We were young, and young is a kind of blindness.

There were just a few of us, old boys who had grown up daring each other into one foolish thing after another. We stood at the top of the falls that day looking down, and the water didn’t look like water from up there. It looked like a road. Smooth, white, fast, and certain.

We had a plan, of course. Young men always have a plan.

There were places on the way down, we told each other — a flat rock here, a ledge there, a pool where a man could catch himself and get his feet under him. We pointed them out like they were bus stops. I’ll grab that one. Then that one. Then I’ll ride the last drop into the pool at the bottom and stand up grinning.

I went first.

I don’t know why I went first. Maybe because I was the one talking the loudest. Maybe because somebody had to, and the rest of them were waiting to see if it could be done. I stepped in, sat down, and let the water take me.

The second my body touched the water, I was in total out of control.

It wasn’t a ride. A ride is something you steer. This was being seized. The current grabbed my legs and my arms and my chest all at once, and it threw me forward before I could get a breath, before I could think, before I could even be afraid in any orderly way. I could hear Dan and Steve hollering like it was an “E” ride times 10.

The stops flew by.

That flat rock I was going to grab — gone. That ledge — gone. They went past like I was watching them from a train, and each one took a little more of the plan with it. I reached for them and the water laughed and pulled my hands away. I was tumbling now, rolling over stone, slammed against rock, spun around, dragged under and thrown up again, with the roar of the falls filling my ears until there was nothing else in the world.

And somewhere in the middle of it, my life started flying by too.

Not in pictures, not the way people say. Just the sudden, cold knowledge that I was about to end. That this was how it finished — not in old age, not in a bed, but here, broken on rocks in front of my friends, because I had talked myself into something stupid and then volunteered to go first.

I prayed. I don’t remember the words. I don’t think there were words. Just God, and the water, and the rocks.

Then, somehow, I was at the bottom.

I came up gasping, coughing, shaking so hard I could barely stand. But I was alive. And when I checked myself over, the only blood was on my right elbow — not even enough to need a bandage.

I stood there in the water at the bottom of the falls, looking back up at what I had just come down, and I knew with a certainty I have never forgotten that I had no business being alive.

It was the grace of God. Nothing else explains it. Not skill. I had no skill in that water. Not luck. Luck doesn’t carry a man down a rocky falls and set him down breathing, with nothing worse than a scraped elbow.

It was my second life-changing event. The first was the hang glider incident with Dan months earlier.

My friends were still at the top, shouting down, asking if I was all right. I looked up at them and I didn’t have to say much. They could see it on me — the shaking, the fear still in my eyes. I was convincing enough in the fear of that flight down that I didn’t have to argue with a single one of them.

Nobody else tried.

We walked home quieter than we had walked out, and I have thanked God for that day ever since. He gave me one miracle on that trip.

This is the second time I could have bit-it. Not sure how many more God will give me. Looking back from 66 years I can see he gave me more than most. You would think I would have started to listen years if not decades ago.