We Watched Our Dog Almost Drown Today

Yesterday it snowed. It was a beautiful, quiet, heavenly sight watching the flakes slowly flutter to the ground all afternoon and into the evening.

I went for a longer-than-normal walk this morning, taking in all the sights and capturing pictures of all my familiar walking places now donned in white. I tried to cover more territory than usual to see as much as possible before today’s rare warm sun rays returned the landscape to normalcy.

I scoured Crescent Beach looking for interesting visual snowy vignettes and headed to our favorite pond tucked into a little mini-wilderness of tranquility. After taking several photos I decided to walk home quickly and drive our boys back to play in all the snow blanketing the area around the pond. No one else would be there, so we’d have it all to ourselves.

I got home, they ate some lunch and put on their snow pants and jackets, and we drove back. The pond was frozen like a donut; the only watery part was the middle. The little dock was pulled to the edge of the pond and had frozen into place. The boys immediately gravitated toward the dock as we tested the thickness of the ice at the pond’s edge. I was happy the dock was frozen to the shore and immovable; my main concern was that they not punch through the ice when stepping from the shore to the dock. I didn’t want them to get wet feet and have to go right back home.

As we were doing our thing, our little dog, Roxy, was happily trotting through the snow and exploring her surroundings. Once the boys were standing safely on their frozen barge, all of our attention went to the dog. She had trotted out onto the ice, which was more than strong enough to hold her little 19-pound body. We laughed heartily at how her short little legs had accumulated dozens of round dingleberries of snow, and how she was trotting so regally on the frozen pond. I took a few pictures of her as she headed toward me and hopped on shore.

Roxy loves her boys, though, and she trotted back toward the pond, walked over the few feet of ice between the shore and the dock, and jumped up to be with them. But she kept going. She jumped off the opposite end of the dock headed toward the center of the pond, trotted on the ice several feet, and broke through the last bit of ice. The only water was in the center and she was now doggy paddling in it. We were separated from her by about five or six feet of ice. She tried unsuccessfully to hoist herself up on the ice to safety. I ran over to a bench to put down my gloves and camera, hoping that in those few seconds I’d come up with some way to rescue her. I came up with nothing.

As we helplessly watched Roxy struggle over and over to try to get up on the ice, a chaotic panic began to explode inside my chest. Here we were, calling to her, yearning for her each attempt to succeed, knowing that it was only going to get worse. And fast. Hypothermia would soon take over and I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of Roxy giving up and sinking into the water. I just knew she was going to die. As close as we were to her, there was no way for us to reach her. Unless. Unless I decided to step off the dock, cross over the ice, which I knew would probably break fairly quickly, and slide into the water to retrieve her. But even if I could set her on the ice to run to my sons’ arms on the dock, would I be able to get myself back on top of the dock? The shore was still blocked by ice all around, so that wouldn’t work either.

After about 20 seconds of thinking disastrous thoughts while watching Roxy struggle, I still had no idea what to do. I’ve been in various outdoor training sessions; I’ve heard more than once that you should never try to rescue someone in a situation that could be equally fatal for you. Here we were at a small-ish pond. Not that deep but definitely deeper than my height. Not that remote but out of range to yell for help. Nowhere near polar but hypothermic nonetheless.

Because we had no way to reach Roxy quickly, I was in between microbursts of thoughts vacillating between watching her drown and jumping in after her. Both were crazy ideas, intensifying my inner panic. Then in a flash of memory, I remembered an article in Time magazine that I had read years ago. It was about reacting in the midst of an emergency, and how an emergency is often the opposite of how it is portrayed in movies. We imagine disasters and envision screaming and running. But in reality, the article said that people caught off-guard in emergencies are often quiet; still; observing; taking it in in disbelief. The article urged readers to be survivors, and that survivors have almost always been people who stopped watching and starting doing something immediately. And that it takes an effort of will, like stepping out of waist-high glue, to make yourself get moving and looking for survival options.

At that moment, I started running around in the snow, albeit frantically, ensuring that I was unglued from disbelief. I started yelling to the boys, “She’s going to die really fast if we don’t get her out!” As I ran what seemed to be a few big circles in the snow, I think my mind went into some kind of freak-out gear. I ran back up on the dock and started pounding the ice below me with a big club of a branch. I’m not sure how I lost my grip of it, but I got back on land and searched crazily for another thick branch. Snow covered so much of the dry land, but I found one off to the side of the pond and ran back. I pounded at the ice but Roxy had been in there way too long. We kept calling and calling for her to keep at it, knowing she wouldn’t be able to make it up on the ice but yearning for some kind of miraculous reprieve.

I remember looking at her at about that point and thinking there was no way she could last any longer. I lost it. With a fiery kind of anger at the situation, I plunked my buns down on the edge of the dock and punched through the ice as hard as I could with my feet, soaking my boots and at one point almost losing my stability. I was MAD with helplessness – hers and ours – but there was now almost a complete passage through the ice to where she was. Except for one last area near her that I just couldn’t reach. With all my might, I aimed and threw a chunk of a branch at it that my son had brought. It didn’t go through. We yelled and yelled for her to keep trying. Then I yelled to the boys, “Go get something else!! I need something else!! She’s going to die!!” I couldn’t believe how long she had been trying to get out. It had probably been about three or four minutes, which is an eternity if you’re submerged in freezing water.

How could she have any strength left? How could she even feel her extremities? Negative thoughts about her state were pouring through my mind. Guilt for even having allowed her to walk on the ice flooded my heart. As a parent, I spend my whole life anticipating what might happen and curbing certain activities for safety’s sake. How could I have failed our dog?

Roxy was so close but out of reach, one seam of ice completely blocking her from the free passage she could swim to me. I looked behind me and the boys were running up. In my older boy’s hand was a long, thin-ish branch that fanned out into dozens of small branches. I remember desperately thinking that it was too flimsy to punch through the ice.

He handed it to me and I gripped the thick end. I reached the fanned-branch side out to Roxy and talked to her about getting herself onto that fan of little branches. I hoped she wouldn’t think I was pushing her away with it like a big broom. Somehow she knew what I was wanting her to do. She tried unsuccessfully to get her body onto some of it and slid back into the water. We all encouraged her to try again. She pawed her way on top of the tangle of little branches so that the weight of her chest was on the clump. With a slight, delicate pull on my end, the friction of her upper body made her stay on the top of the little branches and her back half came out of the water. She was now safely on top of the ice.

Her little soaked body could somehow still walk. That’s the will to live. She trotted wearily to the dock and my older boy swooped her up in his arms. With seriousness in my voice, I firmly said, “We gotta go! Run straight to the car! She could still be so hypothermic that she could die!” When we got to the car, we wrapped her in my son’s jacket and in a sleeping bag that just happened to be there from a sleepover the previous weekend. She was shaking uncontrollably and I looked outside the car. The sun was beaming down while the inside of the car seemed cold and dark.

Still in a frantic, hasty state, I said, “Let’s let her down out here in the sun and see if she warms up by running around.” Right away, she began trotting around. The sun was warmer than any day we’ve had recently and you could really feel its strength. She scruffed her nose in the snow and rolled her sides in it. She looked so chipper. She moved like a cheerful puppy. I went to the ground and thanked God profusely. I stayed there awhile.

In all of the commotion, I couldn’t find my keys so we couldn’t get in the car and go home. We spent the next hour going back and forth, retracing our path from the car to the dock. I just knew I hadn’t lost my keys in the pond. I had a feeling I had dropped them by the car at the beginning of our whole excursion. Nevertheless, they were nowhere to be found. Snow was still abundant enough to hide everything. So we walked the half-hour home.

It was probably for the best. Roxy looked like nothing ever happened and we had plenty of conversational decompressing to do. My chest was still tight with an unrelenting anxiety I hadn’t felt before and I couldn’t stop thinking about how close we had come to watching a terrible death of someone we loved.

Even though it all miraculously worked out, I couldn’t stop thinking about what would have happened if we couldn’t have gotten her up on the stick. Those are the heavy thoughts that I’ve tried to shrug off all day. Would I have eventually jumped in? Would I have been able to save her and myself? Or would I have watched her sink down into the water while my younger son yelled for me to go save her? Meanwhile would my older son have launched himself into the ice to save her?

Those ridiculous decisions are not good for the psyche, yet there’s something important about thinking about what we would have done. After turning them over and over in my mind, I’ve concluded that, if it’s possible to have the wherewithal in that kind of situation, a person needs to have an idea of how they will get back to safety the second before they dive into a potentially fatal environment. What’s scary is that in an emergency like that, you ache to want to help the struggler immediately despite yourself; but you have to fight that ache with a sanity that forces you to try some other things first. You have to take some microsecond measures of self-preservation whether you stay on shore or jump in and rescue them.

When we got home and I got the spare car key, an acquaintance gave me a ride back to the pond. He said he knew of a story of a family in a similar situation. One person fell in, a relative jumped in to save them and couldn’t get back safely, another jumped in and couldn’t get back, then another, and another. Five relatives died that day trying to save each other; only the grandmother survived because she was too old to try.

Thanks to more snowmelt and prayer, I found the key near the car where I thought it might have been. I drove home slowly, making sure my mind was on the road and not the pond. We turned on some Bear Grylls to watch how he exits a frozen pond in a state of hypothermia, and gave Roxy lots of treats. I wonder if she knows how close she was to death.

It’s been an emotionally exhausting day and only the therapeutic motion of typing on my keypad has somehow softened the tightness in my chest. I still can’t believe Roxy is sleeping peacefully next to our son in bed. Had another 30 seconds elapsed in that pond, she would not be here. Thank you God.

As for frozen ponds, I don’t care to see another one for the rest of my life.