I was born a Miller, proudly raised a Kuhn, added a sprinkle of Rosin when my mom re-married, and then I married a Heigel.
The Miller-boys are unpredictable so as Doug would soon find out you gotta go into every activity open to whatever comes at you. To relay our trip with the Miller-boys at Bighorn Lake please use the Gilligan’s Island song to read this next section (click for tune reminder here)…
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from the Bighorn Lake
Aboard my bro’s new ship.
The canyon walls called out to us,
But would it float for sure?
The jet boat sped, we hopped aboard
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.
We’d never had a better day,
But that was soon to end.
When nearly back, we beached on sand
And the boat it sunk right in, the motor sunk right in
We pushed, we pulled to no avail.
My brother swam to land.
His truck was in the marina still
So Jolly lent a hand, the sheriff lent a hand.
We had to leave the boat that night
And swim the channel’s gap.
My uncle’s pants were far too nice,
He stripped to underpants, just his underpants.
Across the water we did swim to a smelly, muddy isle
With Doug and I
My father too
My uncle and a near deaf dog
Hiked a mile
With mud knee high and biting flies
End the day in Miller style.
Is it a great day when it ends with an unexpected cold swim, clothes covered in mud, your jet boat stuck on a sandbar, and the sheriff monitoring from the shore to assure a helicopter rescue of most of your family isn’t required? Well…only when the first part of the day was spent tearing through THE most stunning canyons I’ve ever seen.
Piled into the truck on our way back to the Marina, we were cold and wet when my Uncle made some comment about not needing to do that ever again. My brother’s response was something like “I don’t know Unc, at your age any day spent mostly in your skivvies is a good day!”
I absolutely LOVE my brother for his ability to make lemonade from lemons and bring laughter through the tears. It’s a gift!
Since neither the rangers nor the sheriff (officer Brandon Jolly…real name) could help unmoor the boat, we had 2 choices, wait for higher winter water to float it off the mud flat or begin a rescue mission.
Day 2 involved the four guys, tools and river-raft in tow, heading back to the lake (Dave and Harry from Billings, Tom and Doug from Cody) to assess the carnage. My brother and Doug carried spooled fencing wire (about 2500 ft of it) from the truck (that they had maneuvered into position on a bluff overlooking the lake) back across the mud, into the river-raft to traverse the main channel, and over to the boat stuck on the flats. This task took all morning before the first attempt to pull the boat off the mud with the truck. After somewhat comical hand waving and yelling between the boat and the truck on the bluff almost half a mile away to give the “all-ready” signal, the truck inched forward and the wire immediately snapped!
Despite the setback they re-assessed and decided that a kink in the thousand-plus feet of wire was to blame so they spliced the break, inspected the rest of the wire all the way back to the truck to fix any other kinks and were ready for another try. When the truck pulled for the second time, the boat began to move!
I wasn’t there to see my brother rolling his cowboy hat in the air, slapping his backside like a riding buck and whooping it up when the speedboat not only slipped into the channel but the engine turned over and the jet belched out all of the ingested silt, but I can imagine his relief when she was finally free and not damaged by the event!
Boat from the bluff 
Several more hours were spent with the logistics of retrieving all of that wire, getting the raft back on one trailer behind Harry’s truck, the jet boat on its trailer behind Dave’s truck and collecting Tom’s truck as well – it was a bit like the riddle where the farmer needs to get a fox, a chicken and grain across the river with a boat that’s only big enough for him and one item…. But in the end the happy Miller boys – including honorary Miller boy, Doug, stood around the trucks on the bluff and toasted a successful day with a couple of hard-earned beers and, oddly, a few pickled eggs that Dave had brought along! One more memorable celebratory drink was had at a local watering hole in Lovell, Wy, before Dave headed back to Billings and Tom and Doug back to Cody.
I guess travel invites the unexpected and that is why we do it. All-in-all, it proved to be a very memorable weekend. In some ways, while the previous day’s exploration of the Bighorn Lake and canyon were amazing, Doug found that he actually enjoyed the challenge of the grounding and the following “rescue day” almost as much, as he was able to spend some quality time working on a common project with the Miller-boys and got to know them that much better (and still liked them quite a bit afterwards 😉 ). Talk about lemonade from lemons!
