Watching a man drown:

...Even when we stopped talking and started watching the event unfold, we were still uncertain what to make of it...

...I wonder if the drowning man felt interrupted in the midst of his terror, or embarrassed suddenly to be intruding on the lives of others...

...I wonder if his thoughts in the act of dying were as mundane and oddly abstracted as mine in the act of watching him...

...Somehow in the first few seconds of his drowning the momentum of that thought was stronger than the momentum of the river sweeping him away...

...He just didn't come up again...

...In an odd way, I felt that the drowning man had intruded in my life...

...In the intensity of that moment the situation resembled in my mind nothing more than a party I was afraid of crashing or a group of strangers to whom I was shy of introducing myself...

...My brother and I were involved in an intimate conversation...

...A few minutes later a girl in the group on her way up the trail told us that they were trying to get the drowning man to give in to the current and float to the rock, but apparently he couldn't hear them or was too terrified to surrender himself...

...He had drifted from the calm water by the shore into the swift current CHRIS ANDERSON is assistant professor of English and composition coordinator at Oregon State University...

...Even the fact of a man drowning didn't, in the split second of it happening, break through the barrier of exclusivity or privacy that I felt existed between us and establish a sense of our common humanity...

...The water is very swift there...

...and had started to struggle, waving his arms and apparently fighting against the pull of the rapids...

...Blasts of pine-smelling woods hit us as we rode...

...We grew up in Spokane and knew the reputation of the river...

...What counts-or would have counted-is our instinctive willingness to try to help...

...His book Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction has just been published by Southern Illinois University Press...

...We stopped at a Circle K on the way back for something to drink...

...On the periphery like that it was hard to interpret exactly what was happening...

...We failed to respond because we lacked experience and training in emergency situations...

...The rituals of death are cliched to us now: the villainous cowboy clutches his breast and spirals down to the street...

...It had been 100 degrees for a week and the ponderosa woods by the river were brittle and dry...

...As I looked at the scene from a distance, the group seemed closed unto itself, self-sufficient...

...His gestures seemed exaggerated for effect...

...We kept reminiscing...

...But we should have started running towards the shore as soon as we realized something was wrong...

...What if we sprinted over there in a great show of concern and competence and found that nothing was wrong...

...At the time we didn't know that there was nothing to be done, and that shouldn't have mattered...

...We left our bikes in the brown grass and stood on the footbridge, dipping and swaying as we talked, the sound of the rapids swallowing half our words...

...It wasn't dramatic...

...Perhaps it simply hadn't registered...

...The air conditioning made us shiver as we walked in sweating from the heat...

...We heard an ambulance go by as we paid the cashier, who laughed when we told her we had just seen a man drown...

...I thought for a moment that the drowning man was pretending to drown...

...A friend tried to swim out to help but got caught in the current and had to cling to a rock several yards downstream...

...We weren't sure even then that he hadn't surfaced somewhere else or made it to shore...

...There may have been one or two people standing there watching...

...I guess the phrase sounded odd to her, like the beginning of a joke, or perhaps she, too, was lost in private thought and instinctively resented being interrupted...

...There were simple, practical reasons for our paralysis, as we realized in conversations with friends and family later...

...There was a flow to my words that I instinctively wanted to protect as soon as I glimpsed the struggling of the man in the river...

...I didn't run from the bridge and try to help the drowning man because I was afraid of making a fool of myself...

...Perhaps it was the literal distance between us and the drowning man that led to the kind of aesthetic distance I was able to maintain...

...Perhaps all the stylized images of death I have seen on television had made me immune to the real physical fact of someone drowning...

...WATCHING A MAN DROWN 'HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY' CHRIS ANDERSON It was the Fourth of July, and hot, when my brother and I watched the man drown...

...From that distance, and in the enveloping sound of the river, we couldn't separate out the elements of the scene, isolate the details...

...My sense was that I didn't belong...

...My brother was white-faced, shocked, but somehow the event was already an abstraction for me...

...About two hundred yards downstream I saw a group of five or six people partying on a small strip of beach and then, out of the corner of my eye-I was turning back towards Ted-I glimpsed a man slip into the calmer water along the beach, floating and splashing on his back...

...Looking back now the moment seems frozen, a split-second freeze frame: the beach, the friends standing, the man suddenly in the current, his arms upraised...

...It took the rescue squad over an hour using a helicopter to find the body of the drowned man, which had been swept a mile downstream...

...He flailed his arms and gasped and sputtered like a cartoon character...

...What strikes me now is how little the drowning affected me at the moment...

...I was home for a vacation, and Ted and I decided to go bike-riding in Riverdale State Park along the banks of the Spokane River just outside the city...

...Several seconds after we finally accepted the reality of what was happening, the drowning man went under for the last time...

...As amateurs we couldn't diagnose the event soon enough to act...

...And this is partly why I didn't act, why I continued to stand there on the bridge doing nothing even after I realized the man was in trouble...

...the rest of the group was by now standing on the edge of the shore, leaning over as far as they could...

...The roaring of the water kept us from hearing the shouts, and the group was far enough away to make faces unreadable...

...We had gone farther than we intended and were soon at the Bowl and Pitcher, a bend in the river where a large cylindrical rock and a squatter, flatter rock sit side by side among the eddies and rapids...

...My instinct was to stay away from it...

...Underneath the sense of abstractness I felt, underneath the simple fear- and there was fear, a fear of drowning myself- is something far more disturbing for me...

...People drown right at that spot, at the Bowl and Pitcher, every year, and I said something like that to Ted...

...My real fear was fear of embarrassment...

...Already I was interposing a layer of words and analysis between the event and my inner life...

...My dread was of those strange faces looking up at me as I intruded...

...We couldn't have done anything to help even if we had managed to cover those two hundred yards or so over rocks and down the bank before the man went under for the last time...

...of watching him...

...There was an air of unreality about the man struggling, then panicking, then going under and back up...

...Gradually, as we talked, I began to realize that the man was in trouble...

...As it turned out, the river was so swift that even when the fire department arrived, it couldn't immediately rescue the man still stranded on the rock, and had to ask a kayaker to take out the lifeline...

...The scene in the corner of my eye was at first simply an irritant, hardly impinging on the flow of conversation...

...Only the sudden movement of the girl as she bolted up the bank towards the ranger station signaled his death...

...His friends on the beach hadn't seemed to notice, or weren't reacting...

...His friend on the rock seemed to be shouting...