Summer rafting trip moment that nearly killed me
Am I going to die? I don’t want to die. I hope it’s fast.
Thoughts I never imagined I’d have echoing in my head at 24.
But there they were, appearing as quickly as the day had turned from relaxation to terror.
Minutes earlier, I had settled into a blue recliner raft, excited to float down the Susquehanna River with my boyfriend, his family, and friends. We tied our rafts together so nobody got separated from the group.
With a cold beer in my raft’s cupholder, I stretched out for a lazy drift down the river, happy for the chance to maintain my tan as July turned to August.
I was facing upstream so I could see everyone floating behind me. The current suddenly intensified, and I heard someone yell, “We’re going to split up there.”
I turned around and saw that the eight of us were headed straight for a large concrete bridge pillar. With all of us linked, there was no way to move away. My raft made a direct hit, back first.
I tumbled off the raft, plunged under water, and tried to swim to the surface. I was under the Route 6 Veterans Memorial Bridge, which spans the small Pennsylvania towns of Towanda and Wysox, some 170 miles from my home in Philadelphia.
I’m a strong swimmer, played water polo and even worked as a lifeguard. I wasn’t panicking.
Until I realized I was stuck. We’d used thin, colorful rope to tie our rafts together. On impact, one of the ropes got caught on the pillar and wrapped around my left ring finger, holding it under water.
I felt my right arm in the grip of Dan Logue, the fiance of my boyfriend’s cousin, who managed to stay on his raft. My head was barely above the water. He held me up out of the water with one arm, just high enough so I could breathe. With his free hand, he gripped a tiny hole in the pillar with one finger to keep us steady.
“Where’s Erin? Where’s Erin?” I heard my boyfriend, Shane Brown, scream from the other side of the pillar, where he’d flipped off his raft. Dan yelled back that he had me. “Is she OK?” Shane shouted.
I knew I wasn’t.
Dan and his raft, I realized, were all that kept the undertow — so strong that it ripped off my bikini bottoms and strapped-on sandals — from pulling my head under.
With my other left fingers, I tried to loosen the rope. When that didn’t work, I pulled as hard as I could, trying to tear off my trapped finger.
I stared at the gold cross bracelet on my left wrist, and prayed it wouldn’t be the last thing I’d ever see.
I wondered what it would feel like to drown. I hoped that if I was pulled under, I’d quickly hit my head and go unconscious. I remember telling myself not to say out loud what I was feeling, not to put words to the surreal, heavy possibility that everything might end right there.
I heard myself say, “I don’t want to die.” Dan later told me I actually asked, “Am I going to die?”
“I’m not going to let that happen,” he said.
I knew that was out of his control. Still, I let my body sink into an odd calm and waited to be rescued. Somehow, I stopped thinking about the other possibility.
In traumatic events, the body’s response options aren’t just fight or flight, my trauma therapist, Nancy A. Cooper, later told me.
There’s a third choice: freeze. That’s what my body did.
A person freezes, psychologists say, when their mind quickly determines a situation can’t be outrun or outfought. Many rape survivors react this way during their attacks.