Skip to content
Health
Link copied to clipboard

A summer rafting trip nearly killed me. What those 20 minutes took — and what they taught me.

Until I die, hopefully as an old woman on dry land, I’ll wear a permanent reminder of how easily those 20 minutes could’ve ended differently.

Erin McCarthy stands on the banks of the Schuylkill River near Valley Forge, much closer to home than the Bradford County section of the Susquehanna River where she was trapped for 20 minutes in rushing water this summer.
Erin McCarthy stands on the banks of the Schuylkill River near Valley Forge, much closer to home than the Bradford County section of the Susquehanna River where she was trapped for 20 minutes in rushing water this summer.Read moreSTEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer

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 underwater, 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, about 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 underwater.

I felt my right arm in the grip of Dan Logue, the fiancé 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 were 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.

Too harrowing to process

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.

People freeze, psychologists say, when their mind quickly determines that a situation can’t be outrun or outfought. Many rape survivors react this way during their attack.

I was conscious the entire time. I could talk and answer questions. But my voice was low, almost a whisper. Looking back, I can’t recall certain details.

I couldn’t tell you the temperature of the water. Until I talked to Dan a week later, I couldn’t remember that I was submerged to my chin or that he had to remind me to keep breathing.

I disassociated, Cooper told me, because the situation was too harrowing to process. Endorphins were released in my body that acted as a kind of painkiller, which explains why my finger felt only uncomfortable.

After 20 minutes, I was saved, not by a fellow rafter’s 911 call but by people in our group, people who barely knew me before this trip. Because the pillar blocked my view, I had no idea how hard they were trying to free me, untying ropes and popping rafts with their teeth. People in the group who had made it to shore tried to swim out with broken bottles and sharp rocks that they had found, thinking they could cut the rope.

One friend, Mike Marciante, ran the half-mile or so back to the parking lot to grab his knife from a friend’s car, where he had left it because he worried he’d pop a raft if he carried it. When he returned, Shane’s cousin, Erik Schwab, took the knife, jumped in the water, and let the current take him to the pillar. Hanging on with his legs and one arm, he used his free hand to cut the rope that could have killed me.

On the way back to land, I looked twice at my mangled finger, though my friends told me not to. I needed to see it.

I saw how bad it looked, but I couldn’t worry about how many fingers I’d wake up with tomorrow.

I just knew I was going to wake up tomorrow.

Taking control

I was flown to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center within hours and put in the care of an amazing hand team. Despite their best efforts over two surgeries, the finger was ultimately amputated.

I once thought an amputation would devastate me. But I didn’t spend a lot of time feeling sad about it. What preoccupied my thoughts was how close I had come to dying.

My emotional recovery took the front seat. In the first days at the hospital, I knew I wanted to find a therapist who specialized in helping people recover from an accident like mine. I had little control during the accident. Now I wanted to take control, as best I could, of how the event was going to impact the rest of my life.

Two months later, I still replay these 20 minutes in my head every day. I can focus on other tasks, work, and go out with friends, but the memory is always with me.

Sometimes it makes me sad. Sometimes it makes me thankful. Most of the time, though, it’s just there, reminding me.

As a journalist who’s covered gruesome crimes, I’ve always been aware of suffering, of pain, and of the fact that mortality can be a second away. But the awareness is different now, more personal.

Someone reached for me after I slammed into the pillar. I feel angry for people in similar situations who didn’t have anyone to reach for them, who died alone and terrified and in pain.

Permanent reminders

Trauma, Cooper taught me, can impact everyone who is touched in any way by a life-threatening accident.

The rafting group got together after I got out of the hospital. I thanked everyone, but the words felt inadequate.

Mike gave me his knife, a Damascus steel blade that I plan to put in a shadowbox and hang on my wall.

The experience didn’t leave me with one superior piece of wisdom to share. I’m still a 24-year-old with, thank God, a lot of living and learning left to do.

Until I die, hopefully as an old woman on dry land, I’ll wear a permanent reminder of how easily those 20 minutes could’ve ended differently. I’ll remember why they didn’t.

Most of all, I hope I remember how very much I wanted to live.

As I flipped through TV channels one day after the accident, I rewatched the movie Wind River. On the surface, it’s about killings on an Indian reservation, but really it’s a story about fighters, survivors, and about how strong someone’s will to live can be.

This time, a line struck me that hadn’t before.

“You fought for your life,” one character tells another. “Now you get to walk away with it.”

For me, that’s been the gift and the challenge.

Those 20 minutes changed my life, but the day-to-day routine is still the same. Everyday stress still exists. I still get annoyed by little things such as unexpected traffic or an article not coming together at work. I worry about what people think of me, even if they’re people whose opinions shouldn’t matter.

I’ll think, “How can you be upset about that small thing after you almost died?” or “Didn’t you say you’d be a more patient, more kind person now?”

It’s a struggle. But there’s beauty there, too.

I’m able to have good days and bad days and uneventful days, to have perspective one moment and not the next, because I’m alive.

When I get frustrated, I think about being carried up a muddy riverbank, surrounded by people who had saved my life.

I think about getting to hug my parents and my brothers and my boyfriend again. I think about Penn State football games and birthdays and anniversaries and weddings and births and random nights when everything feels right for no reason.

I think about being taken aback by the beauty of a place I’m seeing for the first time, and by the goodness of people.

I think about getting to walk away with my life. Every day, I get to keep walking.