SCOTT ECKERSLEY'S trim little house is tucked into a hillside outside Ojai, high above a valley carpeted with fruit groves. An arbor shades the front door, which swings open to frame a slim, smiling man. Now 67, he has snowy-white hair and ruddy cheeks. There's a friendly glint in his eye. For the past 15 years he has suffered from fibromyalgia, a wasting disease that has mostly imprisoned him in the simple comfort of the house he built with his own hands. A year after the Sespe tragedy, Eckersley met a beautiful 17-year-old local girl named Jenny. She is standing beside him now. They have one adult daughter.

Eckersley looks exhausted, but he wants to talk. As the lone survivor of the tragedy, he feels he has an obligation to speak. In the years following the accident, he returned to the spot dozens of times. He would sit on a big rock in the middle of Sespe Creek and meditate, trying to figure out why he alone had lived. "How could anybody get out of that stream? How did I get from the middle of the river in that kind of current?" he says. "It's not possible, it's not possible."

Immediately after the tragedy—weak and still feeling pain in his chest—Eckersley submitted to two lengthy interrogations. Everyone—the Ventura County Sheriff's Department, the Seabees, the Forest Service—wanted to know what had gone wrong. Why had they left the cabin? Why had they kept crossing rapidly deepening floodwaters? Who had made the decisions? But no one, it seemed to Eckersley, wanted to assume any responsibility.

It was more important to Eckersley that the families hear the real story, and he met with them one night in Canoga Park shortly after the accident. He wanted to tell the mothers and fathers how their children had died and that they had died bravely. "People were falling over fainting and crying," Eckersley recalls. "Now that I've had a daughter and raised her up and know what it would mean to lose her, it just gives me the shivers what those people went through."

Eckersley also told them of that transcendent moment when one of the boys rose above the fear to express his message of love. Jan Cassol, Bobby and Ronny's mother, felt her heart crack. Eckersley didn't know the name of the boy, but she did. Every night, for as long as she could remember, her son Bobby would kiss her as he went to bed and say, "I love you dearly." Now she knew those words were the last he ever spoke.

"I realized this boy was an enlightened human being," Eckersley says. Back at Live Oak School, he tried to teach the children to appreciate the gift of life. One night he would talk them into doing yoga in the dark. Another, he would insist they all get up to watch the sunrise. And he retold the story of Bobby Cassol's words of love countless times. "I was determined to wake up everybody," he says.

Bobby Cassol's memory haunts Eckersley to this day. He came to believe that at some point on that doomed bulldozer Bobby ended up in his grasp and that he let him go. It is a sequence that he never mentioned in the weeks after the tragedy. But now, stretched out on his sofa in the late afternoon, he tells me a story he says he was never able to tell anyone until recently.

He stares blankly at the ceiling, and his voice drops to a near whisper. He's back on the bulldozer, in the middle of the roaring flood. Everyone is fighting to hold on, and he hears a familiar voice yell, "Scott! Grab my hand!" Eckersley is already holding another boy, but he stretches and grabs Bobby's wrist. The current tears at them. Eckersley feels as if his arm is about to be ripped off. His grip loosens, just for an instant, and that is the only weakness the river needs. Bobby is swept away. The other boy is soon carried away as well. "If I'd only been stronger," Eckersley says. "If I only could have just pulled him up in front of me."

Early in 2006, he received a phone call. Debra Cassol wanted to talk. She and Eckersley started to correspond. For the first time, he talked about his guilt. Debra also started to open up. She told Eckersley about the guilt she felt, too, over not speaking up about her premonition that the boys wouldn't be coming back. It was comforting to talk with someone who really understood.