This is how I heard it.  Some may question the truth of the matter, but I know Dave Edwards and so I’ll take it as fact.

Once a group of rafters with AZRA were tied up at the drainage from Havasu Falls.  It was a clear summer day and folks were blissfully unaware of the flash flood waters until the moment that they hit.  The tributary narrows right there at the opening into a slot canyon so that the water funnels in and shoots out in a torrent.

Havasu flash flood

The folks standing and lounging on the rocks didn’t know what hit them, only that it felt like a wall of falling bricks and then that they were being swept away in the muddy maelstrom of the Colorado.

Dave was in one of the rafts and remembers the chaos of garbage and rocks, of the wall of water carrying ripped trees and flipping boats.  There in the raging torrent coming towards him he saw a woman’s face, and then the face was gone.

Dave grew up with a father, a military man, who made a career out of telling his son that he was hardly the measure of a man, that he wasn’t good enough.  In a way that only that boy now grown to be a man could do, he dove into the water without a thought.  He was swept way in the swift current and he reached down until he felt hair and he pulled the unconscious woman to the surface.  One of his fellow guides threw a float to him, but he was holding the woman with both arms, so he locked the nut in his teeth and in that way the two of them were pulled to safety.  He saved the woman’s life that day.

But he wouldn’t see it that way.  It’s just my job, he might say.