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I know that rowing is good for me and keeps me fit and healthy. But as it turns out, my rowing was also good for someone else. I saved a man’s life! Here’s what happened.
I row on the North Canadian River in Oklahoma City with a Liteboat 5.0 coastal rower. The river was dammed in 1918 to form adjacent Lake Overholser, but the river is still there and is an excellent channel for rowing.
My route runs from the Riversport boathouse to the dam and back (twice), which is about 7,500 meters. On a recent morning, as I approached the dam, I saw a pickup truck in the river, close to the bank and half submerged. That was not normal!
I had my phone with me, so I called 911 and reported it. Remarkably, no one else had called it in. A few minutes later, I heard the sirens of the Oklahoma City Fire Department rescue team and the OKC police.
They asked me to look in the windows of the truck to see if anyone was inside, but the windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see. But yes, a man was inside, and he was alive! They had to break the driver’s side window to get him out.
He had been in the water for 10 hours at that point, having driven off the road at about 1 or 2 in the morning. It was a little after 11 a.m. when I saw the truck and called 911. The water had invaded the cab, and the man was submerged up to his neck. The temperature the night before had gone down to 30 degrees, so it’s amazing that hypothermia had not rendered the man unconscious, if not worse.
Hooray for rowing!
Bob Woods
Oklahoma City, Okla.
