Everyday heroes

Via Chap, a story of how one small group of intelligent, social mammals rescued another small group of same from the icy waters of remote Seal Cove, Newfoundland:

The dolphins had been stranded by a slab of ice since Sunday in White Bay off the coast of Seal Cove, a village of about 400 people. A chunk of ice was rapidly closing in around the mammals and threatening to suffocate them.

"You'd hear them crying, every night," said one of the men in the boat, Rodney Rice, 39. "I went down there last night and you could hear them trying to break up more ice. . . . They wouldn't have lasted another day."

May said it took the four men about three hours to break a channel in the ice with their boat, and one — Brandon Banks, 16 — got into the water and helped calm one of the dolphins weakened by the ordeal so they could tow it to open water.

"I had a floater suit on," said Banks, "And they would come up and rest their head on me and I would keep their head out of the water so they can breathe through their blowhole."

"Local boys" in speedboat free dolphins (Canada.com, 19 Feb 2009)

Cover me

"Courage" and its derivatives get thrown around a lot, rhetorically speaking.

One of the best working definitions of "courage" I've ever heard, and one that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani liked a lot (judging from how often he quoted it) is "being scared but doing what you have to do anyway."

This morning's profile in courage is a 50 year-old New York construction worker and Navy veteran named Wesley Autrey:

Who has ridden along New York’s 656 miles of subway lines and not wondered: “What if I fell to the tracks as a train came in? What would I do?”

And who has not thought: “What if someone else fell? Would I jump to the rescue?”

Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran, faced both those questions in a flashing instant yesterday, and got his answers almost as quickly.

Mr. Autrey was waiting for the downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway in Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help, he said. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Read on for the entire, amazing story. It has a happy ending and it won't spoil your breakfast.

A Man Down, a Train Arriving, and a Stranger Makes a Choice (New York Times, 3 January 2007)