Bros gone wild

Sammy Diaz can fly.

At least that’s how it looks to Rafting Gone Wild revelers on a recent Saturday afternoon as they watch the event’s organizer spring from the Sunrise Avenue footbridge out over the American River.

Wiry and tan, the 23-year-old spreads his arms and does a half-turn in the air. He faces the Sacramento County park rangers on the bridge who, moments before, tried to stop him on suspicion of putting on this gathering of some 3,000 rafters without a permit.

Diaz has been here before, of course. He remembers last year’s Rafting Gone Wild all too well, a day that culminated in rangers booking him and his father in the county jail. Rangers claimed they were intoxicated in public, but the arrests didn’t lead to any charges. Just nine hours of their lives lost, freezing and wet, in a cement cell.

That’s not going to happen today. Not if Diaz can help it. Now, his descent toward the American River accelerates. The rangers watch—dumbfounded, impotent—as the audacious young outlaw soars beyond their reach. Diaz disappears into the river’s depths, resurfacing with an arm to the sky. He floats away from the humiliated park rangers to the hoots and cheers of his people, the rafters and troublemakers and joy-seekers at the river’s launch site.

Diaz is facing three charges by this point in the day: Organizing an unpermitted event, running from the rangers and jumping off the bridge. A rangers’ motorboat is making its way upstream to nab Diaz, so he’ll have to swim to shore soon and hide. But that doesn’t matter. He’s in his element on this river.

“It just felt like freedom,” Diaz says after reuniting with his rafting crew an hour later. “That’s all.”

Attracting thousands of partygoers annually, the Rafting Gone Wild bash has been a stressor on the Sacramento County Parks Department for years, forcing rangers to beef up staffing in anticipation for increased rescues, fights, public intoxication and litter. Each year, rangers declare emergency alcohol bans on the river to quiet the festivities. But they are fast learning that rafters will not back down without a fight for their right to party.

“They call this a ’nanny state,’” says Diaz. “We don’t need someone to tell us how to be safe.”

Diaz isn’t the event’s founder—those details are murky—but he took on admin responsibilities on the Rafting Gone Wild Facebook group last year and is now considered its de facto organizer.

Now, with Diaz’s daring escape and the rafters planning their second of three river celebrations this summer, one wonders if things between rangers and ragers will get worse before they get better.

At first glance, they may look a bit ragtag and rough, with their neck tattoos, dreadlocks, Hawaiian shirts, leis, flat-brimmed baseball caps and gauged piercings. But Diaz’s rafting party of 16 is at once welcoming and gregarious.

A TV station interviews Diaz in a parking lot before the June 25 Rafting Gone Wild expedition. His friends flit around in the background, all smiles, punctuating his responses with affirmations: “Amen!” “Just having fun and enjoying life!”

“I’m not worried about the alcohol ban,” Diaz tells the reporter. “A majority of us have been to jail,” he quips.

It’s funny because it’s true.

As the crew collects its rafts and prepares for the march down to the river’s launch, a young man with neatly combed hair and black-rimmed prescription glasses turns to Diaz’s mom, Robin Romero.

“Hey, tell me if any cops come by here,” he says.

“Why?” asks Romero, 50.

“Warrants.”

“Oh.”

This band of Rancho Cordova natives looks forward to the celebration each year as one of the few times they get to leave behind their daily responsibilities—bills, kids, jobs at Wal-Mart and Burger King—and create another round of memories on the river that served as their backyard in childhood.

“We grew up there,” says rafter and longtime friend Eric Ward. Diaz’s family took him in when the two were just boys. They’ve been jumping off the footbridge since they were 14.

To this group, Rafting Gone Wild is as much about bringing people together as it is a celebration of the Rancho Cordova river culture. But as the celebration rises in popularity, staffers at Sacramento County Parks feel the pressure.

“I wish people would recognize that our intent is public safety and nothing more,” says head park ranger Michael Doane.

Sacramento’s rivers are no joke. Thirteen people drowned in them in 2015, according to officials, including one woman at another party-friendly event, Rage on the River.

To Doane and his colleagues, the swell of partiers and their hankering for booze is a recipe for disaster.

“Because of the participants and their focus on alcohol, it’s not an event I look forward to,” he says.

This year’s celebration drew higher crowds than the June 2015 launch. If Doane had to estimate, he’d say it was well into the 2,000-to-3,000 range. Maybe more.

Rafting Gone Wild 2016 resulted in six arrests, including one outstanding warrant, three public intoxication violations and one drunken driving incident in which the person drove over barriers and onto a bike path near the rafters’ landing point. Last year, there were just four arrests—two over a stolen golf cart.

On top of that, the parks rangers’ boat picked up maybe a dozen stranded rafters this year, and medical aid calls were up from 2015. There were also two calls for unconscious people in the park needing to go to the hospital, Doane says, as well as two rafters going in for head injuries suffered during a fight.

But neither this year nor last held a candle to 2012’s Rafting Gone Wild, which resulted in 23 arrests and more than 100 rescue assists. That marked the end of alcohol on the river for large-scale unpermitted events. And the beginning of the rift between rangers and revelers.

“We’ve already got 60 beers on the river,” Diaz says at the Sunrise Avenue raft launch just 10 minutes before his daring escape from park rangers. The night before, someone had planted two black backpacks full of beer along the bank downstream for the group to retrieve away from county officials’ prying eyes.

Rafting Gone Wild was founded as a drinking celebration in 2011 in response to the county’s decision to ban alcohol in parks on the summer’s three major holiday weekends—Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. That all came to a head when the RGW celebration got a little too wild in 2012.

County supervisors upped the ante by passing a law allowing single-day emergency alcohol bans on the river. Parks have enacted them for every Rafting Gone Wild since.

To enforce the ban, rangers post up at popular launches, where they ask to go through rafters’ belongings. They also patrol the shores of popular hangouts like the Clay Banks and Gilligan’s Island on foot, and use a riverboat to patrol the waters in search of rafters getting drunk.

For their part, Rafting Gone Wilders turn the ban into a game, deliberately disobeying rangers by finding ways to smuggle booze onto their vessels. It’s impish, irreverent. It sends a message of defiance to authorities.

Some rafters fill water bottles with clear booze. Others have alcohol delivered along the way by friends on foot. A brave minority cites its Fourth Amendment right against illegal searches to rangers asking to rifle through belongings, which the officials must respect.

Today, the group passes the checkpoint with a little bit of everything: water bottles filled with vodka, beers smuggled under personal belongings, enough weed to last the day and, of course, the scheduled pickup of those 60 cans downriver.

“Even though we try to keep most of it out, people sneak [alcohol] in,” says Doane. “So we just try and do the best that we can.”

Even so, Doane says it makes a difference. “It helps mitigate resource demand by banning alcohol, or at least reducing calls for services that are alcohol-related.”

Doane says many non-RGW rivergoers agree with the alcohol ban, since it allows them to safely enjoy the water on such busy days. But event rafters say they’re not getting a fair shake.

“I feel like people can have fun with beer or alcohol,” says Anna Clark, a longtime American River rafter and Diaz’s girlfriend. “It’s just some people that ruin it for everybody.”

Diaz takes care to disappear into the shoreline brush after his swan-dive escape from the park rangers. Their motorboat scans the banks in search of him. A helicopter hovers overhead. Enjoying their first drinks and tokes of the day, Diaz’s friends and family drift along, keeping an eye out for him as well. One friend unties his raft and floats off to find the beers hidden along the shore.

“He’s him,” says Robin Romero of her son. “I can’t stop him from being him.”

Reaching the Clay Banks about 40 minutes downriver, the group waits for Diaz to join them. They know he’s safe and on his way. After his diving escape, Diaz spent 30 minutes hidden in the brush before finding a park visitor and using his cell phone to call his crew.

As Diaz’s party awaits his return, a blonde woman in a pod floating past recognizes the group and calls out, “I hope he got away!”

The shore erupts in celebration.

Moments later, Clark spots Diaz with an incoming rafting party. He stands, waves to his family and friends and dives into the river to more cheers. Clark rushes to meet him. Now on land, Diaz is shivering cold. He’s shirtless, baring a chest tattoo of a Tupac lyric: “I’d rather die like a man than live like a coward.”

He scans the bike trail above, looking for patrolling park rangers. The group takes care to disguise Diaz, handing him a black baseball cap, a new pair of shorts and, for good measure, a cupful of vodka-soaked gummy bears.

The rafting party is in high spirits now, cracking beers as they return to the cool, swift river. They splash, laugh and play with a small megaphone, leading chants of “Fuck the park rangers!” with partiers along the banks. What a day to be free. What a time to be alive.

Doane says that this year’s staff was surprised by a surge in anti-ranger sentiment. “The crowd appeared more adversarial,” he says. “That kind of atmosphere sort of breeds on itself.”

He hopes it’s not a trend, but Doane says he’s beginning to notice on social media and the news that when folks are being lawfully detained by law enforcement, then subsequently escape, people cheer them on.

There’s something to it, this celebration of the good ol’ boy on the run: Diaz shouldn’t be on this raft with his 16 best friends and family members. This barefoot rogue should be in jail.

Yet here he is, showered with the laughter of family and friends, fat blunts, smuggled beers and irreverent cries against paternalistic rangers. It’s a storyline that resonates with most of the celebration’s blue-collar attendees, thirsty for just one day to go wild, to be free.

After the Clay Banks, rafters encounter the course’s one stretch of rapids before the river takes a hard left turn. This spot has an eddy that threatens to pull rafters out of the current and pin them against the banks. It also, unfortunately, paints a picture of how much trash partygoers are really creating: popped rafts, crushed cans and empty bags of chips collect and congeal at the eddy’s edges. And that’s just what’s on the surface.

“When these big events occur, it definitely increases the amount of trash on the parkway,” says Chris Aguirre, development director of the American River Parkway Foundation.

Over the course of last year, his organization picked up around 50,000 pounds of trash and debris along the river.

On this day, members of Diaz’s party seem to do their part to clean up after themselves. Ward swims out on more than one occasion to grab empty cans discarded by other groups. When the crew sees some graffiti on the shore, Ward grabs his megaphone and reads the message aloud to nearby partiers: “’Trash your liver, not the river!’”

“It’s not really a matter of education. It’s attitudes,” says Doane. He doesn’t see the use in talking to Rafting Gone Wilders about littering. “This particular group of participants, it was more about a lack of cooperation.”

For all the differences between rangers and the event’s promoters, they do agree on one thing: Shut Gilligan’s Island down. It’s is the final stop for most RGW patrons before leaving the water. Diaz describes it as an islet about 40 yards long, comprised of dirt and goose shit, where the rowdiest partake in mud wrestling matches refereed by a local named Bud. Doane and Diaz recognize this spot as the nexus of most river fights ending in hospital visits. Earlier in the day, someone in the group described it as the place where “Junior got his jaw broke” the year before.

“I’m not the organizer of that shitshow,” Diaz says.

The group hits land about 100 yards north of Gilligan’s Island and turns its attention to a nearby rope swing that rangers had previously tried to cut. A group of resourceful young men are now rigging it back into service.

Downriver, Gilligan’s Island is barricaded by bright orange fencing. Doane considers this a successful strategy; Just one island fight will lead to a hospital visit that day.

Diaz approves. “If they just shut it down like they did today, and didn’t issue an alcohol ban, it’d be fine.”

There’s one more scare in store for Diaz today, and that’s when four Sacramento County park rangers walk right past him on their way to cut the rope swing down again. This time it’s too close for comfort. The group piles back onto their rafts and drifts down to their secret exit point in Hagan Community Park.

In the days following Rafting Gone Wild, Sacramento media salivates over the high-profile footbridge escape. And Diaz revels in it.

He jokes with the morning hosts on 98 Rock, taunts the rangers on FOX40 and pleads his case on KCRA. He also promotes his next event.

In response to Doane’s criticism of the event’s name and what he calls its focus on alcohol, Diaz has rebranded Rafting Gone Wild on Facebook to the innocuous-to-the-point-of-dull The Rafting Community. As with any adept marketer, Diaz uses his 15 minutes of fame to promote the river’s next event: a Hawaiian-themed rafting celebration set for July 23 called Raftopia (™) Luau Float, 2016! To date, the Facebook event has more than 500 RSVPs. And, no, there are no plans to request an event permit.

Asked how he plans to address the upcoming celebration, Doane doesn’t show his hand: “We’re exploring our different options. I’m not going to expound on what our potential game plans might be at this point.”

But at the end of the day, Doane and his rangers want people out at the parks. “I guess what I would like to convey is that it’s not an us-against-them type of situation,” he says. “We want people to have a good time out there, but we want them to do it responsibly.”

Aguirre agrees on this point: “We encourage folks to come out to the river and enjoy themselves, but we want to make sure people are safe out there and that they clean up their trash.”

Maybe that’s the starting point for conversation between rangers and revelers. When Diaz’s friends and family are asked what they love about these celebrations, they focus on community.

“We’re trying to promote having fun, being cool with everybody, making friends,” says Clark, his girlfriend.

“We don’t really get to do that a lot,” says Ward.

“Once we do get an organized family event, we have fun.”

Ward and Diaz both have 4-year-old sons. They expect them to go rafting together someday.

“I grew up on that river and I know everything about the river,” says Diaz.

Rangers be damned, he’ll keep partying on that river, too.