And the Tom McCaffery canoe trip was just a reprise of the great flood.
What year was that? I was on a trip he led in summer of 1975...
I was dodging oil tankers in the fog on penobscot bay in the summer of 75. What I heard from the Tom Terrific trip was the watch group camped on the flood plain below a large water impoundment. A whistle blew. Some how in his vast training as a wilderness guide while attending Brown he skipped class the day the subject of water release from damns was discussed. The group had to break camp in a hurry to avoid the rising water. I understand there are no more dory trips. Too bad. That is one of the thing I liked about hyde.
Meanwhile ... Malcolm and Paul Hurd, before their incarnation as headmasters, were great outdoorsmen. On the second leg of our canoe trip we were paddling along about a mile downriver from Moosehead Lake. Malcolm and Paul had all the maps and everything like that but they were not aces at reading them. The river narrowed and started churning and pretty soon our canoes were out of control. As his canoe starts to spin, Hurd starts screaming. The screaming starts not making sense to us, but now Hurd's voice is going up in pitch. He's screaming just as loud, but his voice is rising. His voice is going up higher and higher, and pretty soon his voice comes to just a little squeak coming out of him. He jumps on to some rocks just as his canoe is thrown against them and smashed to bits along with a second canoe and most of our supplies.
Malcolm and Hurd decide it will be safer to ford and as we are wading through the shallows one of the kids goes under. We are wading along and this kid just disappears under our nose. We hold on to rocks and branches and grope with the other hand for long minutes but we can't find this kid. When it seemed pretty hopeless someone caught hold of a leg and all together we are able to pull him up out of the suction. He had been pushed by the current straight to the bottom of the river but his face had been wedged under a rock and he was able to breathe from an air pocket that had formed there. He shared this experience in a school meeting after we got back to Bath, before his parents yanked him out of the program, and said he had found religion in that river.
