At a church in Chicago, a young woman told the congregation that she and a group of friends had been swimming in Lake Michigan off a Chicago pier.  Laurie and her friends were the only ones there because swimming was forbidden; the water was too shallow for diving and there were rocks on the sandy bottom.  “But we ignored the signs and swam anyway,” Laurie confessed ruefully. 

The teens had spent at least an hour diving and playing in the waves.  Tired, they headed down the pier toward the beach.  Laurie decided to dive once more.  She did, almost brushing the sandy bottom, and then started to swim upward.  But something held her back.  Horrified, Laurie realized that her foot was caught in a tight rocky crevice.  She was trapped! 

“I threw up my hand and waved frantically, my fingers just breaking the lake’s surface,” Laurie said.  Were any of her friends still near enough to see her desperate signal?  Someone had to.  Otherwise, she was going to drown!        

 Suddenly she felt a strong hand grasp her wrist and pull---hard.  Like a cork popping, her foot came free, and she burst to the surface, her lungs aching.  Laurie looked around. There was no one holding her hand or even treading water nearby.  She was the only person in the water.

             Shakily she climbed onto the pier and walked toward her friends, They were all sunning themselves on the sand, nowhere near the pier.  “You guys,” she called, “who pulled me out just now?”

 “Out of where?” one of the boys asked.

“My foot was caught and I almost drowned,” Laurie told them.  She pointed to her right foot.  Despite being wedged so tight in the crevice and then pulled out, it didn’t have a single scratch on it.  Puzzled, she asked again, “Which one of you saved me?”

 A few years have passed since Laurie’s close call, and not one of her friends has ever admitted to pulling her up to safety or even knowing she was in trouble. “It seems unlikely that whoever did it could have completely vanished the moment I surfaced,” Laurie explained that day in church.  “Perhaps it was a lifeguard of a different sort.”

 © Angels on Earth 1998  by Joan Wester Anderson