SUNRISE TO SUNRISE
BY BILL MANNING
On a warm July night in Indiana, three elderly sisters drove to Lake Monroe, a popular spot for recreation. After their respite, the women prepared to leave. The driver, unfamiliar with the roads in the area, drove straight down a boat ramp into the lake.
Firefighter Rick Van Sant, Jr., of the Indianapolis Fire Department was shoreside when he saw the van plunge into the water. Immediately he swam toward it. By the time he reached it, the van had floated about 120 feet from shore and was nosing into the lake.
He instructed the women to open the doors. The electronic mechanism would not operate–they were locked in. Van Sant began pounding the windows with his fists, to no avail.
By this time, another man had swum out to the sinking vehicle. Van Sant directed him to swim back to shore and get a rock.
Van Sant stayed with the women and kept them calm. He instructed them to move to the back seat. He told them the water was only a few feet deep and he would get them out. But he was treading water. The lake was really 20 feet deep at that point.
The other man grabbed a rock but could not make the swim back with it. Van Sant swam to shore, grabbed the rock, and swam back out to the van, followed by the other rescuer.
By the time Van Sant reached his target, only the rear three feet of the van showed above the water. The women stood in the back seat, soon to be entombed in the quickly sinking vehicle.
It took Van Sant, a large, strong man, three hits with the rock before the side window gave way.
“Rick was determined,” the second rescuer said later to the media. “He kept saying, `We`re not going to lose these people.`”
Van Sant pulled out the first, then the second woman. Suddenly, the van submerged completely, flushing out the third victim. None of the women could swim. Van Sant brought one woman to shore while the other rescuer stayed with the remaining victims to help keep them afloat. Van Sant returned to the site–his fifth trip–and the two rescuers brought the sisters safely to shore.
Three people were spared death in Indiana that night due to the tenacious efforts of Firefighter Rick Van Sant and a conscientious civilian.
After the incident, in the glare of media spotlights, Van Sant was low-key, modest to the point of being self-effacing. The local newspapers, attracted to the loudest sounds, played more to the second rescuer`s side of the story than to Van Sant`s extraordinary physical and mental efforts. “That`s okay,” Van Sant confided to another firefighter. “I do this for a living.”
Indeed. Which goes straight to the core of what it means to be a firefighter.
By your experience and training, you are firefighters. By your will, you are firefighters. Most important, by your hearts and minds, you are firefighters.
They say it`s unfair to define a person by what he does for a living or an occupation. That might be true for garbage collectors or editors or model car builders. But by calling someone “firefighter,” we characterize in the purest sense what that person is inside; the “doing” of the job comes by extension.
That`s an essential distinction. One might argue that, with respect to the Rick Van Sants of this world, firefighting may or may not be “in the blood,” but it is incontrovertible, to my way of thinking, that firefighting is in the heart and soul.
You are heroes–down into your souls, down to your shoes. Rick proved it this time with physical endurance, mental toughness, and a rock. What tools will you have at your next call to courage? Whatever`s available, of course.
What`s constant is what`s in your heart and soul–courage, tenacity, love of life, and the urgent will to preserve that life. It`s the stuff by which we can say with assurance: Once a firefighter, always a lifesaver.
The job never ends. You are a firefighter from sunrise to sunrise. What a gift.
Congratulations to Rick Van Sant and to you, firefighter.
