Last summer, Julie Cuevas and her family took part in a quintessential Boise activity: floating down the Boise River.

The Cuevas family moved to Boise in April 2018 to open Madre, a boutique taqueria in the Lusk District. Since then, the family has enjoyed several Boise summers and activities – swimming, biking, camping, floating. You know, the things we all do to cool off in the hot high desert.

That day on the river last summer, Julie was with her husband, John, and baby, Finn, in a raft rented from Barber Park. Their three-year-old, Ash, and Julie's parents were in another. Ash was the only one wearing a life jacket.

“Finn wasn’t even in a flotation device or a life jacket because I was just like, I’m holding him and we’re floating the river. Ash was in his life jacket because it was just easier. And my parents usually would float with a life jacket on – John and I didn’t – but they had taken theirs off,” said Cuevas.

They were happily bobbing along, snacking on licorice and enjoying the float when they came to a bend in the river about three quarters of the way down. With 50ish feet in between the two boats, Julie and John watched as their parents and son got tangled up in tree branches. Unless they figured something out quickly, the boat was going to flip over.

At this point, Julie wasn’t really worried about anyone’s safety. It’s just the Boise River, right? She started making room in her boat thinking they would be picking up spilled items.

“I was so just naive to what can actually happen on the river. I don’t know why. I just thought it felt so safe,” she said.

“I wasn’t even really watching. I was kind of turned away making space in our boat and John was steering. And then I heard John yell in this voice that just shook me to my core, ‘does somebody have Ash?!' and just the shake in his voice… it was like everything stopped,” Cuevas remembered, her eyes welling up with tears.

Julie’s mom and Ash had been up in the front of their raft. She would later tell Julie that when it flipped, she tried hanging onto Ash to help him, but realized she was just holding him down. Ultimately, she had to make the choice to let Ash go.

The three-year-old was in the river alone with only a life jacket until a small raft carrying four adults spotted Ash in the river and pulled him to safety.

“I remember floating up next to their boat and Ash was sitting there surrounded by these four adults. The look on his face was just fear,” she said.

Besides scrapes, bruises, and being emotionally shaken, everyone was ok. But Ash’s life vest was only one part of what saved him that day. Cuevas knows this, because she ended up reconnecting with the family that rescued Ash. The family told Julie that when they saw him in the river, he was on his back, arms spread out airplane-style with his feet out in front of him, calm and keeping afloat. (The rescue family just so happens to be customers of Madre. One day Julie saw the family in the restaurant and thought they looked familiar.)

How in the world did a little three year old know how to float safely down a flowing river? When Ash was one year old, he went through Infant Swimming Resource’s (ISR) Self-Rescue® swimming program.

Now, Julie Cuevas is Boise’s newest ISR self-rescue swim instructor. She’s one of four women in the Boise Valley teaching babies and toddlers life-saving floating techniques.

The day after their close call, Cuevas called Ash’s former instructor, Julie Heinrichs.

“I was like Julie, you won’t believe what happened. We went through the whole thing. Then she told me how busy she was with her business, like that she’s booked out for a year,” said Cuevas. “At the same time – this is August or September of covid – John and I had been talking about how I needed to find another job because the restaurant was just… we were just trying to make things work.”

She needed a job with the flexibility to be a mom and be able to help with Madre. After their accident on the river and now knowing there were kids in Boise on wait lists to take the potentially life-saving course, becoming a certified ISR instructor felt like a call to action.

Cuevas now teaches the swim sessions out of her garage, which looks nothing like a garage and much more like an awesome private swim studio. Right now, Cuevas has 20 students between the ages of six months old to five years old. Five days a week for ten minutes a day, Cuevas teaches 20 kids how to save themselves in water.

The tiniest humans are learning to go from face-down in the water and roll onto their backs to float calmly. Older kids are learning to swim-float-swim. But every kid is different, so each session is sorta customized to meet each kiddo’s needs and comfort levels.

“There are so many people that love ISR. But then there’s also the people that are like, okay I’ve heard about ISR, because typically the first week is blood-curdling screams,” Cuevas says with a knowing smile. “Kids that age just don’t really want anybody but mom, and then you hand them off to some stranger in a totally weird environment. Then you push them to do things that they, one, don't want don’t want to do, and two, don’t know how to do. It’s just a recipe for some not happy screaming.”

“But that is parents trusting the process and kids learning the process and gaining comfort and confidence,” she adds.

The program attempts to recreate the natural learning that children do as much as possible. When a kid is learning to crawl, they have slips and falls as they learn. But in an aquatic environment, you lose the safety of those slips and falls. Kids need to be able to go through the learning process on their own. The instructor is there, not just to catch them, but to guide them through the different processes and skills as they develop and learn on their own.

Cuevas admits that she was a bit skeptical of ISR’s infant swim program at first. A customer of Madre told her about the lessons and set her up with Julie Henrichs. He warned her, these aren’t your typical swim lessons but you’ve got to do it.

“When (Julie Henrichs) told me how much the lessons were and I was like… how? What? These must be some really special swim lessons,” laughs Cuevas. But once she saw the lessons in person, she was sold.

“When I saw our instructor teach Ash to roll onto his back and float I was like, oh my god – that’s like magic. It’s unbelievable. I was so impressed with the programming,” said Cuevas. “And that’s when I knew this was something totally different.”

ISR’s infant swim program is $85 a week for about six weeks. So yeah, not cheap. But ISR knows this and offers scholarships and financial programs, because what Cuevas and every ISR instructor cares about more is keeping kids safe and alive.

That scary day on the river was certainly a wake up call for everyone involved, but for Cuevas it went deeper.

“I’m so thankful we had that scary experience because I gained a totally different level of respect for what we’re doing with ISR,” she said.

One thing Julie Cuevas wants you all to know: ISR swim lessons are not the only thing that saved Ash that day. He also had a life jacket on and it’s so incredibly important to have those multiple layers of protection. Like if you have a pool, you should have a fence around it. If you’re in a body of water, you should have a life jacket on. You can’t rely on one thing. Too often, it’s just not enough.

“It’s great that a kid has the (floating) skill, but we don’t really want to test it,” said Cuevas. “I am so adamant with my families now, because I made so many mistakes on the river that day. From what I know now as an instructor versus what I knew just as a parent is so far apart.”

The Cuevas family is planning to get back out on the Boise River this summer but this time, everyone will have life jackets on. Even Julie and John. She wants the peace of mind that if the raft flips, she will be able to rely on her floatation device so she can focus on helping her babies.

To this day, anytime Cuevas reads a story about an accidental drowning, she always cries.

“It’s just the thought of losing your little one to something that should be more preventable than it is. It’s always so innocent,” said Cuevas. “I think that’s the thing – it’s always something so innocent that could happen to anybody.”

You can learn more about Julie Cuevas’s sessions at www.infantswimboise.com and find Boise’s ISR teachers here.

Photos in today's story were taken by Taylor Walker.

Thanks for reading and please, be safe this summer y’all.

With love from Boise,

-Marissa

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PS – if you forward this to a friend and let me know that you did (marissa@fromboise.com), I’ll give you the scoop on a fun lil artsy, musical event with some CCC artists that's happening somewhere in downtown Boise tonight.