'Land was imminent,' Rehberg recalls
The last thing Denny Rehberg remembers from last Thursday night was looking up from his passenger's seat in the boat.
"Land was imminent," Erik Iverson said for the Montana Congressman in a Monday morning teleconference. "He doesn't have a lot of recollection after that."
But up until the time that the boat driven by state Sen. Greg Barkus, R-Kalispell, crash-landed on a wall of rocks just south of Wayfarers State Park around 10:20 p.m., Rehberg remembers virtually everything.
He remembers the boat ride from his Bigfork hotel to The Docks restaurant in Lakeside for dinner earlier in the evening, Iverson said.
He remembers talking with children at that group dinner about going to school.
He remembers the boat ride back to the east shore and how chilly it was.
"He recalls visiting with Kathy Barkus, and looking up" just in time to see the fast-approaching rocks, Iverson said.
Just before the boat smashed into them, Kristen Smith, Rehberg's deputy chief of staff who was one of five people in the boat, may have sounded the early warning.
"He thinks it was Kristen who made mention of it, saying, 'It looks like we're going to hit something,'" Iverson said. "That's the last thing he remembers. He turned around from talking to Kathy and then they hit something."
For the next 2 1/2 hours - as campers and volunteers on shore came to help, as emergency workers arrived and bustled Rehberg off in an ambulance to Kalispell Regional Medical Center - everything is a blank.
"Kristen remembers a woman literally taking the shirt off her back and giving it to her," Iverson said.
But it was at 1 a.m. Friday that things started coming back into focus for Montana's Republican representative.
That's when Iverson's Missoula phone rang. Rehberg was letting his friend and former chief of staff know what happened and asking for his help over the coming days.
Iverson, now a Missoula consultant and businessman, has been a family friend of Rehberg since their fathers served in the Montana Legislature in the 1980s.
He spoke for a few minutes with his friend during his ambulance ride to the hospital, then took over the job of being the Rehberg family's liaison with the public.
Rehberg underwent surgery for a broken ankle and fractured facial bones on Friday and was released from the hospital around 9:30 a.m. Monday. He's not to put weight on his ankle for the next three to six weeks, hospital officials said.
But that won't sideline Rehberg, Iverson said. If he cannot travel to Washington for the Sept. 8 start of the fall Congressional session, he's got a laptop and a Blackberry that will keep him in the mix.
He needs to be present, however, for votes on proposed health-care reform.
For more on this story, read Tuesday's Daily Inter Lake.
Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com