It was just one of those days: summer, sunny, warm, full of easy livin’. My brother-in-law Gerald had a Chestnut Prospector canoe that he had hardly used since the day he bought it a dozen years previously. The Kootenay River had tamed itself of most of its springtime craziness and was running high, but meltwater blue and full of apparent lazy whirlpools. I figured we’d drift down the river from Skookumchuck at the mouth of the Lussier River to the Ta Ta Creek bridge. It was an easy afternoon’s trip on a river that Gerald and I had known virtually all of our lives.
We enlisted the girls—our wives were 30 years younger then—to drive us from the farm at Ta Ta Creek up to Skookumchuck with instructions to meet us at the bridge in a couple of hours (note: skookumchuck means “strong water” in the Chinook jargon). And so we put the nearly new cedar canvas canoe into the river, donned our life jackets, dug in our paddles and angled out to the centre of the river.
What a day; the mighty Kootenay pushing us downstream with its hissing whirlpools, Gerald and I paddling no more than necessary, the Rocky Mountains on one side, the Purcell Mountains on the other and the beautiful river with us in it in the middle. A few miles downstream we angled over to the eastern shore where a little snye left the main river for about a kilometre and then re-joined it creating an interesting series of riffles, eddies and whirlpools where it came back to the river. We decided to enter the riffles for fun. The lovely canoe came alive. We felt her shift a little sideways and both of us dug in our paddles to correct it. The problem was that we weren’t paying attention to one another and dug our paddles in with a vengeance both on the same side of the canoe—a classic river canoeing mistake. The other problem was that we were sitting on the high cane canoe seats instead of kneeling on the bottom of the canoe thus lowering the centre of gravity like we should have been—another classic river canoeing mistake.
The canoe leaned to one side and the mighty Kootenay seized its opportunity. The whirlpools and riffles, much stronger than we first thought, literally sucked the canoe right off of our bums as we leaned over. In a nanosecond we were in the icy water, popped out of the canoe like a couple of corks and the canoe was on its side filled with water. The powerful waters, mostly glacial fed from the icefield in the Rocky Mountains, began to play with us like a cat with a couple of mice.
No problem, I thought, at least we are both wearing good life jackets.
That’s when I heard Gerald choking on the other side of the canoe. I kicked hard to fight my way through the current and get around the canoe. What I saw struck terror into my heart. With the warm July sun lulling him into complacency, Gerald had left his life jacket undone and it had slipped off of him when he hit the water. He was not a strong swimmer; he had gone under when he entered the river, had taken a lungful of water and was choking almost to the point of losing consciousness. The river’s hissing whirlpools were trying desperately to suck him under and he was struggling, three metres away from the canoe. Somehow I had to get to him, get his life jacket on him again and get him back to the canoe, all through the deep and powerful swirling current of the Kootenay. We were in the claws of the river that its first white explorer, David Thompson, described in his journals almost 200 years earlier as: “Very dangerous from violent eddies and whirlpools which threated us with sure destruction and which we escaped by hard paddling and keeping (to) the middle of the river.”
That experience with the Kootenay River was an extreme struggle that still sends chills down my spine whenever I remember it nearly 30 years later. Somehow I managed to get Gerald back into his life jacket and back to the canoe and eventually we were able to work the capsized, water-filled canoe through the whirlpools and eddies over to the western shore of the river. There we lay exhausted on the riverbank regaining our strength and courage. We had to re-launch the canoe in order to continue our journey down to where the girls were to meet us at the bridge. I can’t remember if we told the girls how close we had come to a tragedy or not, but I guess they will find out if they read this.
I tell that story in order to tell this one. There is an old saw, most likely anonymous, that states that “God is in the details.” The point of the proverb is that details are important and implies that something may seem simple, but in fact the details are complicated and likely to cause problems. In my river story the apparently simple detail that was so important and yet overlooked, almost costing a life, was having one’s life jacket properly done up whilst canoeing even when it seemed like it would be a lazy float down a beautiful river as a sunny summer soiree. That is one way that one could read this story I suppose.
But I take something else from it entirely. Indeed, God is in the details, but God is in the details as a participant not just as an observer watching as things come unravelled because some shmoo like me overlooked a detail. The other story—the God story that speaks to my story—is the long detailed story of Joseph’s life in the Bible (Genesis 30-50).
He was born as the much loved child of Jacob and his dearest Rachel and yet as the details unfold, this preferred son becomes the apparent victim of details run amuck time and again. Joseph ends up a slave and then a prisoner in Egypt and then a leading minster of Egypt and eventually the saviour of his 70-member Abrahamic family, most of whom wished him dead and thought that he was. But the Bible’s point about Joseph and all the details apparently run amuck in his life is that God was involved in every detail. God was bringing his goodness and purpose out of them for Joseph and for all of Joseph’s clan and eventually for all God’s people Israel in the Exodus. The point is that looking at it through the lens of faith, God is in all the details of life working all things together for good for those who are called by him and love him, as the Apostle Paul would succinctly put it some 1,500 years later (Romans 8:28).
As Gerald and I sheepishly shook the glacial river silt out of our shorts and lugged the canoe up the banks of the Kootenay river that summer afternoon so many years ago, there was little doubt in either of our minds that God had been involved in the details that day.
