A Year Later
by Al Pugh

A person using the name "Sean" posted a thread on the message board the other day reminding us that it has been a year since Skip "River Rat" Walters died while fishing in the Susquehanna River. As a review for those who are unfamiliar with the incident, River Rat’s boat was having motor problems and after calling his son on the cell phone, he anchored the boat to keep from drifting down into rapids and went to work on the motor. His empty boat was found later, anchored in that spot. Apparently, something caused him to fall overboard and drown.

Now, a year later, what have we learned? Is it to always wear life vests, to tie ourselves to the boat in this condition, to never go alone when hypothermia is probable if we fall in? Certainly, we have learned these lessons, and fools we are if we fail to apply these principles the rest of our lives. However...

I propose we have learned things much more important, if we think with our minds and our hearts.

Most of us would not consider these lessons new knowledge. I contend that nearly all of our minds knew these things, but that most of our hearts had allowed the socio-political polarization that is becoming so common to blind us to these realities. With River Rat's death, these things have moved from being "known" into the nether region between pure reason and pure emotion where most reality exists. That is to say, because we "feel" it and "know" it at the same time, it has "become real" to us, and we have learned.

We have learned that it is possible to become good friends with a person we’ve never met face to face.

River Rat’s death required all of us with any conscience to consider what we could say or do for the family. In determining what we really knew about the man, and what we could honestly say about him, we had to think about a person who we had never shaken hands with, who we had never bumped shoulders with, who we had never seen in person and talked to. Then, we realized that not only was that true for Skip, but that it was true for most of us as well.

Honest people who frequently disagreed with him about fishing volunteered that they wished they had been there to go in after a man they wouldn’t recognize if they bumped into him on the street. Others were heartbroken by the loss of a man who they only knew by his self-imposed nickname. Many came to the Susquehanna Rodeo in July to support the memorial to River Rat, some of them driving a considerable distance. A fair sized group attended the family’s memorial service, ignoring differences in faiths and distances driven, to give support and sympathy to a family they had never met, in memory of a man only some of them had met.

We have learned that good people are all around us.

Counter to what would be considered usual for Americans, we trusted people we didn’t know much about (in the "standard" way) to get our contributions to River Rat’s family. We trusted the same category of people with messages important to us that we hoped would be important to the Walters family. We agreed, by deciding to participate, that "we" represented "I" and in so doing we put our personal reputation in the hands of what would have been considered essentially strangers if it had been 1986, rather than 2001.

We have learned that tomorrow is never guaranteed.

River Rat knew the river, he knew his boat, and he knew the dangers. Still, he went to the river, following the call that we all know so well, apparently the same internal "call" that men like Boone, Crockett, Carson, and Bridger heard. Then, even with the experience and preparation he had, the unthinkable happened. I don’t know for certain, but I strongly suspect that he knew the possibilities. I think that he prepared for them as best he could, knowing that if the outdoors gets any of us, it is really only because of one of two things, not being prepared or encountering something new, or a combination of them. Sure, Rat could have mitigated that possibility by staying holed up in his house, with his heart screaming for the outdoors. Rather, he chose to follow his heart, and we who would make his choice must understand that tomorrow is guaranteed to us only when the day after tomorrow comes. "Carpe Deim" would probably never have escaped River Rat’s lips, but I suspect it cried out from his heart.

In our world, instances of internet contact followed by personal contact are most often reported in the news as disasters, and given the day we are in, we all must remain vigilant. None the less, some of us have carefully crawled a little bit out of our respective hermit’s caves, exposed a bit of our beings, and learned something special indeed from this man that most of us never met. God help us that our lessons should have to always be learned at this high a price.