The devil introduced himself to me one fine spring day in the American River canyon just below the town of Auburn.
Back in the early 70s, engineers got to looking at that canyon and they decided it would be the perfect place to build a dam. A big, honking, manly dam. The kind of dam God could be proud to say that He had built. And behind it would form a great lake, spreading out for dozens of miles upstream in two different canyons.
So they commenced to moving a bazzillion tons of rock and digging a huge foundation. And they blasted a 90-foot diameter diversion tunnel through a quarter-mile of bedrock to get that pesky river out of the way while they worked on the dam. And they built the towering Foresthill Bridge, an engineering marvel whose twin in Japan had collapsed not long after the first car drove across it. Hundreds of men were at work, they were pouring concrete and blasting rock around the clock, and money was flowing like water in the river itself.
Then one day some guy noticed something that a battalion of high paid engineers had overlooked. That dam would sit smack dab on top of one of the only active earthquake faults in the area. Those engineers could not have placed it more perfectly had they used the latest in 21st Century alien-derived technology. The water behind the dam would weigh about as much as a medium sized country, and this might have some small geological defects. If the Auburn Dam were to go, it would take down Folsom Dam and Nimbus Dam like dominoes and. wash Sacramento out to sea. A lot of politicians live in Sacramento, and they were most unhappy to hear this. So construction on the dam was stopped.
But southern California was growing like a cancerous tumor, and its people coveted that water so strongly that the Good Lord Himself might have a hard time keeping it from them. And even more politicians live down there. So construction was started again. Then stopped. Then started. And finally stopped — although I hear it might start back up again soon. As it stands now, there’s nothing there but a huge cut in the canyon, a small coffer dam and part of the foundation. And the diversion tunnel, which is now the normal course of the river.
In my younger days I ran with the wild things. Crazy men who would oftentimes drag me along on their insane adventures for sadistic reasons of their own. One of these fellows was an avid canoeist, and together we had pushed the performance envelope of that unstable type of watercraft on several occasions. One dumb stunt was to run the South Fork of the American River from Coloma to Folsom Lake in the spring. That stretch of water kills a few people every summer, when the river is considerably tamer. You’d have to be some kind of fool to make that run in the spring, when the snowmelt runoff turns it into 30 miles of whitewater. It just so happened we fit that description. The canoe was totaled and we each damn near drowned a dozen times, but we somehow made it to the lake with no major injuries.
I considered that run to be the climax of my canoeing career, and would have been happier than a clam never to set foot in one again. So when this same madman pulled up with a new canoe in the back of his pickup and begged me to join him for a run through the diversion tunnel, I firmly stated quite strongly that I would not even consider such a suicidal thing, He tried to weaken me by pouring numerous beers into me. But I was a rock. I never wavered in my resolve nor backed dawn in the slightest, even as we parked his truck at Twin Bridges and carried the canoe down to the water's edge. But then I was committed. I still don't know how he did that.
It was pretty early in the year and there was a lot of fast moving water, but at least the river had receded to a more normal level. A month or two earlier the water had been lapping at the Highway 49 Bridge 60 feet overhead. With the right meteorological conditions, that bridge has been known to disappear under 200 feet of raging floodwater.
I had hiked out to the damsite one stormy day in the early spring and beheld Mother Nature in all her fury. The river had backed up behind the coffer dam and the mouth of the diversion tunnel was quite a ways underwater. A huge whirlpool had formed in that wild looking lake and I watched full grown trees circling the maelstrom before being finally sucked down into the tunnel. At the downhill end, a 30-foot stream of water was arching up out of the tunnel, not even touching down for 100 yards downstream. An awesome sight. And an important clue to what we were getting ourselves into. But I never gave it a second thought as we got ready to embark.
I actually knew some people who had run the diversion tunnel the year before. But that was in the late summer when the American is basically a mellow stream. And they were in a raft, not a 14-foot aluminum canoe. You could put your dog in an eight-man inflatable river raft, kick it out into the current and he would probably make it downstream to his destination just fine. But canoes do not want people to ride in them, and like ill-tempered donkeys they are forever trying to eject their load. So preparations must be made and equipment checked. By equipment, of course, I mean beer, which we packed into a large icechest and strapped tightly into the canoe. Being young, carefree and dumber than fenceposts, we considered vests and helmets to be silly things that only flatlanders used. And honestly, where we were going lifevests would only have made it a little easier to retrieve the bodies. After a beer for the road, so to speak, we were ready to rock and roll.
The diversion tunnel was only a few miles downstream. There were no real rapids in this stretch and we moved quickly. But long before we saw the tunnel, we heard the tunnel. It was moaning like a giant kid blowing across the top of a giant soda-pop bottle, and it was actually making its own wind which got stronger the closer we came to its source. We paddled around the last turn into the damsite where a steel cable was stretched across the river supported by floating barrels carrying signs with their stay out or die message in several dialects.
We infiltrated the perimeter and beached the canoe so as to conduct a quick recon, hare a beer and talk strategy and tactics.
That was one spooky place, let me tell you. The entrance to the tunnel was off in the shadows and it was moaning and roaring and whistling loudly. The water level was about a third of the way up the tunnel, and a vertical pillar in the center of the mouth was causing quite a commotion when the water hit it. We looked into the tunnel and saw that this mess of whitewater flattened out soon, and it seemed fairly smooth for as far as we could see. But it was a hell of a lot steeper than I had imagined, Way down in the bottom of that gloomy hole I could barely make out light from the other end. Strangely, the water level at that one seemed considerably higher. But I wrote it off as an optical illusion. Important clue number two had just blown right past me. It looked tricky, for sure. But we didn't know the half of it as we loaded back up and paddled naively into the hole.
It was a real close thing right at the mouth of the tunnel where that roaring water hits the pillar and splits into two breaking waves. Just perfect for flipping a canoe — and it almost did. But we fought our way out and began to race down the tunnel. The water was moving so fast that when I tried to use my paddle it was almost ripped from my hand and the canoe would slew around sideways. So I left it to my friend behind me to keep us pointed straight. And as we flew down that hole a terrifying sight appeared from the darkness before us.
Down at the bottom the tunnel slants back upwards, and this bend was actually somewhat below the downstream water level. When the combined waters of the north and middle forks of the American River hit that dip, after racing down a highway speed pipe for a quarter mile, all hell breaks loose. The river rose up in a solid wall 10 feet high. And from then on that last hundred yards of tunnel was three quarters full of rolling, boiling, smoking whitewater the likes of which I had never seen before and hope to never see again. The devil himself was in the bottom of that hole, just waiting for us. And we were hauling ass down there to make his acquaintance.
The immediate future looked mighty grim indeed. A deep sense of inner peace and tranquillity enveloped me for a moment, like a deer caught in the headlights of a fast moving truck. But no matter how resigned I was to dying, I knew that getting hurt doing it would suck. And this was going to really, really hurt. We began to scream incoherent orders at each other, but that canoe was so far past the point of control that anything we might have tried to do would have only made things worse. With the luck of the foolish, we hit the devil dead center and perfectly straight.
The canoe slammed into that wall of water like a speeding car hitting an embankment. Dozens of rivets blew out, beams opened up and the front was stove in for two feet. We went over the top and I was launched upwards, hovering airborne momentarily before crashing back down into the canoe, losing my paddle in the process. A breaking wave then threw it back into my face. I got a busted nose but I got the paddle, too, and I lost no time putting it to it's intended use. We were spun around and smashed backwards into the wall of the tunnel so hard that it crushed that end of the canoe to match the other. We were going up down backwards forward and sideways, all at the same time. The only thing that kept the canoe from flipping over was the fact that it was mostly underwater. We almost made it into the sunlight when a backcurrent caught us and blasted us upstream to try our luck again. We finally shot out of the tunnel backwards, paddling at full throttle with the canoe sinking beneath us. And shouting with glee like lunatics who had just fled the asylum.
When the river eased its grip on us, we pulled our submerged canoe onto a small beach and collapsed exhausted in the sand. We could look a ways into the tunnel and see our icechest caught in a standing wave. It would tumble around for awhile, actually moving upstream before it would be caught in the suction and disappear underwater for a minute or two. Then it would pop back up and do its dance again. Finally it got sucked under for good, and for all I know it's still there. Occasionally one of our beers would float by, and we would swim out to get them in order to build our courage back up for the rest of the trip.
From that point on down to Folsom Lake is where the real rapids are. But after Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in the tunnel, they were like ripples in a pond. We had to constantly pull over to empty our badly leaking canoe before it sank. But we made it to the lake, and after a long battle into the teeth of the wind we paddled up to Rattlesnake Bar where a friend awaited.
We were pumped full of the Joy of Life. A couple bikini-clad young ladies who we introduced ourselves to in the hope of sharing this joy soon ran off to their car, So I guess we looked a little wild. We knocked back some cold ones, abandoned what was left of the canoe at the water’s edge and headed home. Our brush with the devil has given me a slightly different perspective on life. Wow, should I ever see my crazy friend pull up with a canoe in his truck again, I intend to draw the shades and pretend I'm not at home.
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