ecovered. Not more than a few summers ago, one of the town football stars was with his friends at the lake that is right next to the town. Jeff was also another rising star. His talents were coming in to play as we were moving on in to high school. You could almost hear the scouts drooling. I remember that I was at the lake that day. My grandmother had come to visit us from New York. That day was particularly hot so we decided to cool off at the lake. It was about four when we headed back in to town. On the way back we spotted Classic Lifeguard I, the pride of our local air ambulance fleet, sitting beside the lake. I thought, “That can only mean one thing. Some Snowbird or foreigner drowned. Poor bastard.” The next day I read the paper. Local child drowned it said. It took some doing but I found out what had happened. My friends Scott and Trampus were out cliff jumping with Jeff. They had all decided that they were going to jump off at the same time just so the splash would be bigger. The counted off and Jeff jumped off before the other two. He managed to hit the water an instant before Scott. David 3Scott’s feet landed right on Jeff’s neck. The force of a 60-foot fall shattered several of Jeff’s vertebrae. I pray to this day that he was knocked unconscious or killed right then. They found his body 400 feet down in the murky depths of Lake Powell. It took them months with robots to find him. To this day I still have nightmares about him being conscious on the way down. Not being able to move. Not being able to swim up to the surface. Not being able to breathe. Just falling. In 1997 another person in my class was killed. He wasn’t the greatest person I knew. He wasn’t exactly the brightest either. We used to stay to our respective groups and that was that. He lived out on the reservation and I lived in town so I didn’t see much of him either. One day, apparently, he decided that he was ...
