The days my brother died... Day 1: The Damn or the Drop

Growing up as latchkey kids in a mountain town with less than 700 people, my brother and I had some very strange adventures growing up. Luckily for both of us, we were always together, so if something bad happened, we could get help for the other.

There were five times in my memory that stand out as days that my brother could have very easily died, and very nearly did, but for luck and a little bit of intuition.

On a white winter morning on christmas break, the great blizzard of '82 was taking a pause and my brother and I decided it was the perfect moment to have an outdoor trek. It was our first winter in the duplex, and this was our first time being snowbound. We just had to explore the now foreign territory again.

We walked down to the general store and got penny candy and supplies for mom. On the way back, Josh suggested we take the forbidden road home. Forbidden because the family who lived at the end of it had a very mean dad who yelled at anyone who got too close to his house. We walked up that road until we could see two things, the lights of the grinch's house and the dam to the left that connected at the end of the two roads.

In the summer, this dam held what could barely be described as a lake, more of a pond really... You could walk across it if you were careful and good with balance, but if you lost your balance you had to try to fall in the water, because the other option was about a 20 foot fall to the forest floor below.

As we took a left, away from the house, towards the dam, I wondered if the lake was frozen over, or if we would have to do that precarious balancing act in the snow. Sadly, it turned out to be the latter. The ice was brittle around the edges of the lake and impossible to pass on. The lake was big enough that it was too much to ask for us to go around... plus... there was the danger factor.

As any boys would have, we decided to take the scary balancing act way across and back over to our street. We shuffled slowly across, Josh taking the lead. The lip of the damn was about a foot across and when we got to the middle we had to leap the two foot gap that allowed the spillover. Josh jumped over sure footed and turned to help me. When I lept, my foot slipped a bit on the ice and Josh grabbed me and guided me to safety. My slip had, however, thrown him off balance and once I regained mine, he started to wobble.

Thinking that he was going to go over the bad edge of the damn, I gave him a shove backward and he plunged into the frozen lake, breaking right through the ice.

Being only seven years old, I did the only thing I could think of. I ran the rest of the way off the damn, ran down the road, up the driveway, around the stairs through the front door and hollered at the top of my lungs "JOSH FELL IN THE LAKE!!! HELP!!! JOSH IS IN THE LAKE!!!"

Mom and Chuck were up and out the door quicker than I had ever seen them move, they ran down the driveway all while trying to put their coats and hats and gloves on... I ran alongside crying in shame that I had left him there. We got to the bottom of the driveway and turned up toward the damn, Josh was walking slowly towards us. Shivering and dripping wet, Mom grabbed him and wrapped her jacket around him.

After a very long hot bath for both of us, mom made some chicken noodle soup with mashed potatoes in it and we all sat around the fire. Despite how easy it is for kids to hurt themselves on these adventures, somehow, miraculously, we always lived to do it again...