By Steve Kash
When Don Rogers, 53, an associate professor of recreation therapy at Indiana State University, was renting a canoe for a morning at the Myakka River State Park, Fla., in July 2008, he had no way of knowing he was en route to a terrifying adventure that would demonstrate how a man with an extreme vulnerability can survive by drawing on a reservoir of cool self discipline learned over a lifetime.
During a family trip near Bradenton, on a day his wife, Nancy (an associate vice-president of community engagement at ISU), and their two kids planned a beach outing, he decided instead to pursue his love of bass fishing by taking a solo morning outing to Upper Myakka Lake, which he had previously visited but never fished. (Nancy, though silent, was obviously not crazy about the idea, Rogers recalled, because she and the kids had seen the lake’s extreme wildlife hazards on a previous nature tour.)
The night before the fishing trip, his 10-year-old daughter Laura had sternly warned: “Daddy, the alligators at that lake are really big and dangerous!”
Unfazed, Rogers got up early that morning so he could drive to the lake and be on its water by 7. He had long since earned a reputation as a top-notch outdoorsman with wide-ranging interests. One of his former mountain climbing feats had garnered him a congratulatory phone call by none other than President Ronald Reagan. In addition to being a bass fisherman, Rogers has been a scuba diver. He has tandem skydived with a 45-second freefall from 14,500 feet. In 2002, he was one of the people nominated to carry the torch for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics through Terre Haute. His canoeing technique is so skillful that he had formerly instructed others on the slender craft’s usage in Northern Minnesota’s boundary water lakes and whitewater, once surviving a raging electrical storm with a novice canoeist who had been so terrified by the weather conditions that he had collapsed into a fetal position, causing Rogers to have to paddle alone to safety while trying to settle the other man down.
But most of all, Rogers had too overpowering a vision dancing in the strobe lights of his imagination to listen to any wise counsel: that morning, he intended to catch a big Florida bass well up in the double digits.
At the lake
He was the first person to arrive at Upper Myakka’s canoe rental shack, which because of the lake area’s teeming alligator population never has many people renting boats. On the occasions the facility does have people seeking rentals, they come in pairs or threesomes. The shack’s female attendant pointedly asked Rogers, “Are you sure you want to go out alone?”
Seeing him in his wheelchair surely added to her surprise (he has used one since 1976).
“I’m sure.”
As the attendant was helping Rogers by pushing an aluminum canoe into the water for him at the back of the long inlet leading out onto the lake from the boat dock area, she warned that sometimes alligators chase a hooked bass right up to an angler’s boat. But the information did not make him nervous; he recalled it heightening his excitement for the morning outing because he has always liked feeling he was a part of the wilderness environment.
In order to better balance the weight of the one-passenger canoe so its bow would not poke high out of the water in an unstable way, Rogers sat backwards on the canoe’s front seat, using the boat’s normal stern as its bow. He had manned canoes solo this way in the past.
Within minutes Rogers had made his way from the inlet onto the lake and was turning south in the warm morning sunshine, paddling in a light breeze 20 yards or so off the Upper Myakka’s coast, past some high ground with groves of cypress and palm trees where black panthers have been spotted. He was making a beeline for a promising place to fish, a long stretch of grass along the southwest coast’s marshy area.
After he passed a spillway dam, he began fishing slowly along the marsh’s grass line in hopes lunkers would be cruising there for food. He was out of eyeshot of anybody else that morning, and although there were little waves, he could easily control his canoe as it rolled gently on the surface 20 feet from the marsh.
While he repeatedly furled a 10-inch bluish plastic lizard toward the grass line with his Baitcaster reel and seven-foot rod, instead of attracting bass, he aroused the curiosity of a quartet of mid-sized alligators five feet long, which in human terms were about the age of young teenagers.
“One was on each side of my canoe,” recalled Rogers, “but they weren’t threatening. Three of them stationed their bodies at 45-degree angles to the boat and looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. The other observed me by looking head on.”
The alligators kept a respectful 20 to 30-yard distance from Rogers, and during the time he fished this area, they never came closer. He found it very thrilling to be with the big reptiles but acknowledged that he could have done without them. He had heard they do not customarily attack watercraft like canoes unless an unusual commotion gets them excited.
As he fished, he also spotted three enormous alligators lying in the marsh’s high grass.
“I thought maybe they were the grandfathers of the guys surrounding my canoe,” he kidded. “The gators were huge 12 to 15-foot-long monsters with jaws wide as an NFL lineman’s shoulders, but I wasn’t afraid. I decided I would have a little fun by casting my plastic lizard up near the big boys’ snouts to see how they responded and was surprised to get no reaction.”
Having fished at the edge of the marsh for an hour without getting a solid strike at his lure, Rogers paddled on south, fishing as he went—and still no luck. The curious alligator quartet followed along, maintaining a distance of 20 to 30 yards while configuring themselves in the same encircling pattern they had been employing. He had no idea what an extreme threat they would soon present.
He spotted a cove that cut 200 yards back into mainland surrounded on its three sides by more marsh.
“I got excited at the sight of the cove,” said Rogers. “For a fisherman, it was like catnip. I was expecting a real turn in my luck, and it did turn, though not as I expected.”
Paddling back into the cove, he eagerly resumed his spin casting.
After fishing in the cove for 10 minutes, he would need all of his poise, his resiliency, and his ability to live and cope in the NOW if he was to survive.
A ‘Can Do’ attitude
Rogers began learning these skills when he was growing up during the 1960s with a father who was a career military man, a hard-driving, highly-stressed computer geek often away from his family, and when he was around his wife and five children, he could be worked up into a nervous state from his job. At an early age, Rogers learned to watch his step. Compounding his challenges with his father’s temperament, every few years the man’s duties with the Air Force and then the National Security Council caused him to have to move around the world to Italy, Okinawa, and various sites in the U.S.A., so Rogers was regularly uprooted and torn away from childhood friends.
“Anybody can be broken by circumstances,” said Rogers. “I was fortunate I was able to keep myself together. Also, Mom did her best to provide a support system and a feeling of normalcy for my two brothers, two sisters, and me.”
Rogers coped by becoming an excellent student and athlete: a sprinter in track, a receiver in football, a wrestler, and a good enough lacrosse player to get a college scholarship offer; however, he was unable to focus on academics while in his late teens. Instead, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Upon mustering out, he enrolled in a trade school in San Diego, learning skills to be a fitter and a welder in shipbuilding yards.
A recruiter who came to the school from the Kelso Shipyard in Galveston, Texas, was so impressed with Rogers’s work that he offered him a job in Galveston. There, Rogers worked on high-tech exploration ships.
“I had a great time,” said Rogers. “I made good money at the shipyard and enjoyed myself as a 21-year-old dude by being into scuba diving, hanging out on the beach, and chasing women.”
But as he lived the bachelor’s life, he planned ahead by deciding that he wanted to become a dentist, and at the time of the accident that left him with paraplegia, he was making plans for a move to California, where he could work in a shipyard while living with some family members long enough to establish residency and enroll in a California college.
Rogers built his own bike in Galveston, a Chopper with a Honda 450 engine. One night as he was riding it home from work, a jalopy driven by an impoverished Mexican man pulled in front of him. (Neither Rogers nor the man had insurance.)
While he was in the hospital deeply concerned about what the future held for him, fate intervened on his behalf when agents for the Texas Rehab Commission visited his room and gave him a battery of aptitude and IQ tests. He scored so highly that the state of Texas offered to send him to college, and he enrolled at North Texas State.
“I was intimidated at first by college,” Rogers recalled. “I got an apartment by myself and bought a used van. I would go in my wheelchair out from my apartment to the van. Fortunately, I could stand momentarily. This enabled me to pull myself up into the van, and then I pulled the wheelchair in behind me. I never got pathological about my situation by calling out, ‘Why me?’ I resolved to cope by having a ‘Can Do’ attitude and living aggressively.”
Being aggressive led Rogers to some dangerous falls. Among them, once he fell head-over-heels on an escalator and broke his wheelchair. Another incident occurred at a Colorado ski resort; he lost his balance while attempting to negotiate a steep staircase in his wheel chair, which threw him into a full back flip. Amazingly, he acrobatically landed on his knees as if he had been practicing a maneuver, grasping his chair in one hand and the rail with the other. A few bystanders gave him applause.
By the time Rogers graduated with his bachelor’s degree from North Texas State, he had worked himself into excellent physical condition. During the next few years, he set a world record in 1981 for the 100-yard dash in a wheel chair (16.49 sec.). The following year he led a group of other wheelchair users on a three-day mountain climb up Guadeloupe Peak, Texas’ highest mountain (alt. 8,751 ft.), which brought about the phone call from President Reagan.
Rogers’ road to Indiana State led through Indiana University, where in 1998 he took his doctorate in the Department of Recreation and Park Administration with an emphasis in leisure behavior and family counseling. At IU, he met his wife, who was also working on her doctorate.
Following marriage, at a time Rogers was finishing his doctoral degree and while Nancy was eight months pregnant with their first child, he found himself in another emotionally traumatizing predicament. His mother was coming to the end of her life the month before he had to give his dissertation — and the job offer he had been tendered at ISU was conditioned on him finishing his doctorate by the time his employment was to begin in Terre Haute.
“No matter what the discipline, you have to meet the expected standard,” Rogers said. “I could not really take time to be with my mother, who was in Arizona, and I could not give extra time to my wife. I had to perform under very stressful circumstances.”
The fishing cove
The fishing cove Rogers had found was not surrounded by trees, so the wind here was much stronger than it had been, making the canoe more difficult to keep in a good fishing alignment with the marsh’s grass line.
After Rogers had fished the cove for 10 minutes, a particularly strong gust turned the boat’s bow away from the grass line, and Rogers, his frustration aggravated by the fact he had not caught a fish in more than an hour, pushed back very hard on his paddle, causing the canoe’s bow to raise perilously upward. He instantly shot across his seat; the canoe shack had provided him with a slippery seat cushion.
Dangerously destabilized, the canoe jutted 45 degrees out of the water, rotating left as it took on water.
“A frantic moment!” recalled Rogers. “Time slowed in my mind to fractions of seconds. ‘Oh no, this can’t be happening.’ I was thinking as water came into the canoe.”
He had a last-gasp notion how to keep the canoe from capsizing. To salvage the situation, he threw himself to its opposite side from where he sat; the canoe turned over and he toppled out.
“I realized immediately there was a good chance that I could die,” he said. “My fishing tackle sank; floating items like my lifejacket, which I didn’t have on because it was so bulky and the lake’s water had been calm until the cove, fell into the lake and began drifting away.
“My lifejacket was floating off in the direction of an alligator. I had to make a decision: stay by the boat or swim out for the lifejacket, which was 10 feet away.”
He swam for the jacket, managed to get it, and swam back to the canoe, which was lying sideways in the lake, filled with water. (The only thing keeping it from sinking was that it had plastic buoys in the bow and stern.)
After managing to right the canoe, Rogers climbed back over its side rim and sat in the middle of the water-filled craft, holding a cross thwart with one hand as he reached down with his free hand into a pants pocket for a heavy pocket knife that could be opened with one hand.
In the meanwhile, one of the four alligators — the one which had been eyeing Rogers head on since becoming attracted to the boat — edged forward toward him, closing initially to within 30 feet. Another alligator swam toward Rogers’ waterproof camera case and nosed it.
Rogers made what plans he could. If an alligator attacked him, he decided he would tilt the canoe so its submerged rim would lift up out of the water forming a momentary shield; if the alligator attempted slithering over the rim to get at him, he would gouge its snout with his blade. He tried comforting himself with his knowledge that alligators like to attack a prey in the water from beneath, and his bottom side was protected by the aluminum canoe.
“I was not happy with myself for putting myself at such risk,” said Rogers. “I so loved my wife and my family, and I knew that I could be separated from them forever, but I also knew better than to get down on myself. Over the years, I’ve found that in all kinds of situations, I perform at my best when I’m on the edge. I’ve studied martial arts in Terre Haute. This has taught me to be focused and centered within myself. (Rogers has a black belt in Hapkido). I believed that the most important thing I could do was to keep my mind clear and to do everything possible not to show fear to the alligators because they would sense it and attack.”
He continued eying at the sinewy reptiles as calmly as possible, sometimes lowering his head to the water line to make eye contact. Three of the four alligators continued looking at him from slanted positions in the water, the other — the one that had always studied him head on — was little by little closing distance, so he stared at this predator the most.
Occasionally, he glanced into the nearby marsh to see if the commotion caused by his canoe capsizing had roused any of the full-grown, 15-foot alligators, but none appeared to be in the marsh. Although he couldn’t see any lurking, he suspected they were there; if they weren’t, those confronting him were lethal enough. Even an aroused three-foot juvenile is a potential killing machine. Its exceptionally powerful jaw muscles can inflict a bone-crushing bite onto the limb of a completely healthy man and easily drown him in open water.
A couple minutes following his canoe mishap, Rogers reached into his pocket for his Verizon cell phone, arguably a godsend, because only a month earlier he had taken advantage of the company’s offer to customers with two-year service contracts to give them a free upgrade. Rogers had opted for a waterproof phone upgrade but had never tested it. All he could do was hope as he pulled the wet phone out of his pocket.
He flipped open the phone and the screen lit up, bringing a partial sigh of relief.
His first call was a speed dial to his wife, who didn’t answer. Upon getting a prompt from her voice box, he left this message: “Honey, I’ve fallen out of my canoe, and I’m surrounded by alligators. If I make it through this, I’ll need some dry clothes.”
Next, he dialed 411 for information assistance to get the number of the Upper Myakka Lake’s canoe rental shack, but he got a busy signal.
Finally, he dialed 911: “Ma’am, I’ve fallen out of a canoe. I can’t walk, and I’m surrounded by alligators. I need some help.”
The operator asked him to repeat what he had said. As he did, giving her his approximate position in the lake, he felt that he was in his life’s most eerily unusual phone conversation. The woman seemed so far off, so unable to help if an alligator made a sudden charge as he clutched the phone.
She told him to hold the line open even though she would be away from the phone trying to figure out what to do. A quarter hour passed — during this time, the alligator looking straight at Rogers slowly closed to within less than 20 feet in spite of Rogers’ best efforts at martial arts mind games by calmly looking back into its eyes while positioning his head at water level.
The operator came back on the line to tell him that help was on the way.
“You have to hurry, ma’am,” Rogers said in a voice barely above a whisper. “One gator is coming my way. I don’t want to talk more than necessary. My voice might aggravate it.” (By this time, the threatening alligator had moved to within 15 feet of Rogers.)
He heard the rescue boat coming, but it turned in a direction away from him.
“Ma’am!” he said calmly as possible to the 911 woman. “The boat just went the wrong way.”
She was able to quickly redirect the boat because she was on the line with somebody at the lake in contact with the boat.
The threatening alligator was still warily closing on Rogers when the noisy rescue jet boat scooted into the cove on the water’s surface, causing all four alligators to promptly swim off.
“I was pretty relieved when the boat came,” said Rogers. “After the boat operator hauled me onto his boat and retrieved one of my lost rod and reel outfits from the lake bottom, he put on a show for me by skimming the boat over a section of the marsh beside the cove — it was full of huge alligators. Every 20 to 30 feet, one jumped out of the way as we shot across the grass. I don’t think one of them made it because the boat ploughed into its back.”
After Rogers saw his phone logs, he was surprised to find he had been on the line with the 911 operator for an hour and five minutes. He said it had only seemed like 20 minutes.
Rethinking the predicament he put himself in, Rogers readily acknowledges he was being too much the unconquerable 21-year-old infatuated by wild nature on the morning he paddled by himself into the isolated cove while surrounded by alligators. Although he intends on living the rest of his life as fully and aggressively as possible, he has a new perspective on personal risk management and no intention of ever canoeing again on the Upper Myakka Lake.
