About a week ago, a girl fell off a cliff into the Skokomish River, which flows out of the Olympic Mountains into Hood Canal in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Much of Western Washington is pretty rough country, and lots of people drown every year, often because they are weakened by hypothermia. The waters remain cold year round, so it’s actually very common for people to die as a result of hypothermia in the summer, when they are less cautious around rivers and lakes.
In this incident, the girl broke a few bones in the fall, and was showing signs of hypothermia, so she had to be extracted from the canyon she had fallen into fairly quickly. However, hauling her out on foot wouldn’t have been practical given the fractures, and might have taken too long given the hypothermia, so a Nighthawk helicopter from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station flew in to lift her out. Hospital Corpsman Second Class Richmond Roy rappelled a couple hundred feet to secure the girl and lift her to safety.
The rescue was carried out in a narrow canyon, under a bridge and in significant wind (you can hear the wind at the beginning of the clip while the cameraman is walking along the bridge). The video below gives an idea of how tight it was, and what nerve it must have taken for the chopper pilot and the corpsman who pulled up the basket. Near the end of the clip, you can see the basket swinging around in the wind as it nears the chopper, which remains motionless in midair. Amazing.
For all the bashing women give men, when you get right down to it, these extraordinary feats are simply beyond the capabilities of women. That image of capable, dutiful men placing themselves at considerable risk to lift a helpless girl out of a perilous place is a perfect metaphor for civilization itself. It puts feminism, women’s lib and notions of gender equality in their proper perspective.
