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Robert Price: Another day, another Kern River swimmer lulled into drowning
| Saturday, Jul 5 2008 6:37 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 17 2008 11:33 AM
Christi Abshire knows the Kern River. She grew up in the town of Lake Isabella, fishing, rafting and kayaking on local water. As a teen, she spent summers working as a guide for a Kernville commercial river-rafting outfit, regularly briefing tourists on what to do if they're pitched into the frothy maelstrom.
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When a heavy, late snowmelt made the Kern River particularly treacherous in the summer of 1998 — eight people drowned there that year — CNN came out to Kernville and interviewed her.
"The water is so swift," she warned the camera, "... everything has to be planned."
Ten years to the day after she gave that interview, Abshire, now 29, was on the Kern River again for a Saturday morning family fishing expedition at the Live Oak picnic area.
The four of them had been there for a few hours when another group — five adults, several children — arrived and poured out onto the riverbank a short distance away.
The current was strong, but the newcomers coaxed the children into the water. None had life jackets. A few minutes later, the adults ventured in, swimming crossway through the powerful current and emerging exhausted and sputtering on the other side.
After 10 minutes, Abshire's family had seen enough. Go talk to them, they urged her. Abshire, so apprehensive about the river's power she felt sick to her stomach, walked over and spoke to the three men.
She told them about undercurrents, strainers and undercut rocks. She told them about the annual drownings, and the river's most recent victim — a young man lost just the day before in much calmer water. She gave them her personal background, but tried to be humble about it. She didn't want her perceived braggadocio to ruin anybody's day.
One man seemed genuinely shocked, but another smirked and the third chuckled — as if, as Abshire later explained, "I was some local know-it-all who needed to leave." So she did. She'd tried.
Five minutes later, laughing man was swimming across the river again. His 16-year-old daughter was in the river, too. Suddenly she was in trouble, gasping and going under. The father swam to her and, fighting against the current, pushed her toward the shore where family members pulled her in.
Exhausted, he fell back into the water. With everyone's attention on the girl, even as she stood on the riverbank, obviously safe, none of them noticed him drifting down the river, gasping. Abshire's family started yelling, and the man's family looked up in amazement.
Nearby picnickers had rope, and Abshire asked them to run to where the water pooled more calmly some distance ahead, west of the rapid. Three men — one of them the smirker — grabbed the rope and took off.
But Abshire, trailing behind, begged them not to go in after the flailing swimmer.
"If anyone goes into that water, we are going to have two missing people, not one," she said. Eventually they lost sight of 38-year-old Gonzalo Acosta, who'd brought his family up from Glendale that day.
Back at the picnic area, Wendy Sanchez was with Acosta's wife.
"He is a very strong swimmer," the woman said. "We come here all the time. He knows that if you get taken down the river just to relax and you will come out downstream where it is calm."
A week later, he still hadn't emerged.
Abshire never thought she could respect the river any more than she already did before June 28. Now she knows she can — and does.
"I've commuted through the (Kern River) Canyon since I was 16, and I used to carry rescue equipment with me in my car all the time," she said. "I'll start carrying it again."
She's convinced more needs to be done to warn swimmers of the river's power. If it's a mandatory life-vest law, so be it.
In sharing her story, Abshire means no disrespect to the missing man or his family. She tells of Acosta's apparent drowning in the hope it will save another life on another day. But having paddled and fished on Kern County water most of her life, she knows better than to hope for too much.
Reach Robert Price at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.