Coincidence - Alan May [16]
“Ready?” he murmured to Dave Cameron, standing at the rail. “Over ye go, lad.” Then he shouted, “Man overboarrrrrd!”
Dave enjoyed his role in these man-overboard drills. He had been a hero inadvertently several times in his life, not only finding himself on the scene just when someone needed help, but also having the presence of mind to know how to help them.
He had worked at a shopping mall, scooping ice cream, the summer before he started at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Late one evening he’d been walking to his car in the mall parking lot when he came upon two teenagers kicking a younger boy. They were taking out their frustration on him because he had just a few dollars in his wallet.
Dave, although not half as brawny as the two thugs, had stormed into the fray with such vehemence that they had fled. One of them lost a shoe in his haste. The sneaker had dangled from the window lock in Dave’s bedroom for years until his mother converted the space into a library/guest room, with a rather more conventional décor when she realized her son had left the family nest for good.
The following year, Dave had been walking from the Queen’s campus to his attic apartment on King Street when a van came squealing around the corner in front of him. The passenger door flew open and a young woman landed on the pavement at his feet. In short order Dave took in the van’s make, model, and license plate number, flagged down a motorist to call 911, applied pressure to the bleeding lacerations the woman had suffered from her fall, and talked her down from her hysteria as she told him of her abduction and sexual assault. Dave’s quick thinking helped the police catch the three men who had assaulted her.
Yet a third incident had happened when Dave was in grad school. His first job after getting his undergraduate degree had been as a counselor at an outdoor program for young offenders, popularly known as “hoods in the woods.” He loved the experience, feeling a rapport with the students, difficult though they could be. He decided he had finally found his calling and a use for his sociology degree. He would be a teacher. He enrolled in a one-year B.Ed. program at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His plan was to teach high school social studies.
Toward the end of his program, he was practice teaching at a high school on Bloor Street near the U of T campus. Every morning he walked along Bloor on his way to school, Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand, briefcase in the other—props he carried into his classroom each day to make him appear older than his students. One day, he smelled smoke and raced down a side street in the direction it seemed to be coming from. He zigzagged his way across alleys and streets until he found its source: a two-story house with black smoke billowing from an upstairs window and flames licking the roof. He could hear cries coming from inside.
Dave pounded on the door and rang the bell, then, using all of his weight, threw himself against the door again and again until the lock gave way. A young mother lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs, overcome by fumes. Two smoke-smudged toddlers were clinging to her and poking her, crying for her to get up. Dave scooped the woman up and hefted her over his left shoulder, tucked the smaller of the tots under his right arm, and, grabbed the hand of the older one. He staggered out of the house just as a fire engine careened up to the curb and five firefighters swarmed into action.
The city awarded him a citation for bravery for his actions, delighting his class almost as much as it embarrassed him.
Now he hit the water and swam briskly to the designated spot a hundred feet from the Inspiration. He relished his part in the man overboard—MOB, in sailing vernacular—drills. It was a nice change of perspective, after all, from being the too-heralded