Meditations on Heroism
My friend Carol rides the bus to work. One morning, an elderly man got on the bus who soon began to clutch his chest. Eyes wide. Sweat on the brow. Cardiac arrest. Carol checks for breathing, finds no pulse, points and shouts "You! Call 911!" and commences CPR. The bus has stopped. Carol performs CPR as if a metronome was clicking in the background. The AED is brought into play and there is a return of spontaneous circulation but the man remains generally unresponsive. The ambulance arrives. Carol, already late for an appointment, grabs the next taxi.
Imagine that you are that man, given another chance at life. Whenever you got back on the bus, would you look at everyone already seated, and everyone getting on the bus and wonder, Are You the One Who Saved My Life? You might start to look at people and the world through a different lens. At least that's what the man told me when I met him last month. He happens to be the father of a friend of mine.
Years ago, the well known Wasatch backcountry skier Mark White and his girlfriend Marla essentially pulled this off with an avalanche recovery of a lone skier near Cardiac Ridge. The run goes by the name Hansen's now. Mark and Marla shied from the media spotlight as do many of the real heroes on this earth.
I picked up a Medal of Valor in Washington DC a decade ago because of a lightning strike on the Grand Teton that involved 17 climbers. But the truth is that there were a lot of that went up there and hell I got paid to go up on the Grand that day. (Although a few years ago, after reading a piece on rescue I wrote in Outside magazine, my accountant pulled his glasses down on his nose and said, "I sorta thought you'd get paid a bit more for that stuff.")
Most recently the word hero came up in regards to the tragic Wilson Glade avalanche that killed four skiers. You'll recall that our protagonist was briefly caught and then almost single-handedly performed not one but two live recoveries of people who were deeply buried. When the media hailed him as a hero, he simply replied, "A hero would have taken his party somewhere else that day. "
