft to get back into and it was only a hundred yards to the shore if anything went wrong. The icy water stung like needles but they both laughed and splashed each other, not noticing that the current was pulling their raft away. Both boys attempted to chase down the wayward raft but it kept eluding their grasp, and the cold water was beginning to cause leg cramps.

As they realized the shore was unreachable and the raft was slipping away, panic set in and their teenage sense of invincibility began to erode. How had things gone so quickly awry?

As if by miracle, some crusty old fart in an antique wooden boat appeared out of nowhere and yelled, “What are you two idiots doing?” After begrudgingly helping them into his boat and urging them to be careful of his fishing gear, he navigated over to their raft and towed it to shore. With one last stern warning about the danger of boating without a life jacket, he motored away and left the two shivering knuckleheads pondering whether or not they should tell their parents what happened.

Plans
If I documented all the times that my peaceful life got interrupted by someone else’s poor planning, I’d run out of paper. If I documented all the times someone else pulled my fat out of the fire due to my lack of planning, I’d run out of paper twice as fast. Sometimes, our best laid plans…

Let’s face it, people are screw-ups and you and I both fit neatly into that category. Maybe we should just quit being so pissed at all the old fools who don’t vote like us, think like us, look like us, or talk like us, and just appreciate their existence. And maybe we should be prepared to put down our fishing poles and pull total strangers out of the water once in a while.

A meeting of great minds who think alike