Brennan
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So all five of us were in the water at this point. The raft's upside down. And luckily, we had fallen in close enough to the raft where we could grab hold of it. So everybody's still hold of it. So there's me on one side with Billy, Jeff and Nicole on the other side, and the guys on the back. He says, hey, I got to hop on top of this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Because on the top of the raft, there's a rope that they can pull in case of a flip. So he's like, hey, I got to pull this raft back over. You guys need to let go for a second. So it counts one, two, three. And on three, Billy lost his shit. He lets go and he jumps on top of me, like on my head, pushes me under the water.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Have you guys seen that scene in The Guardian where he elbows him?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
I should have just elbowed him. But he jumps on top of my ass and sends me and him downriver. It was enough for us to push us away from the raft. We are moving at a much faster pace than the raft.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Yeah. He actually was able to pull Jeff and Nicole back in. It's a crazy river and I'm in and out, in and out trying to catch my breath. And all the while I like go under, I come back up and I can hear like, and I finally hear the guy get to the left side, get to the left side washing machine. And in my head, I'm like, Oh God, Nicole's there. They're paddling. The guy's paddling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
All Jeff is doing at this point is just scream crying for
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So I start swimming as hard as I can. I could just hear Billy screaming behind me. And I'm like, he's not even moving. He's sitting there with his hands on his life jacket, just screaming bloody murder. Oh, fuck Billy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Part of me was like, do I do the selfish thing and just keep swimming and just let him go?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So I'm sitting in the river and I'm like, okay, I got to go back and get Billy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
On the river, the right side as you go around is where the washing machine rapid is. The reason he was telling us to get to the left is because if you got far enough to the left of the river, you would miss it. I go back and I grab him with my right arm by the life jacket. And he's just like flailing. He's not doing anything. I'm trying to one arm myself and him to the left side of the river.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
I was exhausted at this point, but my adrenaline was going. So I had enough strength to get to where I knew he was going to be okay. And I knew that if I didn't let him go, we were both going over. At that point, I was like, okay, I'm going to get to the shore. I think I pulled him enough. I got to the side of the shore, got out and just like laid on a rock and then barely went over.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
And I didn't see him go into the rapids. Like I couldn't see him at all the way the river was. And so I had no idea if I had helped him. But I do remember one specific moment of terror when I'm laying on this rock, just exhausted. I remember looking back and seeing my newly wedded wife and the guide and the screaming middle-aged man fly past me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
yeah how are they gonna come get me i'm in the wild by myself like what the hell am i gonna do so i am now laying on this rock in the middle of the yellowstone wilds basically with no shoes no cell phone all i have is my life jacket and my wetsuit and you're in buyer country oh no so we were driving through yellowstone the day before and had seen some black bears that's all it's in my mind like
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Well, I don't anymore. There's the two cliffs on each side. I had to make a decision. I'm like, all right, I'm going to climb up this cliff and go to the service road. And maybe that's where the company van can come get me. And I'll just kind of wait there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Okay. That did cross my mind. Maybe I could walk along the river and they maybe have stopped, but I didn't know if they just kept going. I don't know. Billy had just kept going. So I'm like, they could be miles down the river. Who knows how long it would take. So I start climbing this cliff, basically barefoot. My feet are bleeding. I get to the top and I kid you not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Do you know what go-heads are? No. Uh-huh. They're like a thorn. They get like hard when they fall off and they're like really pokey and they get in bike tires and bike tires go flat all the time. There's a whole freaking field of them. So I take off my life jacket and I try to strap it to my feet thinking like maybe I could like scooch across this field of goat heads. Nah, it didn't work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So I basically just had to like walk across this nasty field. All the while, they'd caught up to Billy. He had gotten out of the river, pulled the boat off. The guide was like, hey, I'm going to go up and take Billy back to the van. He's not going to want to keep going. All of them were like, we don't want to go. Nicole's like, I don't want to keep going. Like, where's my husband?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
What the hell is going on? And he goes, well, I'm going to go up and drop Billy off and look for Brennan. He's gone for 30 minutes, comes back without Billy and tells Nicole, oh, I found Brennan. He's going to go back in the van. He doesn't want to keep going.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
He lied. Told Nicole that I was okay and safe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
They can only pull the raft out at a certain point in the river because it's so heavy. And they remember the cliffs. So there was like a side path that they walked up, but it wasn't wide enough for the raft. So they had to finish.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
boat oh my god expensive boat the boat who gives a fuck you get the people out i mean i agree he comes back tells nicole that i'm safe that i didn't want to finish i'm like come on man i literally just got married to this woman please don't make me sound like some sort of weenie He's like, hey, you got to finish the tour with us at that point.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
And it was probably like only another two hours or so. So they get back in and the rest of the river is pretty calm for them. But all the while, I finally get to the road. But for some reason, I don't know if I got disoriented. I started walking in the wrong direction. And now when I think back, I'm like, I was so stupid because I could have just looked at the river.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So I take off the top of my wetsuit because now I'm just cold. So I'm half naked basically with just my life jacket in my hand. And I'm walking down the road for probably like 40 minutes or so. And this Prius starts coming down the road. And I'm like, I'm saved. Sweet. They can like call somebody. It's all good, right? There's a lot of tourists in Yellowstone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
And I could not communicate with them. They spoke an entirely different language.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
And all they said was Yellowstone with a question mark. They're like, Yellowstone? Where's Yellowstone?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Also, I'm bleeding. Yeah, yeah. So they turn around and leave. And I'm like, okay, at least there's traffic on this road.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So I keep walking. I finally get to this like ranger shack. I put my life jacket on the ground and just kind of lay down and it starts to rain. All of a sudden I just see the headlights and the van. So they had finally found me. It was four hours or so later.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Billy had run up to Nicole after all this and was like, oh my gosh, your husband saved my life. Thank you so much. She's like, get away from me. After all of this, we're back in the van and the guide was like, hey, how would you like to come work with us next summer? You can get certified and come work on the river with us. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds awesome. Let's do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
My wife was like, absolutely not. You are not getting back on that boat.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
I wouldn't be surprised if their river rafting business is no longer around. Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
No, I would. But the very next day, we actually went hiking and ran into some brown bears. And my wife took off running, left me for dead again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Yep, we're still together. She's actually here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
No, it's all good. We're happily married, though. Thanks for letting us tell our story, guys. All right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Do you want to sing a tune or something? I want to have a theme song. Oh. Okay, great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
I am actually at a school. Are you a teacher? I'm a student advocate at a high school. Oh, cool. I work at an alternate high school. I help kids who are in rehab, teen parents.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
I do. So it was June of 2014. We had just gotten married and our honeymoon was to Paradise Valley, Montana. We're going to go whitewater rafting on the Yellowstone. It was the second day we got there. It was kind of overcast, raining on and off. It's June in Montana, so it's not super warm yet. There was a lot of runoff still, so the water levels were pretty high and it was cold.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
We showed up the outfitter. thinking that we were going to have like this big group of people to go river rafting with. And there was two other people and the guy. So it was my wife, Nicole, myself, a guy named Billy, I'm going to say, and a guy named Jeff. Billy was probably in his late teens. I don't know if he was quite an adult yet. And then Jeff was in his mid fifties.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
He was Billy's uncle, which I kind of thought was weird at the time, but I mean, whatever. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So we showed up at this outfitter and The guide's like, hey, all you need is a life jacket and a wetsuit. Leave your keys, leave your phone. He's like, oh, if you want the real experience, you need to leave your shoes. I'm just barefoot. I think everybody else was like, no, I'm wearing my shoes. I'm like, I want the real experience. I'm a river man.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
He definitely was. On the way to the river drop, he starts explaining to us, there's only really two spots. that you have to be concerned about. The first spot is a class four rapid at the very beginning. The second one is about a mile down that same river. It's called a hydraulic hole or what people call a washing machine rapid. And what can happen with that is if you get sucked in,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
It's hard to get out. It just kind of recycles you. So we get to the drop-off area, get in a boat, and on both sides of this river are basically just cliffs. So one side of the river is the road we drove in on. The other side is like a service road. We're 20 miles from really anything. So there's Nicole and I up front, and behind Nicole is Jeff, and then behind me is Billy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
The guide says, hey, when we get up to this rapid, this class four, you have to paddle super hard, or there's a chance that, you know, the boat could flip. At this point is when he's like, oh, by the way, if you fall in, make sure you hold on to the raft. So we can kind of see this rapid coming up. He's like, all right, everybody needs to paddle as hard as they can.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
So we just dig in, dig in, dig in. I remember looking back and seeing Billy and he's frozen. He wasn't paddling. He wasn't doing anything. Sure, sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
And it was scary. I remember the last thing I saw was my feet in the sky.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
My bare, hairy, hot-ass feet. Then I just remember darkness and cold. The water was so cold.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII
Basically just flipped on its back.