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It's spring time in Maine which is commonly referred to as Mud Season up here. That's a pretty self-explanatory term, as it always gets wet and sloppy and everyone wanders around in knee-high rubber boots for a few weeks. This year was an exceptionally wet spring especially for some areas in northern Maine where they had awful flooding. I live in the central/southern part of the state and a couple of years ago we had some significant flooding of our own.
My family and I live in a very rural town without any sort of a downtown area (or our own post office, for that matter). We also, luckily, live on relatively high ground but the nearby town of Gardiner is right on a large river called the Kennebec. Well, life in rural Maine is pleasant but not all that exciting, so when downtown Gardiner flooded, my family and I hopped in the car to go watch the floodwaters splash against the old brick buildings and rush over parking lots. We parked well out of the way, bought a bag of doughnuts at a little bakery and walked to where a collection of other flood-watchers were gathered.
It's unnerving to see places you've driven, walked on and done business in underwater. There was a lot of tense energy in the crowd we had become a part of and so we stood, my husband, three-year-old daughter and I, and nibbled warm doughnuts, chatted and watched.
There had been a man kayaking in the rushing flood waters when we had first arrived. (I remember being surprised that anyone would do that, but I know white water kayakers tend to be a little on the fate-tempting side.) Suddenly and disturbingly, we now only saw an empty yellow kayak bobbing up from a particularly deep, fast-rushing hole of water created by a small grove of trees sticking out of the middle of the river (which the day before had been a parking lot).
Clearly, someone had been watching more closely than we had because rescue teams were arriving and trying desperately to figure out first, where the man was, and second, how to get him out of the rushing waters. They had ropes and life vests and floatation devices but the current was intense and the bank they were trying to access the water from (opposite from where we were) was unstable at best, a mud slide at worst.
And then the man surfaced, spit out of the hole and pulled back down again. His skin was pale against the darkness of the water and there was no resistance to the current in his limbs. He rolled again with the water and then began to drift away from the trees and the hole. The rescue teams were then able to bring the man to the shore where they tried in vain to get him breathing again.
I had never seen anyone die before, had never even seen a dead person for that matter. And it felt so odd - my young daughter munching warm doughnuts and happily playing at our feet in the crowd, totally unaware of what was happening - the buzz and collective shock of the crowd - the feeling of sadness for the rescue workers desperately trying to jump-start the mans heart on the distant shore. The rush of emotion was so great that a numbness took over as I watched the yellow kayak still twisting and floating in the current.
THE YELLOW KAYAK
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