On the Beach
Why go to Cancun when I already have my own Club Med? By Bill Vaughn
 

[read the beginning] began stabling these rent plugs on the far side of the beleaguered structure, which compelled the health department to charge him with water pollution. By then the roadbed of Harper’s Bridge was growing weeds. An ice jam shredded much of what remained of the span. In 1997 an arsonist torched one of the bridgeheads. And soon after, the other one went up in flames.

Of course, none of this mayhem stopped people from enjoying the water. The place continued to swarm with swimmers, inner tube flotillas, anglers in drift boats, and duck hunters, whose vessels were shrewdly concealed by reeds and cattails, like little islands. In the winter old men still came to drop hooks through the ice for whitefish. Because Harper’s Bridge Road terminates at the bridgehead this remained one of the few places outside the city limits where you could get to the water without pleading for permission from some cranky land owner (like me).

But a few years ago the guy who owned the land around these blackened pilings tired of all the traffic and tried to block the public’s access to the right bank. First, he strung barbed wire across the paths leading from the road to the water. When that didn’t deter anyone, he drove so many steel fence posts into the ground the area looked like the Nazi’s fortifications on Omaha Beach. But people found ways through this maze, as well, so he felled a big cottonwood across the top of this mess. Then he spray-painted everything orange.

Montana’s 1985 stream access law declares that streambeds up to the highwater mark belong to us all. In 2002 the attorney general ruled that streams can be accessed at bridges. Maybe this guy had never heard of the law, or believed it didn’t apply to him, or decided it sucked. Whatever, it’s a bedrock right of Montanans to use any of their waterways, even when they pass through private property. This tenet of the 1972 state constitution and the populist legislation it inspired has survived multiple legal challenges by imperious land owners.

The most notorious of these was Mike Curran, who strung wire across six miles of the Dearborn River to harass floaters. An anglers’ group sued, and the case went to the Montana Supreme Court, which ruled against this relentless tyrant in 1984.

I assumed the fate of the beaches at Harper’s Bridge would also end up in court. But, to my relief, no pricey lawyers were brought in to settle the matter. After fielding a slew of complaints, the county, which owns the right-of-way to the bridge, engaged the landowner in a full and frank exchange of views. The fortifications vanished.

And then to my surprise the landowner made a complete U-turn. He and his family agreed to sell the Montana Fish, WIldlife and Parks Department eight acres surrounding the ruins of the bridge on the right bank, and offered to donate four acres of land around the ex-bridge on the left bank. And so, for a mere $63,225, Montanans, and the world, have permanent access to the Clark Fork on both sides of Harper's Bridge. The landowner put a nice piece of change in his pocket, and will no longer have to put up with crowds of daytrippers trampling across his property.

To celebrate Bastille Day, just because it was a holiday that fell on a sweet July afternoon when I had some time to kill, I walked freely down a path beside the ruins to the water and waded in up to my chest. Then, stretching out in the warm sand, I closed my eyes, and let the narcotic flow of the luscious river we all own put me sound to sleep.


On the beaches at Harper's Bridge:



Pulled Under
The river that runs through Dark Acres looks innocent,
but it’s a devious and dangerous serpent. By Bill Vaughn

[read from the beginning] toward the ruins of the old Harper’s Bridge, which lie just below the beach where I drank beer with my Delta Sigma Phi fraternity brothers in the 1960s, I didn’t think much of it when Lyndon entered these eddies. Clara avoided them, and swam to the bank, looking for dead fish.

But the water here, as we discovered when it tugged at our tubes with a force that left us shaking, was being driven downward by the energy of the collision, gouging a deep hole in the bed of the river and creating a fierce whirlpool.

The moment Lyndon swam into this vortex he disappeared.

I cried out. And so did Kitty. But there was nothing we could do. Our little dog was gone.
And then, just as quickly, he was back, shot from the depths of this churning maelstrom as if he’d bounded onto a trampoline. When we got our hands on him we cried and held him and let him lick our faces. What’s the big deal? he said. Let’s swim.

So when we paddled out to the island on our tubes we got the dogs out of the water as soon as we could, and walked straight to the end of the island. The spit had been honed to a dagger point during the spring runoff. And now there was a series of whirlpools just off the tip, each one more ferocious than the one that tried to steal Lyndon. While Kitty held the dogs I heaved a hunk of cottonwood into them. It immediately vanished. We watched. But it didn’t reappear.

We walked upstream to a sunny spot on the right bank where the current had piled a mound of scrubbed, blinking sand, and lay down on it while the dogs explored a little spring-fed stream nearby. Ospreys and hawks wheeled overhead, and an eagle checked out Lyndon to see if he might be light enough to cart away for dinner.

Then it was dogs all over. Four big beautiful high-bred beasts, dripping water, eyes insane with the pleasure of swimming away a hot Sunday afternoon, suddenly issued from the rushing channel on the left, and bounded across the sand toward us. They were past us in a beat and loping toward the tip of the island as their masters, five twenty-somethings in tubes, three women and two guys, arms linked, shot by us in the rush. I stood up and pointed at the whirlpools.

“Don’t worry, they’re real friendly,” one of the guys shouted.

“Stay away from those whirlpools!” I shouted back, pointing. “We almost lost this one in there last year.” But it was too little and too late. The dogs—a Husky, a yellow lab, a Doberman, and a black lab—were already at the water’s edge, our dogs on their heels, yapping. The big dogs dove into the water, following their masters, who were already bobbing and twirling in the maelstrom. As we shouted at Clara and Lyndon they hung back, knowing better.

The Doberman and the black lab somehow made it through the whirlpools with little effort. But the Husky disappeared, and then the yellow lab. Kitty and I ran to land’s end. The floaters had felt the power of the water and knew something was wrong. They furiously paddled to shore, jumped from their tubes, and called for their animals. Finally, a figure popped out of a whirlpool. It was the yellow lab. After some very scary touch-and-go, the exhausted dog finally paddled into the arms of his mistress.

She stood up and began yelling and sobbing at the water. “Max! Max! Where are you?”
Shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun, the guys edged back into water, trying to see inside it. One of them ventured too far, and had to swim for his life to get back to the grasping hand of his friend, who pulled him from the current.

For a half hour Kitty and I stood on Radish Island watching, and the big dogs and their masters stood on the shore. But Max never appeared. 

Finally, on both sides of the water, we called off the watch. Heads down, everyone went home. Kitty and I plodded up the island, paddled back across the river with Clara and Lyndon, and collapsed into our patio chairs. The dogs curled up next to each other at our feet, and fell into a happy sleep.

In a few minutes the sun drove the river from their coats.