The author of these words is the first winner and recipient of the Arnold Rosen Life Experience Fellowship. This is an annual life-time award that funds any of the recipient’s work while in the retirement phase of life. The work must be unique to retirement and the recipient is barred from “keeping his hand” in his business, or otherwise returning to his office. The award pays the recipient an annual stipend that covers any and all of the recipient’s living costs, including all entertainment and travel — in fact, including anything that the recipient’s heart would desire, within reason. This award — funded by Dr. Rosen’s retirement plan and Mrs. Rosen’s sagacious investment strategies — guarantees that the recipient will always have living costs covered and thus the recipient is free to proceed with his work in retirement without financial worries. The recipient’s only obligation as winner is to self-publish on Substack any item, story, essay, or memoir that the recipient thinks is worth saving and sharing.
Daniel received my email announcement about my new Substack format and immediately replied, “Write about that guy who almost drowned while white water rafting, and how you saved him.” Wow. I doubt if that event would have come to me without my son’s suggestion. It’s not because it has been forgotten. In fact, I remember it vividly, perhaps too vividly, like a series of stroboscopic images framed by lightening flashes. I guess I remember it the way psychologists and criminologists describe memory formation in life and death situations.
I can date this event to the summer of 1973 because Sondra and I were back in New York, but before children, (meaning Daniel). We had rendezvoused with 3 or 4 other couples. Someone Sondra was working with at Maimonides Hospital had put this canoe trip together.
Almost all of these people were brand new to me but some I had met before. Among the latter was Lenny. Lenny was a character. Sondra knew him as a psychologist working in her unit. He was our age and had come to New York from Israel, although he had been born in Argentina. I vaguely remember hearing he had served in the Israel army as a paratrooper. He was a large man, barrel chested, tall, stout, solid not flabby. Lenny always had an air of mystery about him. The rumor was that he secretly worked for Mossad. I gave it no credence but I didn’t rule it out either.
There was one other person I met who sticks in my memory. I had never seen him before or ever saw him again. He was a young physician, slender, of normal height, like myself. I had forgotten his name, so I’ll just call him Dr. X. (I later asked Sondra if she remembered him, but she shook her head, “I don’t have a clue.”)
We all got into 2 or 3 cars and caravanned down to the Delaware Water Gap. We were going to a place south of Port Jervis on the Delaware River that rented canoes. We would have a wonderful leisurely afternoon on the water, paddling down and drifting through the water gap. The canoe rental company had a site downriver from the gap where we would drop the canoes. The scenic views alone would be worth the trip.
My memory is dim before we actually got into the canoe. Somewhere I have the image of Lenny unwrapping the foil and wax paper from a hero meatball sandwich and eating it with gusto. Other than that, nothing.
But things get sharper when we positioned ourselves in our canoe. The three of us were in the same canoe. Lenny took the bow position and I took the stern. Sondra sat in the middle. There was no bickering that I remember; all of us seemed satisfied with where we ended up. I know Sondra was. She has never been at ease in water. She could sometimes enjoy a swim, but only with the comforting tiles of the pool edge nearby. She never liked being in lakes or rivers. I think Lenny insisted in being at the prow because he wanted to be the point man, the guy up front. On the other hand I recall telling someone I had been ‘in boy scouts’, and mentioning the “J stroke”. (I didn’t mention that we practiced the J stroke for 2 weeks on the lake in scout summer camp, and I was never able to master it. Was this my second chance?) I think all of us were happy with our place in the canoe.
And then a worker came around with an armful of thick bright orange life jackets, and passed them out to us. Sondra and I put ours on and buckled the straps. Lenny put his on and simply laughed when the worker suggested that he buckle it. We pushed off and we were soon floating down the river.
At some point, exactly when, I’m not quite sure, I became aware that the surface of the river had suddenly become wavy and very choppy. We seemed to accelerate. Then the waves became high, and got higher still. The canoe seemed to stop its forward movement, and our only motion seemed to be just up and down, and before I could really process these sensations, we were suddenly swamped, and wet, and in the water. The canoe had turned 90 degrees and was heading down the river sideways. The canoe was filled with water up to the gunwales but the three of us held on. We all had a firm grip on the side, and I thought, without a tinge of anxiety, “What fun we are having!”
And then, I remember thinking that maybe we were facing some danger, and perhaps comforting myself, I thought of what the owner had told us about these aluminum canoes. They had been constructed with built in flotation devices in the bow and stern, so they were unsinkable… and at that point, exactly when that calming thought was drifting in my mind, the canoe suddenly got sucked down, went underwater with me holding on, and that canoe stayed down. I now realize that the current had dragged it under, and it was like a sail boat running with the wind, but the canoe itself was the sail, as if all puffed out, straining, and pulling us along, underwater.
I let go and came up to the surface, buoyed by my life jacket. Lenny was nearby, splashing furiously. I swam over to him and he grabbed me, pushed me under to keep his own head above water. I assume now that his life jacket, unbuckled, must have been ripped off of him as easily as air jets from a mechanized shucker blow off the skins and shells of peanuts on the way to peanut butter, like in “How It’s Made”, but at the time I had no idea what had happened.
I have always been a strong swimmer and secure in the water since childhood. (The only two merit badges I won in the Boy Scouts were for Swimming and Life Saving.) Now I found myself held down, looking up into a hazy shimmering sky, refracted through the surface of the Delaware River, a mere 12 inches above my head. But still, at that moment, I felt no fear. I was quite prepared to help Lenny keep his head above water, but to do that, I needed to get mine above water also. However, only when my struggles seemed to make Lenny’s grip on me stronger did I began to panic. Finally, I realized that if I didn’t do something, I was probably going to drown. At that point, I kicked him as hard as I could and broke away.
I came to the surface, now worried about Sondra. She was my priority. I saw her ahead of me and to my left, between me and the bank. Her head was above her life jacket and she was going down river fast. I swam over to her and pushed her to shore and helped her clamber up the river bank. She was okay and I went back into the water to look for Lenny.
I am not sure if the current pulled me around a corner of the river, but I saw Dr. X leaning over Lenny, on shore, about 100 yards ahead. As I swam over and came ashore, Dr. X, who may have just lugged Lenny onto the shore, fell back, utterly exhausted and whispered breathlessly, “Take over.” I don’t know if he had started mouth to mouth resuscitation but I knew it was up to me.
I bent over Lenny. His skin was a mottled grey blue. He was not breathing, I could detect no heartbeat, and his pupils were wide and fixed, an indication he had no reflexes. This ‘examination’ only took a split second, and I thought with horror, “Lenny is dead.” At that point I punched him in his chest with my closed fist, as hard as I could, and started to do ‘mouth to mouth’. As I positioned his jaw, I became aware of the faint odor of garlic and meatballs. As I blew my breath into his body, I could hear the sound of my air gurgling and bubbling in his chest. I was like a kid sitting at a soda fountain, ‘making bubbles’ and blowing into (rather than sucking on) his straw.
Suddenly Lenny coughed and Dr. X and I turned him onto his side, whereupon he threw up the meatball sandwich plus a good portion of the Delaware River. Soon after, he began to gasp, coughed a lot more, and began to stir. He pinked up and began to show signs of life. I was shocked; I never thought he could be revived.
Later I learned what had happened. Apparently some sluice gate in some dam feeding into the river had been opened and an inordinately large amount of water suddenly entered the river just as we passed by in our canoe. It swamped us and threw us out of the canoe and dragged us under. Lenny lost his life vest and did, in fact, drown. Dr. X was in a canoe ahead of us and his canoe survived the sudden rush of water. Seeing Lenny floating facedown and lifeless, he jumped into the river, and with difficulty all alone was able to drag him to shore. It was then that I stumbled up out of the water.
Once Lenny revived I don’t remember much. Other people quickly came and someone went off to call an ambulance. (This all occurred well before cellular phones had made their appearance, so someone had to drive off to find the nearby gas station or store that had a phone.) I remember an ambulance came and Lenny was checked out by the EMT’s. They wanted him to get in and be seen in the hospital but Lenny refused, insisting he was fine. And then I remember it was later, it was getting dark, and we were waiting for a car to pick us up. Dr. X asked me what it felt like to be a hero.
This is where it gets a little dicey for me. I didn’t feel like much of a hero. If anything, Dr. X was the hero in all this. Lenny would not be alive if Dr. X had not slipped over the side of his canoe to pull Lenny to shore. Who was responsible for this potential tragedy that would have changed forever, and even ended, our lives? Was it Lenny, with his macho nonchalance? Or was it me, overly confident despite my thin canoe skills, my ‘J stroke’ far from perfected?
What do they say in Judaism? “You save a life; you save the world.” I guess that’s how it should be spoken and it’s best not to change it. The effect of Daniel prompting me to write this, however, requires that I replay the event, decision point by decision point. They say you have to break away (by any means) when someone is panicking in the water and is holding you under. I’m okay with that, but it merely assuages guilt; it doesn’t entirely eliminate it. If I had applied a reasoned armchair analysis, in terms of who was more in danger, perhaps I should have immediately gone back to Lenny once I saw that Sondra was floating safely on her own and angling towards the shore. That might have made more sense. (Who has an armchair in the middle of the Delaware?)
I didn’t feel like a hero, then or now. Maybe that’s why this event never spontaneously popped up when I have tried to think what might be worth saving digitally in memoir form. I needed Daniel to make the suggestion.
A hero should be honored. In contrast, I felt if I had been pardoned. Lenny had been taken away and Lenny had been given back. I was intimately present and participated in both. Why? Was it pure chance? That would be my usual default position, as I like to think of myself as a rationalist. However, in this instance, I guess I’ll hang with Einstein and assume that God does not ‘roll dice’. I was His instrument. It feels good for me to think so, and plus, it’s easier. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
After writing this I asked Daniel to tell me what he recalls when he was 12, hearing about this probably around the dinner table, and what he thought about it at the time. He dictated an answer into my mobile phone’s voice mail:
“OK, here's my recollection of what I heard when I was 12 or so. I don't know if it was an old friend of yours telling it, or Mom, but the gist was that you were in your late 20s, in either medical school or a psychiatry residency, and you went on a white water rafting trip… and this gentleman was not wearing his life jacket; he was leaning against it or it was loosely around his shoulders, untied… and he got sucked off the back of the raft, or fell over the side and was sucked under, into the rapids, and he was eventually spat out down river and was face down in the water. Someone — I’m not sure if it was you — dragged him to shore. You performed CPR mouth-to-mouth on him. You revived him and he was OK and he made a full recovery and that's why we always should wear our life jacket. Bye.”
So this event has come down stripped of all my talmudic and psychological preoccupations. The entire episode ends up being a mundane life lesson: always put on your life jacket and buckle it. We need these life lessons. Thank God.
(Sorry, I just noticed this.) You are correct and I have and edited and included a new sentence.
Ok, glad to help you get the details correct.