I found this news item to be highly emotional; one because it is tragic, and two because it shows human beings are capable of being self sacrificing and heroic of body and spirit and in the end, we are all just human....and we connect with strangers in an instant.
There are rare moments in life that stay locked inside a person’s heart forever. Beautiful moments like the first cry of their newborns or the way they felt when they said, “I do,” to the one they love the most.
And there are also moments of intense pain and horror that scar our hearts and sear images — like snap shots — in our mind, experiences so traumatizing they play on a loop in the background of the mind, and can be plucked from the mental archives to be relived at any time with intensity so strong it feels like time travel.
On Saturday, my friends and I experienced both.
Friday afternoon, 10 of us traveled to Van Buren, Mo., for our annual two-day girls-only float trip down the Current River for what history told us was guaranteed to be a good time.
And it was.
Right up until the very moment it stopped being a good time and started being a horror show that keeps us awake at night.
Split into two rafts of five, we set out on the river Saturday morning laughing, enjoying the beautiful weather and each other’s company. We made some new friends along the way and met up with a other familiar faces from last year’s float.
A little over halfway through our four-hour trip downstream, we rounded a bend to find ourselves in the midst of an intense and serious scene that, at first, I thought must be some kind of altercation.
As a man pulled our rafts to the bank, we soon discovered it wasn’t an altercation — it was something much worse. Someone was trapped underwater. They were drowning. They had been under too long.
If you read the incident report from Saturday, you will learn the victim was a 21-year-old named Lucas Mehler from Hutsonville, Ill. It says he was a swimmer who was floating in the Current River when he became tangled in a branch and was unable to get out of the water.
But what happened that afternoon was so much more than that brief description.
It all can change in a moment - Perryville News: Opinion
There are rare moments in life that stay locked inside a person’s heart forever. Beautiful moments like the first cry of their newborns or the way they felt when they said, “I do,” to the one they love the most.
And there are also moments of intense pain and horror that scar our hearts and sear images — like snap shots — in our mind, experiences so traumatizing they play on a loop in the background of the mind, and can be plucked from the mental archives to be relived at any time with intensity so strong it feels like time travel.
On Saturday, my friends and I experienced both.
Friday afternoon, 10 of us traveled to Van Buren, Mo., for our annual two-day girls-only float trip down the Current River for what history told us was guaranteed to be a good time.
And it was.
Right up until the very moment it stopped being a good time and started being a horror show that keeps us awake at night.
Split into two rafts of five, we set out on the river Saturday morning laughing, enjoying the beautiful weather and each other’s company. We made some new friends along the way and met up with a other familiar faces from last year’s float.
A little over halfway through our four-hour trip downstream, we rounded a bend to find ourselves in the midst of an intense and serious scene that, at first, I thought must be some kind of altercation.
As a man pulled our rafts to the bank, we soon discovered it wasn’t an altercation — it was something much worse. Someone was trapped underwater. They were drowning. They had been under too long.
If you read the incident report from Saturday, you will learn the victim was a 21-year-old named Lucas Mehler from Hutsonville, Ill. It says he was a swimmer who was floating in the Current River when he became tangled in a branch and was unable to get out of the water.
But what happened that afternoon was so much more than that brief description.
It all can change in a moment - Perryville News: Opinion