How a Porta-Potty Saved My Life (Paperback)

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.

Alan O'Hashi is a writer, filmmaker, publisher, and storyteller whose work grows out of a lifelong curiosity about people, place, history, and the unexpected ways the past continues to shape the present.Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, O'Hashi grew up with the American West as his backdrop. His education began with biology and political science, an unusual combination that eventually led him toward environmental politics, community development, documentary filmmaking, and writing. His career has taken him from the mountains and forests of the West to tribal communities, classrooms, film sets, publishing projects, and archives.At twenty-three, O'Hashi worked as a seasonal ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park. On July 31, 1976, while trying to return to the park from Cheyenne, he became stranded in the Big Thompson Canyon during one of Colorado's deadliest natural disasters. His Ford Pinto station wagon stalled in the rising floodwater after striking a 55-gallon barrel. He escaped through the driver's-side window and reached higher ground. An unlikely aqua-blue portable toilet caught his car's bumper and helped steer the vehicle away from the main current.For decades, O'Hashi regarded the experience as a remarkable story from his youth-a story he occasionally told when someone asked about the flood. Fifty years later, a visit to the Loveland Museum's 50th-anniversary exhibit changed his perspective. Photographs, artifacts, maps, and the names of those who died brought the experience back with a force he hadn't expected.He began asking different questions.Why had he escaped when others hadn't? How much control had he actually possessed? What role did chance, circumstance, instinct, other people, and faith play in the outcome?Those questions became the foundation of this book.O'Hashi grew up Presbyterian and has spent much of his life thinking about the tension between predestination and free will. The flood gave those theological questions a personal dimension. He could make choices, but he could not control the circumstances of those choices. He could choose his next step, but he couldn't choose who-or what-would appear to help him take it.That idea became a recurring theme throughout his life.O'Hashi later faced other moments when circumstances outran his plans, including an emergency airplane landing, serious illness, hospitalization, and other unexpected turns. Each experience reinforced a lesson first introduced in the Big Thompson Canyon: we cannot prepare for every possibility, but we can develop the resilience and resourcefulness to respond when the unexpected arrives.His work reflects that same curiosity about uncertainty.O'Hashi has produced documentary films exploring history, culture, family, and the American West. His projects have included stories about Indigenous history, Juneteenth, Japanese American experiences during World War II, and the landscapes and communities of the Rocky Mountain region. His documentary work has taken him into archives, museums, tribal communities, family reunions, and historical sites, where he often combines personal stories with larger historical questions.He is also the founder of Best Chance Media, an independent publishing imprint based in Boulder, Colorado, where he works with writers to bring their stories into print. Through publishing, filmmaking, workshops, and his own writing, he has become increasingly interested in helping other people tell the stories they carry.