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Show THE NINE(TEEN) LIVES of TOM WESSON The man who takes a licking...and another...and another...and another...and keeps on ticking By Jim Stiles highwater might create. Already an experienced and respected boatman, Tom watched the river rise with a fury he could not have even imagined. Finally, when he saw an entire house float by the flycamp, headed for Cataract Canyon and Lake Powell, Wesson acted unilaterally to stop all commercial and private trips from entering the dangerous waters. But Wesson would never guess that his own life would soon be in peril again, not from the raging waters, but from something no larger than his outstretched hand. Tom was still at flycamp, Cataract was closed, and he had stayed busy all day and into the night. Finally, at about 2 am, Wesson went back to his tent and crashed, totally exhausted. But he forgot to zip up the netting and a few minutes later, already drifting toward sleep, Tom felt something slapping him in the face, followed by a sharp pain, right in the middle of his nose. Wesson grabbed his flashlight and saw...a BAT! It was flying erratically into the sides of his tent and Tom frantically tried to catch it. But the bat escaped through the open netting and Tom, now bleeding, found fellow ranger Barb Warner, who was able to confirm, “Yep Tom, looks like a bat bit you on the nose.” Wesson piloted the park’s Zodiac upstream, ‘against the current, to Moab, where the Chief Ranger Jim Braggs met him and transported Tom to the hospital. Without the bat to examine, there was no way to know whether the bat was rabid or not, so Tom endured the anti-rabies vaccine—15 shots over a period of a few weeks. A year later, on the first anniversary of his Bite, he was back at flycamp again. After a party to com- The phone rang. I looked at the ID and saw it was Wesson again. We'd spent most of the last two hours on the phone, though it was, by necessity, a one sided conversation. He talked and I scribbled furiously. Sometimes I'd say, “Are you kidding me?” Or “I can barely believe this!” or “How is it you're still walking around?” But mostly I just scribbled. Now I picked up the phone again. “What's up Tom?” “Yeah Stiles...after we hung up I got to thinking and realized I forgot to mention the ‘hatchet man.” “The Hatchet Man?” “Somehow I forgot him.” “Okay...who was he?” “Oh its was a long time ago. I picked him up hitchhiking in Vegas and he tried to kill me with a hatchet. We were on some dirt road in the mountains west of Loa. I was looking for a shortcut to Denver. And he tried to hack me to death. Turns out he was a murderer on the lam.” I sat down on the couch and propped my chin on my hand. He told the story with such..such nonchalance, like someone recalling a long ago chigger bite. “Let me get this straight. A guy tried to murder you with a hatchet and you forgot to tell me? A close encounter with a hatchet killer somehow slipped your mind?” “Yeah dude, well I’ve had so many of these, it just got by me...you know what I’m saying?” This story is about the remarkably resilient life of memorate the event, Tom returned to his tent, only to find it surrounded by crucifixes, cloves of garlic, and my pal, Tom Wesson. a big wooden stake, driven right through the fabric of When Tom came to Moab in the late 70s to work as a seasonal boat mechanic at Canyonlands National his tent. Maybe the curse was over...maybe not. Spring 1984. Fellow ranger and Cessna pilot Forrest Weldon had planned a flight to Flagstaff with a stopover at Tusayan, near the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. Tom’s girlfriend was there and he decided to come along. Ranger Pat Grediagan hopped aboard as well. But the plane was plagued with engine problems and takeoff was delayed twice. Finally they replaced the plugs, the instrumentation looked good, and Forrest prepared to take off. But in the long delay, Weldon had failed to notice Park, he’d already had his share of close shaves. As a ten year old, he’d once become stranded in the middle of a fast moving stream, a few hundred yards upriver from Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite. A few years later, now old enough to drive, he lost control of his VW and ran off the Angeles Crest Highway. Tom sailed over the cliff and he and his bug landed in some sturdy trees. He walked away with scratches (after he climbed down the tree). Then Tom joined the U.S. Coast Guard. He was stationed in Portland and cruised the waters off the Pacific coast, mainly rescuing idiotic boaters who literally got in over their heads. But one night so did Tom. The crappers on. his Coast Guard cutter backed up and Tom, in need of relief, hung his ass off the taft rail. But to steal a line from George Costanza, “The a wind shift. As Forrest pushed the throttle and the plane stubbornly clung to the ground, Wesson looked out the window and noticed something odd---the windsock was blowing in the same direction as the plane. To get sufficient lift, an airplane needs to fly in sea was angry that night, my friends.” The ship was battling six to seven foot swells and one gnarly bump knocked Tom off the rail and into the Pacific. With to the wind. Tom was only able to yell, “Wind sock!” The Cessna was traveling at 110 mph. It briefly lifted off the runway, barely missed a barbed wire fence, then plowed into a cattleguard and gravel road, a hundred yards beyond the south end of the runway. The impact ripped off both wings, the fuel tanks ruptured and fuel splattered everywhere. Tom remembers seeing his own sunglasses fly off his face and hit the plexiglass windshield and shatter. The plane finally came to a stop. The chaotic crash was followed by dead silence. Tom said shakily, “Let's compose ourselves.” Incredibly, Pat and Forrest were unhurt. Tom broke two ribs and sustained a concussion. Still Tom kicked open the door and climbed out of the plane, caught a ride back to the airport where he retrieved Pat's car, picked her up, and drove on to Tusayan. A few days later, when he returned, Tom was almost arrested by the San Juan County Sheriff's office for leaving the scene of an accident, albeit his own. his trousers still around his ankles and with Wesson treading water, Tom called out to his mates, but at 3am nobody heard his plaintive pleas for help. An hour later, one of his buddies finally noticed his absence. According to Tom, what happened next was the stuff of miracles. “The quartermaster executed what’s called a Williamson Turn, where he comes [ — back over exactly the same route he'd just followed. I’d been treading out there for a couple hours when I saw the lights. They came right up to me and cut the engines and I let out a yell. They pulled me out and I was back on the ship again.” So...enough is enough, right? Ol’ Tom should have been able to coast from here on, knowing the odds of being tossed a potential lethal blow again, from any direction, were damn near impossible. But for Wesson, these incidents were just the prologue. Tom Wesson’s dance with Death was just warming up. Coming to Moab seemed to be the catalyst. Six months later, again in Cataract, Tom drank some water from a cooler that turned out to be untreated runoff from Clearwater Creek—it might have been clear but it wasn’t very clean. He was bringing a boat back to Potash and by the time he reached the takeout, near dawn, Tom was critically ill. Alone and without a radio, he emptied his bowels and passed out on the beach. Almost dead, other boaters finally spotted him and rushed him (again) to Allen Memorial Hospital where he was given anti-biotics for giardia. That winter his weight dropped from 180 to 130 pounds. Tom, now bleeding, found fellow ranger Barb Warner, who was able to confirm, “Yep Tom, looks like a bat bit you on the nose.” Tom was only able to yell, “Wind sock!” Tom arrived in June 1979 and went to work for Holladay River Expeditions, running . tourists in triple rigs through Cataract Canyon. On an early trip, Tom took over the oars when the “captain” got catapulted into the river. At Satan’s Gut in Big Drop 3, the boat buckled and Tom was pinned between the aluminum frame and the boat. He was completely under water and under the boat with nowhere to go but down. Nobody noticed he was missing until someone heard a gurgling noise. It was Wesson, in the process of drowning. They pulled him out and Tom was so terrified by the experience that he went Enough? Nope...there’s more: Autumn 1986. While deadheading j-rigs back to Moab, Tom flips backwards off the front of the boat and into the surf and gets run over by the prop. He tries to dive to avoid the blade but he’s wearing a lifejacket. The buoyancy pulls him back to the surface. He feels the prop strike him. Tom comes to the surface screaming, “My fucking leg!” His friends on the boat see what appears to be a leg, floating nearby but it’s just a plastic bottle. Incredibly Tom’s leg is still attached, but black, blue and yellow, from his waist to his toes. He makes a splint, still runs Cat, then drives back to Moab and the hospital. No broken bones Early 1988. Tom drives to St. George, Utah to take a Civil Service test for a postal carrier job. He stays with friend Brad Minor (who'd also been along for the boating incident). The test is the next day, but Tom and Brad decide to try out their skateboards at a new golf course that’s about to open. It has a new paved concrete driveway for the golf carts—per- back to Portland, quit the Coast Guard, and came back to Moab to run rivers full-time. Death defying Wesson was about to go ona roll... He went to work for Tag-a-Long Expeditions in the spring of 1980 and starting piloting his own boats through Cataract and Desolation Canyons. And in March 1983, he went to work as a boat mechanic/river runner with the National Park Service at Canyonlands. 1983 was the biggest water year on the Colorado River in recorded history. Cataract Canyon, just downstream from the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, was running at 105,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) by early June. Tom was sent to the flycamp at Spanish Bottom, above Cataract, to monitor the river and to be ready for any crisis the 14 |