The Rescue On The Mountain

Last summer, my brother and I were at the beach. The sea was very strong. A small boy was in the water. He was very tired. He could not swim back. My brother saw him. My brother is a good swimmer. He swam fast. He helped the boy. They came to the beach together. The boy's mother was very happy. She said thank you many times.

Three children were rescued from a small lake on Sunday afternoon, after their boat turned over in strong wind. The children, all aged between ten and twelve, were saved by two local fishermen who saw the accident from the shore.

The accident happened at about three in the afternoon. The children were on a school trip and were wearing life jackets. The wind became strong very quickly. The boat turned, and the children fell into the cold water.

Marcus Doyle, one of the fishermen, said: "I was checking my nets when I saw the boat go over. We had a small boat, so we went out at once. The water was cold. The children were brave."

The children were taken to the local clinic. They were cold but not hurt. The school will check its safety rules before the next trip. The fishermen received a small letter of thanks from the mayor.

A fisherman was rescued from a small island late on Friday afternoon, after his boat broke down in rough water and could not return to shore. The rescue, which took just under three hours, was carried out by the local coastguard and a volunteer lifeboat crew of four. The fisherman, a 54-year-old man, was unhurt but very cold.

Miguel Santos had set out from the harbour at five in the morning, as he did most days. He had checked the forecast and was wearing the right clothing. Late in the morning, however, the weather worsened more quickly than the forecast had predicted, and his small engine failed in the rough water. He was pushed onto a small island about two kilometres from shore.

"I had a radio," Santos said later from the harbour. "I could see my own town. But I could not get back, and the waves were too big to swim. I made the call. That was the only sensible thing left to do."

The lifeboat crew reached him at four in the afternoon. They wrapped him in thermal blankets and gave him hot tea. By half past six, he was back at the harbour with his family.

The coastguard captain, Anna Reis, said that Santos had done everything right. "He did not try to swim. He did not try to fix the engine in rough water. He called early, while he could still see the shore. That is the lesson. The sea will not give you a second chance to call."

The local fishing community is collecting money to repair Santos's boat. The lifeboat service has been called out eleven times this year, more than at this point last year.

When the fishing boat 'Marina' lost its engine in heavy weather some four nautical miles off the coast of San Pedro at twenty past eleven on Friday morning, the man at the wheel had perhaps forty minutes to make a decision before drifting onto an exposed reef. By midday, his radio call had reached the regional coastguard. By half past one, a volunteer lifeboat crew of four had reached him. By half past four, he was back at the harbour, in dry clothes, drinking coffee with his daughter, and slightly bewildered to find himself on television. Stories of this kind end well or do not end well, depending on margins of perhaps fifteen minutes. The margin, on Friday, was the radio call.

Miguel Santos is fifty-four years old and has fished the same waters for thirty-one years. He had checked the forecast, which had predicted rising winds in the afternoon, and was wearing the right gear. The engine failure, he said later, was the kind that happens once a decade — a fuel-line problem that gives no warning. "You hear it stop," he said. "You try to start it once. You try to start it twice. After the third time, you stop trying and you make the call. That is the rule. I had to remind myself of the rule."

The local lifeboat station is a volunteer service. The four crew who launched on Friday — a retired teacher, a nurse, a marine engineer, and a postal worker — had been alerted within seven minutes of the coastguard's call. They reached Santos at quarter past one, attached a tow line, and brought the Marina back to harbour at slow speed. The crew leader, Anna Reis, has done this work for nineteen years. "Most of our call-outs are people who have done one or two things wrong," she said. "Miguel did everything right. The engine died. That happens. The reef does not care if you are an experienced fisherman. The radio call is what we ask for, and he made it."

There is a financial dimension that does not usually appear in the local paper's report. Friday's rescue cost the volunteer service approximately three thousand euros in fuel, indirect labour, and equipment wear. The service is funded by a small regional grant and by donations from the fishing community itself. Santos, like most rescued in these waters, will not be charged. The system rests on a quiet contract — that the call is free, that those who can give donate, and that everyone, in turn, treats the sea with appropriate seriousness. The contract has held for sixty years. Recruitment of new volunteers, Reis admitted, has become harder. "Young people work different hours now," she said, with the careful tone of someone who has answered the question often. "We will manage. We have always managed. But the trend is real."

Santos plans to be back on the water next week. "You do not stop fishing because the engine failed," he said. "You replace the fuel line and you check it twice. You make the call earlier next time, perhaps. The sea did not do anything wrong on Friday. Neither did I. Sometimes a fuel line breaks and a wind rises. That is what the sea is."

When the kitchen fire on the third floor of an apartment building on Calle del Almendro broke out at quarter past nine on a Tuesday evening last month, a man on the ground floor was already on the phone to the fire service. The call took ninety seconds. The first engine arrived five minutes later. By twenty to ten, all forty-three residents of the building had been brought down the central staircase or the rear fire escape, the elderly couple from the fifth floor by two firefighters and a neighbour they had not previously met. By ten o'clock, three people were in an ambulance with smoke inhalation, none seriously, and the fire itself was contained to a single kitchen. By eleven, the residents were drinking coffee in the lobby of a hotel two streets away, sleeping arrangements were being negotiated, and the building's owner was on his way back from a dinner he had been unable to enjoy after the third call. The fire was, by every available measure, a small one. The response, by every available measure, was not.

It is at this point in any urban-emergency story that the genre prepares its standard moves: the calm officer with the clean quotation; the affected resident who articulates what neighbourhood means; the building owner with the responsible statement; the closing line about how nobody, in the end, was hurt. The genre is not stupid. Its conventions exist because they organise a complex twenty-minute event into something a reader can hold. But they also do something else, less often noticed: they convert what is, on inspection, an ordinary mid-sized public service performing competently within its design parameters, into a small parable of urban civic life. Whether the conversion is innocent depends, in part, on how often it is read.

The officer who managed the scene, a senior firefighter named Pilar Vega, has done this work for nineteen years. In a brief interview the following morning, she said the things she was expected to say — that the response had been textbook, that the residents had behaved sensibly, that early calls saved lives. She also said something that did not, on the night, make it into the local paper: that the response time had depended on a station which had been threatened with closure three years earlier and which had survived only because of a sustained campaign by residents who were not themselves, in any direct way, the immediate beneficiaries of its work. "They saved this station," she said. "Last night, this station saved them. Most of them have never met. That is what cities are."

The man who made the first call is a sixty-eight-year-old retired teacher named Samir Cohen, who lives on the ground floor and was, by his own account, half-asleep in front of the news when he smelled the smoke. "I could have done nothing," he said. "I could have assumed someone else had called. There was a time when I would have. I do not know exactly when I started calling first. Probably after I retired, when I had less reason to think that someone else's reason was better." His call, the dispatch records show, was the only one received in the first ninety seconds. Two further calls came in over the next four minutes.

The financial dimension of the response, which goes unmentioned in the local paper's report, deserves a paragraph. The station that responded is funded entirely by the municipality, on a budget that has been flat in real terms for seven years. The two engines on duty that night were both in operation by their fifth year, in a service whose standards previously called for replacement at year four. The crew on shift had worked a twelve-hour overlap with the day shift to cover a vacancy. None of these details affected the outcome on Tuesday. They are, however, the conditions on which Tuesday depended, and they are not, currently, being discussed in the relevant council meetings with any urgency.

The elderly couple from the fifth floor, who were brought down by Vega's team, are home now. The kitchen will be repaired by next month. The neighbour who helped carry them, a younger man whose name nobody on the night thought to record, has been asked to come to a small gathering at the building next Saturday. He has accepted. The article ought to end here, with a small civic image of the kind the genre rewards. The article also ought to add — and this is perhaps the only paragraph the form does not supply — that the conditions under which the call was answered in five minutes are themselves contingent on choices being made elsewhere, by people who were not in the building on Tuesday, and that the choices, if continued, will eventually produce a Tuesday on which the response is slower. Nobody knows when. Cities depend, in the end, on the things they are not currently noticing.

What I could not put on my CV when I was twenty-three, in the small office of the regional newspaper where I had been hired the previous month, was that the editor who hired me had told me, at the end of the interview, that the paper's official line on the strike was the line the proprietor expected and that I was not to depart from it without first speaking to him. He had said this kindly, in the manner of someone passing on a slightly tedious house rule, and I had nodded, also kindly, and had taken the job. I have written, in the years since, several pieces of a kind that this essay is supposed to be, in which a young person comes to recognise that the institution they had wanted to join has terms attached, and the recognition is treated as a small awakening. I do not entirely trust those pieces. I am writing this one with that distrust in mind.

The strike I was sent to cover that summer involved about two hundred workers at a tannery on the eastern edge of the town, who had stopped work over a series of changes to their shift patterns that, taken together, would have reduced their effective hourly pay by something between six and eight per cent. The proprietor of the paper, who also sat on the board of the chamber of commerce, took the view that the tannery was an important regional employer and that the strike was, at heart, a misunderstanding. The editor, who had begun his career on the trade-union beat in another paper twenty years earlier, took a different view privately and did not, that summer, depart from the proprietor's view publicly. I went and interviewed strikers, foremen, the company's communications officer, and a local councillor. I wrote what I had been told to write, with the small concessions to balance that the form permits, and I filed it on time.

It is here, in essays of this type, that the writer is supposed to record the moment of moral reckoning. There was no such moment. What there was, instead, was a slow accumulation of small accommodations over the following two years, each of which seemed reasonable at the time, and the cumulative effect of which was that I learned the trade. I left for a different paper eventually, and have since worked on stories I am, on balance, proud of. The young man who took the job and nodded kindly is not a person I have repudiated. He is a person I am still, in slightly altered form, working with.

The convention of this kind of essay would now produce a redemptive paragraph in which I name what I would do differently. I have one prepared. I am not going to use it. The redemptive paragraph would do its work, and the reader and I would feel briefly that the essay had earned its weight, and the strikers from that summer — most of whom accepted, in the end, a settlement that gave them perhaps two of the eight per cent back, and several of whom had left the tannery within a year — would still be where they are. There is no version of this essay that reaches them. There may be a version of it that, by being honest about not reaching them, refuses one small comfort I am otherwise free to take.

A serious objection presents itself: that what I have just described — the principled refusal to write the redemptive paragraph — is itself a sophisticated form of moral self-presentation, in which the writer claims credit for restraint while continuing to do, in subtly altered form, the work the essay critiques. I think the objection is correct. I think there is no version of this essay that escapes it. The most that can be said is that admitting to it is preferable to not admitting to it, and that the slight worsening of the writer's position relative to the reader, which the admission produces, is a price worth paying.

What I could not put on my CV at twenty-three, then, was not the secret content of the editor's instruction. That instruction was, in a slightly less direct form, the standard one in regional papers of that era; everyone in the trade knew the shape of it. What I could not put on my CV was the information that I had nodded. Twenty years on, in a different city, in a paper that is run differently and in a register the proprietor of my first paper would not have understood, I am still looking for a way to write something in which the nodding, rather than the leaving, is the centre of the story. This essay is not it. I am noting that it is not it, and I am ending here, without an image, because the image I have available — of an empty editor's office on a Saturday morning in August, with a single light on and a kettle just boiled — would do more than its share of the essay's work, and I would prefer, on this occasion, to do that work myself, which I have not entirely managed.