Summary

Arnold Ryder survives being swept away in fatal mudslide

Arnold Ryder was delivering newspapers to the rural homes up Hubbard Creek when his Ford Tempo got stuck in a rut carved in the road by water coursing down the hill.

After going to one of his customers to call his wife and ask her to send a tow truck, the 70-year-old retired baker from Myrtle Creek was walking back to his car in the pouring rain Monday evening to wait, when a mudslide roared down the hill and swept him away.

It was the same slide that destroyed a house on the hill above him and killed four people. But Ryder survived.

"There was a man and a little boy there," Ryder recalled from his bed in the intensive care ward of Columbia Douglas Medical Center, where he was listed in fair condition after suffering abrasions, broken ribs and hypothermia.

"I heard him holler to the little boy: Run! Run! Run!

"I heard about four or five of those great big trees crack, and a big roar like a freight train and that was it.

"I grabbed a tree and hung onto it. It was too much. Down over the hill I went, praying all the way.

"It had me buried and rolling underneath of it like a rock."

Deputies recovered the bodies of Rick Moon, 46; Susan Moon, 44; Sharon Marvin, 40, a neighbor; and Ann Maxwell, 40, a family friend from Roseburg who was visiting.

The boy, 13-year-old Justin Moon, and his sister, 16-year-old Rachelle, escaped without injury. She attends Roseburg High School; he attends Fremont Junior High School.

Ryder, for his part, came to a stop about 150 feet down the hill and managed to get his upper body out.

"My mouth was filled with gravel and dirt, and I had to dig it out," he said. "I started hollering and dug myself out. I lost my pants and that's all I could think about. But I couldn't get my right leg out."

One of Ryder's newspaper customers, former paramedic Jeff Orr, found Ryder with a tree pinning his leg and covered him with a blanket.

"He told me he thought I would be OK for a little while. He wanted to go help the other guys. I said go ahead. I laid there for an hour and a half until the paramedics found me," Ryder said.

Ryder couldn't help thinking how glad he was that his wife, Imogene, had decided not to accompany him. The slide had carried away his car and dumped it down the embankment, but Ryder could see a taillight shining through the debris.

After surviving World War II as an infantryman in New Guinea, Leyte Gulf and Corregidor, a car wreck in 1947 and this mudslide, Ryder figured his luck was about played out.

"The good Lord has given me three passes," he said.