Flash Flood

Connie watches the men load Tom Riley's truck and makes her prediction plainly: "I'm afraid Eugene and the great outdoors will be a dangerous combination for anyone near him." Whit waves it off. Two days in the mountains with Tom and Bernard Walton is exactly what Eugene needs to feel like he belongs, and Eugene has certainly packed for it: "Compass, poison oak antidote, snake bite kit, tourniquet, purified water, propane lanterns, waterproof tarp, rope, whistle."

The trip goes about the way Connie feared. Tom's portable radio is smashed within the first hour, dropped while Eugene helps him out of his backpack, and Eugene's own radio stayed home because of Tom's rule against gizmos, so nobody hears a forecast. Eugene studies the clouds instead and pronounces that the storm will skirt past them. Tom keeps needling him despite promising Whit he would stop, and when the tents go up he balks at sharing one: "He belongs here about as much as a pair of roller skates belong on a mountain climber." Eugene has heard every word. He announces he would rather sleep under the stars - "After all, I wouldn't want to lecture anyone on their dreams while they're having them" - and the camp goes quiet. Then there is the bear. Bernard has been pressing beef jerky on Eugene all day, and Eugene, too embarrassed to refuse it, has been dropping it along the trail, laying a scent line straight to their campsite. The four of them scare the animal off by banging the dinner pans, which turn out to be full of mashed potatoes and baked beans.

Back in Odyssey the storm is anything but past. The radio announces a flash flood watch for the mountains, and Connie spends the night dialing the ranger station through failing phone lines. She even tries to drive up, and a park ranger turns her around at the roadblock.

At dawn the creek is rising fast, and Tom has gone fishing upstream. The flood arrives as a ten-foot wall of water that takes the tents and provisions and leaves Tom clinging to a branch above the torrent, too far out to reach, the current too strong for a human chain. It is Eugene who sees the answer: "I'll climb out on the branch, loop the rope around it so you can pull, drop the hook down, catch it under his belt, and we'll pull him out, just like a pulley system." Bernard's review: "Are you going to draw us a schematic diagram or are you going to get the rope?" Eugene inches out over the water, swings the hook to Tom just as his grip fails, and the three of them haul him to safety.

Dried off at the ranger station, Tom says the thing Bernard dreads having to sit through: "I teased you a lot on this trip, Eugene, about being so prepared and all, and... Well, now I thank God you were. You saved my life." Eugene is welcome on any camping trip Tom ever takes again. Then the ranger, apologizing that a ranger station is not a cafeteria, offers the only food he has on hand: beef jerky.