Walter Mastropietro is the luckiest SOB alive. Or maybe the unluckiest man alive.
You decide.
He was the 61-year old man from Westfield, New Jersey, who got sucked into and over the Allagash Falls in a Wal-Mart kayak and lived to talk about it. I call him Walter because Mastropietro is too hard to spell.
“I am thankful to the Lord,” he said this week, still recuperating from a host of injuries suffered from smashing into rocks — with his face. One thing he did right: He wore a helmet. Otherwise Walter would not be talking to anyone.
Like me, Walter is a flatwater kayaker, taking only reluctantly to fast and churning water. I was with the Upsidedown Canoe Club years ago, when we almost went over those same 40-foot falls in a heavy rainstorm.
Walter has a place in Moncton, New Brunswick, and naturally heard about the charm of paddling the Allagash, one of the nation’s most famous rivers. He read a story on a planned festival in a kayaking magazine, and on Aug. 23 he rejected the torturous multi-day trip to the falls that many paddlers take and decided to drive to the ranger’s cabin at Michaud Farm, then make the short two-hour paddle to the falls.
It was 8:40 a.m. when he left, alone.
He made it too fast. “I missed the sign. I knew I was getting close, then I was in fast water and I heard the roar. I still didn’t think it was the falls, and then I got sucked in,” he said. “It happened too quickly. I wasn’t paying attention.”
It was about 10:30 a.m.
His sit-inside kayak slammed into a rock and both he and the kayak went under several feet of water.
“It happened all so fast, before I knew it. Then I was trapped in 25 to 30 feet of water. I had to breathe, but I knew better, trapped underwater. I held it and finally broke the surface,” he said.
It wasn’t over yet. “I went through three or four rapids, down again. Up again,” he said. Finally Allagash Falls spit him out, battered, bloody and broken.
At the hospital, doctors told him he had three breaks in his cheek bone, a torn ligament in his one finger and a broken ankle. He bruised and battered all over, but he was alive. “My left eye was swollen shut. I looked like Frankenstein,” he said.
“I tried to get off the river on the left, but the current was too strong. The right side seemed calmer. I sat on a big rock for 20 minutes, getting my breathing back. I took off for shore, touching the bottom. It was about 25 feet to the shore.”
He took stock of the situation, bleeding from his nose and cheek, spitting blood. “I was scared and alone.”
The “lucky” part came four or five hours later when a canoe party made the portage around the falls and found him. The party included an EMT and an experienced first responder. “They came from heaven, “Walter said. One of them even had a satellite phone. There is no cell service on the river.
The canoe party carried Walter back across the portage to meet ranger Trevor O’Leary. He was taken back to Michaud Farm and then two hours to Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent. Doctors there patched him up and opted to transfer him south. His injuries were not deemed serious enough for an airlift, so it was back in the ambulance for a six hour drive to Maine Medical Center in Portland.
He was so beat up that he was in rehabilitation for five weeks.
It wasn’t over yet. When he left the hospital, he didn’t have a dime. His wallet and credit cards were still in his truck at Michaud Farms. Somehow he got a replacement credit card but had no identification. He had to use his hospital discharge papers as ID to charge a bus ride back to Caribou. He couldn’t even buy groceries at the supermarket — again because of no identification. He borrowed $10 at a breakfast spot to pay someone to take him back to his car, back at Michaud Farms.
Looking back, he said, “I thought that was the end of it all. It was divine intervention. That helmet and PFD saved my life.”
He recovered his Wal-Mart kayak, battered but still usable. He will continue flatwater paddling from now on. But no rapids, no falls.
Me, too.
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the Bangor Daily News in Rockland for 30 years.