Unlike Jose, the column filler, when Garner confronted the real possibility of death, he did not think about his family. He did not think about friends or social contacts. In fact, he did not think about any body else. He thought only about himself. He thought about an unceremonious death in this dark, cold wet place. He would simply disappear and nobody would ever know what happened to him. But instead of frightening him, it made him mad. He would not let the world ignore him this way. His anger and outrage poured adrenaline into his bloodstream until he shook his head and tried to get his wits about him.
As his head cleared, he heard a noise, a noise so loud and without distinction that it seemed to blot out all other noise. It was the sound of torrential rain falling on water. He looked up. Large raindrops filled his eyes. It was raining. He couldn't be underground, if it was raining. He felt the pressure of the water pushing him up against something. He tried to turn and feel what was holding him. It felt like a collection of twigs and debris. The river was rushing toward him, and he was lodged in a jam of branches and junk. He could not see anything in front of him. The darkness was total. So he turned around carefully, trying not to dislodge himself from his safety net of branches. Downstream he saw the faintest flicker of a light. Maybe it was a streetlight. Maybe even a flashlight. The flicker was so dim and the rain was so heavy that he wasn't even sure if he had really seen it. But it was his only chance.
Garner had been coming around the outer loop on his way home from the Casa del Norte. He turned in towards town on Culebra Road and then turned off onto a smaller road call Verde Vista to cut across town to his apartment complex. Only a few miles from home on a dark and slightly wooded part of the road, he had to stop because rising water was flowing rapidly across the road in front of him. There was a sign that said "Low Water Crossing". He looked at the water, judged it to be no more than a few inches deep and decided that his Chevy pickup could easily get through it. He had gotten the Chevy truck to help round out his image on the construction site. He had also lowered the suspension. So getting through the water should be no problem. At least that is what he thought.
Garner backed up several car lengths to build up momentum to help him get through the water. Then he gunned the accelerator and raced toward the liquid challenge running across the road. About a third of the way into the water the truck slowed down, almost to a drift. Halfway into the water, Garner felt it lift the truck and begin to carry it sideways. His heart began to race as he tried to figure out what to do next. The truck was moving sideways with greater speed until the tires hit the submerged guardrail that kept cars from going off the road into the river below. Garner breathed a sigh of relief realizing that the guard rail would protect him from going completely into the river, and tried to figure out what he was going to do next. Then there was jerk as the water lifted the truck further up and over the guardrail. The next moment Garner found himself floating away perpendicular to road that he was just on. Before he could adjust his reactions to this new situation, the truck jerked again. This time it was snagged on some unseen object below the surface of the water. Again Garner felt relief and again it would be short lived. Whatever the truck had snagged on seemed to hold it. But the water flowing from the other side was causing the truck to tilt until water began to fill the truck bed. Garner was sitting at a forty five degree angle as the truck took on water and began to sink.
"I've got to get out of here or I am going down with the truck," Garner thought as he looked around for an idea.
In the back seat was his leather tool belt. Hooked onto the belt was twenty or thirty feet of utility rope. Garner reached into the back seat, unhooked the rope from his tool belt and hooked it onto his dress belt. He didn't have his plan completely thought out, but he needed to get out of the truck before it went down. He figured that he would stand in the bed of the truck and try to lasso something on the bank, and then pull himself over to the edge of the river.
Garner rolled down the window and pulled himself out of the truck cab. His upper body strength was well developed from filling those columns. However, his strength was no match for the strength of the river. As he lowered himself into the rushing water, hoping to pull himself down the side of the truck and into the bed, the water grabbed his legs and pulled them out from under him. As his legs went out, his head came down on the window frame of the door and he lost consciousness. He was very lucky that he didn't drown. But apparently his number was not up. He rolled onto his back and the speed of the water kept him from sinking until he was lodged in the collection of debris where he regained consciousness.
Garner stayed lodged in the safety of the debris for what seemed like an eternity but was probably not more than an hour or so. The rain had stopped and moonlight was beginning to shine through the clouds. Compared to the darkness earlier, it was like a dimmed spotlight. But he knew he could not stay there much longer. The cold water was drawing the heat from his body and he had to fight hard to keep from going into convulsive shivering. Turning his back to the current, Garner saw the flicker of light again about a quarter of mile downstream so he decided to leave the safety of the tangle of branches and let the current carry him towards the light. Maybe he would find some people who could help him. He rolled his way out of the debris and into the rushing current.
The current was much faster and much stronger than Garner had expected. It pulled him away from the safety of the debris and down the river as though he were a balsa wood boat floating on a stream. In the pale light of the moon, he would see a bridge overpass just a few hundred yards ahead.
"If I can get to the bridge," he thought, "I can grab on to the pilings and then pull myself up the side of the bank." But, again, he under estimated the force of the river.
The water was actually pushing him toward the right bank of the river, but, he was trying to steer himself to the left side where he saw the light. The net effect was that he was heading straight down the middle of the river on a collision course with one of the bridge pilings. By the time he realized this it was too late. With a thud that almost knocked the wind out of him, Garner slammed up against the concrete piling. The wet smell of the concrete was oddly familiar and comforting to Garner. He regained a sense of himself and his situation. Realizing the mistake that he had made before, he pushed off of the piling on the right side and tried to steer with the current over to the right bank. He pushed off with his feet, kicked as hard as he could, closed his eyes and braced himself for the impact with the pilings holding up the other side of the over pass. Instead of the hard thud he was expecting he plowed into something soft and spongy instead.
"Oh, my God," Garner thought, "it's a body." He thought about how bodies get spongy when they get waterlogged. He thought about how narrowly he had escaped becoming another spongy body after the flood. Garner would not like to be a spongy body after a flood. He was far to vain about his appearance. He thought that dying all alone in an underground river might even be better than having your spongy bloated body found after a flood. But as he was thinking these things, he was feeling a rising revulsion over being pressed up against this spongy corpse.
Making the best of a nasty situation, Garner tried to crawl over the spongy corpse to get up on the bank underneath the overpass. But as he pulled himself up, the corpse groaned and began wailing incomprehensibly in a garbled mixture of Spanish and English. It wasn't a bloated body after all. It was a chubby Mexican American man about Garner's age.
"Help me, Amigo," the spongy Mexican American pleaded. "Don't let me die here."
Garner took the rope from his belt, attached the hook on one end, and tossed it up on the bank hoping that it would catch on a tree or something so he could pull himself up. Luck was with him because on the first toss, the hook caught in a crack in the concrete that formed the support layer of the overpass bridge. He stepped over the spongy man and began pulling himself up.
Just as he got his foot on solid ground he felt a tugging on the cuff of his trousers on his other leg. It was the spongy Mexican American.
"Help me, amigo, help me," he said in mournful wailing tones.
"I'll need a crane to pull you out of the water," Garner thought as he looked back at the large and spongy man. "It every man for himself here!"
In a dark moment of pure survival instinct, Garner pulled back his free foot so that he could kick the spongy man holding on to his other leg. He figured that a blow delivered to the man's nose would be enough to free him. But just as he was preparing to deal the blow, he heard another voice.
"Over here," the voice said. "I think there is somebody under the bridge." The spongy man's voice had carried and attracted a crew that was repairing an electrical transformer that had been lost during the storm.
Thinking quickly, Garner wrapped the rope around his one hand and reached down with the other to the spongy Mexican American. "Here grab my hand," he said, "and hang on. Help is on the way."
The electrical crew managed to get Garner and his spongy friend up onto the road where they called an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, so did a news crew from a local television station trying to get footage on survivors of the flood. The local audience liked to see this kind of footage. It made them feel good that it wasn't them who got washed into the river. The news reporter was interviewing the spongy man as he was being put on a stretcher and carried over to the waiting ambulance. The man was barely coherent and was completely overtaken with the joy of still being alive. At that moment he was one with all good things in nature. He was talking about how he thought he would never see his family again and how this was a lesson for him so he could be a better person. In the middle of his almost incoherent babbling, he pointed over towards Garner and announced loudly, "I owe my life to him. He saved my life." He then continued to elaborate on that claim. The news crews hurried over to Garner to get his view of what had happened.
"I didn't really save his life," Garner reported. "I just helped to pull him out of the river."
But this was taken as a hero's modesty. The late news that evening and the next morning's early edition proclaimed "Local Construction Worker Saves Man in the Worse Flood of the Decade."
The swollen river had washed Garner away from his truck, through the darkness of the river and into the spotlight of the local news. He was a recognized local hero and it was ten times better than anything he could have planned.