Rafting in the Rockies

Those daily briefings and meetings and handshakings and constant questions from the press. Presidents generally enjoy the rituals of office--otherwise they wouldn't be Presidents--but there also come times when they yearn to escape. Calvin Coolidge used to flee to his father's farm in Vermont to enjoy the tranquillity of the haying season. Herbert Hoover cast flies into Virginia's Rapidan River. Harry Truman swam off the beach at Key West, and Dwight Eisenhower drove golf balls through pine-edged fairways in Colorado.

With Congress going into recess and no crisis requiring a presidential presence in Washington, Jimmy Carter felt as entitled as any other citizen to an August vacation. A white-water enthusiast for many years, he decided that the Rockies' Salmon River would provide a brisk break from the capital. The mountain vistas of the American West were more appealing in August than his usual retreat on Georgia's St. Simon's Island.

First, though, Carter had to pay a visit to Plains. Returning to his home town in Georgia is no longer pure pleasure for the President. Local merchants, worried about a drop-off in the number of tourists who thronged the town a year ago, expect him to stroll the streets and attract crowds during his well-publicized trips home. So the President grinned his way along jammed sidewalks for the mandatory stops at various local stores. Jimmy also had to pay a visit to Cousin Hugh Carter, whose tattletale book about the family has dismayed several of its members. He and Rosalynn both accepted embraces from their cousin to avoid any fresh newspaper speculation about a family rift.

But Carter seemed to relax fully and enjoy two softball games between a team of White House staff members and unarmed Secret Service agents and a squad collected by Billy from townspeople and the traveling press. Pitching all the way, Jimmy led his team to victory in the first game, 6 to 5, even though he himself went hitless. His team lost the second game, 12 to 8, despite his solid single. After the game, the tireless President jogged home in the 90DEG heat.

The Carters' arrival in the mountains of the West was thus a bracing change, even though an editorial in the Idaho Statesman complained peevishly that the President was more interested in the state's wilderness than in its people. It was true, though, that the First Family--Jimmy, Rosalynn, Amy, Chip and Jack--soon became about as isolated as a modern First Family can get. Climbing aboard an 8-ft. by 20-ft. wooden-floored rubber raft, they set out for a threeday, 71-mile ride down the utterly uninhabited Middle Fork of the Salmon River. To be sure, Secret Service agents bobbed along near by in other rafts, and rotating teams of reporters trailed at a distance--but with firm orders to keep out of the President's sight. Indeed, as Carter cast off, he aimed his own 35-mm camera at a mob of photographers and joked: "This'll remind me of what I'm leaving."

Free at last, Carter did not seem to mind a cold drizzle, then a drenching downpour, and even a stinging hail, as the raft of state alternately drifted and hurtled down the winding river. Nestled into the somewhat crowded vessel, he could look up at rows of pencil-thin Ponderosa pines in the mountains, or down at their reflection in the crystalline water. Under low clouds, the gray-and-green world was eerily silent except for the rushing rhythm of fast-flowing twists and drops in the river.

The President expertly cast flies into the stream and landed three cutthroat trout, which even he, under state fish and game regulations, had to toss back into the water after removing the hooks from the fishes' mouths. The Carters spent one night tenting under a full moon at an abandoned ranch site, where the temperature dropped into the 40s. Their crew of experienced guides produced a tasty dinner of marinated roast beef, broccoli, sourdough biscuits and strawberry shortcake. Carter's only comment, relayed back to the press by walkie-talkie: "It was a nice day, and nice that I caught a lot of fish, and nice that I don't have to make comments to the press."

Setting out again next morning, normally drifting at about 5 m.p.h. through the peaceful canyon, the Carters sometimes swirled through rough water. As their raft pitched over 8-ft-high Tappen Falls, one of the boatman's long aluminum steering oars jammed between two rocks and snapped. From a distance, the ever watchful press came to the rescue. A TV crew supplied tape to hold a patched-up oar together. Unlike most wilderness visitors, the presidential party had many means of solving unexpected problems. When Amy discovered she had left her glasses behind, they soon arrived via helicopter.

Nor were the cares of Washington ever kept totally out of mind. Each day Carter got an update on breaking international developments through his security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The latest intelligence briefing reached the President through a special telephone line and then by radio, aided by antennas erected in the woods along his remote route. Electronic scramblers kept the radio messages from being intelligible to any eavesdrop per. He also learned thus of domestic developments--that the Senate had passed his Civil Service reform bill, and that a postal strike threatened. The inevitable black box through which the President can order a response to nuclear attack rode the rapids too, in a Secret Service raft.

A brilliant sun warmed the Carters' last two days on the river, enabling them to spot bighorn sheep on the towering bluffs and even a golden eagle with a 6-ft. wingspan. They stopped at the site of a long-abandoned gold mine, swam in the chilly stream and ended their river ride with obvious regret that it was over.

"I don't want to leave," said the ebullient President. "These are the best three days I've ever had."

From the Salmon River's relative serenity, the President moved on with his family to spend another week in the even more spectacular scenery of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, where he planned to hike, fish and sail on Jackson Lake.

Despite petty complaints that he was not putting aside enough time to meet citizens or plunge into politics along the way (an odd protest from a region where he is not politically popular), the vacationing President quite fittingly was seeing parts of America at its unspoiled best. All too soon, he would have to assume once again the burdens of office. Instead effacing the fleeting question of whether he would land the dancing trout he had just hooked, he would confront Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin across a conference table at Camp David and struggle with the intractable problem of how to achieve an enduring peace in the Middle East.

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