After a shrill beep and jarring vibration from his pocket, Gaston Fire Chief Roger Mesenbrink reached for his pager.
"DROWNING. SW WEST SHORE DR." It was a call to Gaston's nearby Henry Hagg Lake, a popular summer recreation spot with a notorious reputation for steep drop-offs and annual drownings. Oh, man, Mesenbrink thought. Not another one.
He called on the closest dive team, readying his crew for a recovery mission. Driving west toward the lake, he braced himself for the sight of yet another body being pulled from the water, and the end to what had been a slow, safe summer.
Mesenbrink encountered neither bodies nor tragedy, but a scene he later described as "phenomenal."
He and his crew found at the shore a damp, mud-covered group of children and adults, wrapped in towels, panting, the end of a family's courageous rescue of eight children from the lake's unpredictable undercurrents.
In his 46 years on the job, "I have been through every kind of rescue scenario you can probably dream," Mesenbrink told The Oregonian on Sunday.
"Never have I seen this sort of outcome. A trained team would have done no better."
Before the drama unfolded, the Gibson family, originally from Hillsboro and meeting for their yearly reunion, were enjoying the sunny Saturday like any of the other thousands of park-goers that day.
But the moment Evan Gibson looked up from washing his mud-covered feet to see a small boy flailing his arms from the waters, he and his family became heroes.
"He needs help!" Gibson yelled, sprinting toward the water, followed by his nephew.
April MacLean, Evan Gibson's sister, looked up and took off after her brother. Their sister, Michelle Rushing, followed, crying out "They're drowning! They're drowning! They need help!" MacLean's husband chased after.
The children MacLean noticed earlier playing by the shore had disappeared from sight. Familiar with the lake's many dangerous drop-off points, the rescuers knew what had happened.
Evan Gibson and his nephew, first to reach the water, recovered two of the kids' mothers, who had run in after their children but couldn't get past where the lake falls off from ankle deep to 15 feet.
None of the women's children could swim either.
MacLean grabbed the first two bodies she could get hold of, and passed them to Gibson.
Rushing, farther in the water, grabbed a small girl, eyes open, unconscious. Suddenly, holding the child, Rushing tripped over another submerged body, paralyzing her with fear.
"We realized we had no idea how many were underwater," Rushing said.
She quickly dug for the second body, another unconscious girl, and passed both children to MacLean's husband.
Both girls were handed to another Gibson sister, Lura Kirby.
Kirby rolled one child over and began patting her small back until her eyes began to flutter and she coughed violently, filling Kirby with relief.
"I felt, just joy," Kirby said. "Maybe even a sense of elation. We weren't too late."
As Kirby rolled the second girl over, she quickly came to. "I didn't think they would wake," Kirby said. "I think there were angels there yesterday."
Forming a rescue chain, the Gibson family recovered one child after another.
"With the weight of their clothes, and the dead weight, I was worried I wasn't going to be strong enough," MacLean said, crediting her feat of strength to adrenaline.
Within four minutes, all eight children were accounted for, safe and conscious. They were taken to a hospital as a precaution and all were released.
When Mesenbrink arrived, he found the Gibsons huddled with the rescued children in a state of "quiet happiness." The children's parents hugged their children closely, thanking the Gibsons over and over again between racking sobs. "The kids are doing great, quite well," Mesenbrink said Sunday. "I'm amazed."
And even though the Gibsons are reluctant to call themselves heroes, Mesenbrink has no doubt.
"There is a reputation of these kind of incidents having very bad outcomes," Mesenbrink said
"You can call it luck. But I call it good old hard work and paying attention to human life."
Copyright 2012 - The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
