How a Porta-Potty Saved My Life

He thought he’d have a leisurely drive home. He had no idea he would drive into history: Free will, predestination and an aqua-blue portable toilet.On the evening of July 31, 1976, 23-year-old Alan O’Hashi left Cheyenne, Wyoming, and headed west toward Rocky Mountain National Park, where he worked as a seasonal ranger. A Colorado State Patrol officer warned him about bad water ahead and told him to turn around at Drake.Alan kept driving.Within minutes, a shallow trickle crossing U.S. Highway 34 became a deadly current. His pea-green Ford Pinto station wagon struck a 55-gallon barrel and stalled. He watched another car, and its occupants, disappear into the darkness.He climbed through the driver’s-side window and waded for higher ground.Then an aqua-blue portable toilet caught his bumper and steered his car away from the river.A portable toilet may have saved his life.This isn’t a story about escaping one of Colorado’s deadliest natural disasters.On the flood’s 50th anniversary, O’Hashi returned to the story through a 50th-anniversary exhibit at the Loveland Museum and saw the flood differently. What happened that night became his first lesson in uncertainty: we make decisions with incomplete information, circumstances can change faster than we can respond, and the best we can do is make the next decision.Drawing on his Presbyterian upbringing, O’Hashi explores the uneasy space between free will and predestination, faith and coincidence, providence and physics. Along the way, he discovers that salvation doesn’t always arrive looking holy.It can arrive in an orange state truck, or in a Chinook helicopter, or in a stranger’s car, or a portable toilet floating downriver.In retrospect, O’Hashi asks a question that reaches far beyond the canyon: What do we do when the road ahead disappears and we have no idea what comes next?How a Porta-Potty Saved My Life is a memoir about, uncertainty, faith, resilience, and learning to take the next step when there is no map.