Chosin Cold

(Originally posted at joecsmolen.com 12/22)

Just like every winter, in November, the dry east wind started screaming down the Gorge. That January, it was still full blast. In the news, they warned the Columbia River might freeze across. “Yeah!” my neighbor even older than me said, “Back in ’78, a’most lost muh boat.”  

The Willamette froze first. The two-hundred-yard wide finger of the Willamette, just below where the Clackamas flows in, at the boat ramp between Meldrum Bar and the north shore - that froze right away. Even that far south of the Gorge, it was windy – Chosin-cold, I call it.

I’m telling all this so you can go and see the spot and believe it.

Some guys don’t have anything to do in retirement. My winter deal was to go down to the river and feed the birds. Marooned by winter, there were just puddle ducks, grotesque hermaphrodite geese – and a few straggler Canadas.

That wasn’t all I accomplished, though. There was the lumber I collected - that floated down the river from the progress being made upstream. I couldn’t make her wait forever. She doubts I’ll live to do it. She thinks it’s funny, but twenty years ago when I first retired, I told my wife I was going to frame up her own potting shed.

So the finger between Meldrum Bar and the north shore had looked frozen across a week ago and I was sitting in my truck coveting a maybe sixteen or twenty-footer – probably a two-by-six - somebody had dragged out on the ice. Through my government-issue field glasses, looked like a piece of PT – pressure-treated. I needed it for my wife. There were three or four kids on the ice playing out there past my plank. Nobody much around. Well, there was a young guy with wild, shoulder-length dark hair sipping one of those great big cans of beer. You know – maybe twenty ounces, ABV probably eight or nine percent - and I was noticing that he was tilting it up pretty far – that is to say, he already had about half of it gone when he walked down between my truck and the shore.

I knew to stay clear of him; I had since he jumped my Salmon spot on the river bank two years ago – just horned-in and moved my chair and ripped-out my rod holder and crowded me about twenty feet downstream. With a rock, right in my spot, he drove in his own rod holder and wanted to know, “What are you gonna do about it, dude?” That’s when I noticed his bare knuckles. Big as dumb bells.

Once, while the rest of us escaped across the December Chosin, I and another guy held-off a Company-size force with just our rifles. Dumbbell-size knuckles was different.

Probably you know where I’m going with this. Everybody knows the old iced-over-pond-with-kids-playing-out-on-it, right?

Format-wise, it was a pretty routine rescue. I was just sitting warm in my Ford. I could see two boys running my way toward the gravel shore. When I turned-down my radio and rolled-down my truck window to hear them, the cold of the wind harshed me right in the face. Both boys were frantic, trying to hurry in across the ice and flopping down and slipping and struggling back up and waving and yelling - I could tell now - at the guy with the beer. I could feel the boys’ panic, just in the way their voices jabbered. There had been at least three kids out there. Now, I didn’t see anybody else out there past my two-by-six, where there was a dark spot in the ice. The boys pointed out on the ice. They grabbed and hauled at his free arm - the guy with the beer. He yanked away and back-handed one of them right across the face. The kid jumped right up though, and knocked the beer out of the guy’s other hand and the man cussed and chased him about ten feet and cussed more, and turned suddenly and headed by himself out on the ice.

I called 911 and got out stiff from sitting and stumbled on the river rock and gravel. That day I hadn’t even been out of my truck yet and in a rush, I forgot to button my collar and turn it up around my neck and the cold chomped me and I shivered.

It was a biting cold. The terrified faces of those two poor kids! Death was in the air.   

The two boys – the one that got back-handed had blood all over his face - told me their little sister went right through the ice and never came back up. They said the ice never cracked or warned them at all. They said they were watching her, but the ice just broke and their little sister was gone. I knew the personal, rawness of that kind of terror. In in my own days that age, I’d served considerably under the tyranny of guilt.    

There’s a thing to know here: we’re talking a winter river. A winter river doesn’t sit. A powerful winter river’s a muddy, restless, eating thing. There’s a fast current. In that little, skinned-over arm of the Willamette, it was a swirling, mindless eddy you bet! There was no way to tell which way it might be going, where it might slurp a little girl’s painted finger nails – before it swallowed her and turned her over eternally to the down-stream bottom-feeders.

Out by the dark spot on the ice now, the long hair guy just stood there with my stick of PT, looking around him. Then he seemed to decide and he spread down on his belly and he was sliding around out there and I could see him sweeping his bare hands over the surface of the ice and staring down. Pretty soon, I saw him suddenly flip on his back, and with my long stick of PT under his shoulders, throw his legs way up in the air and arch and thrust his feet down full force. His boots punched right through the ice. Like an up-side-down saw bug, he flipped right back over on my plank and jammed his arm in the water and yanked something out like it was nothing but a minnow.

When he handled her, I could see her little sky-blue snow suit. She was real limp. Just floppy. A lot of time had passed. I could see she was dead. I’ve seen death before, plenty. You don’t need to get close to know it.

But I could tell he didn’t think so. I could see exactly what he did. Doing mouth-to-mouth, he unzipped her out of her wet snow-suit and pulled-off her little mittens and yanked-off all her soaked clothes. Fast, he laid her out on the ice on her bare back flat as a fish on a cutting board. He stood up on my plank, and boots first, stripped off his jacket and his pants and shirt - all of it dry and warm. I could see him cradle her little body just like you would a baby - his right hand palmed under her skinny neck, his forearm supporting her back. In one motion, he slid her head and shoulders up inside his dry t-shirt. I saw her head poke up into one of his huge shirt’s arms so big it covered her little head like a hood. He drug one leg of his dry pants up around both hers. He hurried everything he had on her. Last, he folded her into his giant jacket and started doing more mouth-to-mouth while shuffling pretty much naked and bare foot for shore.  

These days, they call it “flashing back.” At the Chosin, we weren’t issued any winter gear. A lot of us ran for it and made it barefoot across the reservoir – if we didn’t get picked-off.

So the short version is, I got up close and I watched what the paramedics did. They continued with the mouth-to-mouth. Their monitor showed her heart beating. Pretty quick, I saw her eyes open. She looked real blank, but they opened.

Her big brothers just wailed and bawled to make me cringe. In his skivvies, the hammer-knuckled man just sort of shivered there in the wind and looked worried and craned his neck to see what they were doing inside the ambulance. He was all over hairy, like a bear. I could see his ID and cash and everything had spilled out of his back pants pocket and was getting trampled on the ambulance floor by the two EMTs. In the confusion of the emergency, everybody kina forgot about him. I didn’t see the Sheriff.

I walked back over and started-up my truck and cranked the heat. I left him in there in my old fatigue jacket I keep handy for when I have to go under my truck. He was pretty cold, but I thought it was fair I did, so real careful, I shuffled out on the ice and got my stick of PT and his boots.

I had to leave behind me her little pale blue snow suit frozen there to the ice like a dead GI.