The Ost women and Mrs. Fredericks struggled to higher, safer ground. When the Fredericks men didn’t show up, Ost left the women praying while he went to look for them. He heard Mr. Fredericks call for help for his son, Paul. With a flashlight he borrowed, he was able to see the difficulty. The surge of water and trees had caught 15-year-old Paul and pinioned him in a sitting position in the water, with one log across the small of his back and another across his lap. The ends of the log were jammed between a smashed trailer and the Ost car, so solidly they wouldn’t budge. Paul cried out with pain as the two men tried to pull him loose. The water kept rising as the men tried to pry the logs apart with sticks. A 2 × 12 plank, ten feet long, even though full of spikes, seemed a promising tool to pry with, but with it they were only able to gain an inch or so further separation of the logs that held Paul prisoner. The men felt Paul’s and their own helpless panic as the water swelled up to his chest, his neck, his chin. Raised in a soundly religious family, Paul bravely faced the realization that he was gasps from death. In desperation, Ost called on Mel Fredericks to pull as hard as he could, not to care if Paul cried, or if they pulled his arms or legs out of joint. In this last, desperate straining try they found that miraculously they could raise him six inches. The rising water had buoyed the trailer. In their next few feverish tries they were able to pull him loose and helped him to walk to high, dry ground. One stranded group, calling for help, included a wheelchair case, and, mucking shoeless through the water, they portaged him out, chair and all. George Whitmore had a badly injured eye—from running into a rope, and it looked like he might lose its sight. They all moved to the highway, which was still dry. A motley crew they were, in pajamas, or almost unclothed, some shoeless. By this time the water had covered their cars. Some of the wounded were taken by car toward Hebgen Dam—away from the slide. Marooned, without their cars, in a strange, shaking canyon—prisoners of a night in which everything seemed mad, somehow word reached them that their ordeal might not be over. There was possibility that a dam several miles upstream, which they’d never seen, was likely to give way any minute. So they scrambled up the sagebrush hillside and built a fire on a level and fairly open site. Others joined the two families. One group, whose car hadn’t been flooded so suddenly, managed to save groceries, a camp stove, sleeping bags, pans and a 9 × 12 ft. plastic tarp.