RDAU_2026-ISSUE0809_DIGITAL MAGAZINE

current and Bennett’s weight pushed Reinhardt’s head underwater. He was a strong swimmer, but his 5-foot-9 frame weighed only about 155 pounds, a good 90 pounds less than Bennett. He’d taken on a herculean task. He swam with all his strength, angling toward the boat ramp, desper- ate to hit shore at the clearing, where they’d have a chance of making it up the bank, which was about 8 feet high. But it wasn’t working. Again and again, Reinhardt’s head went underwater and he had to fight to resurface, gasping and gagging. Long experience had taught him to tamp down panic, but now he could feel it coming over him. Oh, crap , Reinhardt thought, we’re both going down the river . He had nothing left in the tank— his muscles felt dead with fatigue. So he said a silent prayer: God, I need your strength right now to help him. With a sudden burst of energy, he fin- ished the upstreamswim, coming to rest at the base of the tree, where a mass of its roots jutted out of the muddy bank. The water was too deep to stand, so Reinhardt laid Bennett’s chest over a slickmuddy outcropping and guided his arms through loops formed by the tree’s roots. The two men lay there for a long moment, spent—vomiting from exer- tion and from swallowing water. Now, how to get Bennett up onto dry land? Within a couple of minutes, a deputy from the Limestone County Sheriff’s Office arrived and peered down over the bank. “What do you need?” he called. “Rope,” Reinhardt answered. “Do you have any?” “I don’t.” “Maelie,” Reinhardt said, “give him the ratchet strap.” The deputy came partway down the embankment and lowered the strap to Reinhardt, who used it to fashion a makeshift harness, passing it around Bennett’s chest and fastening it to his belt loop. By now, Bennett was slipping in and out of consciousness. For 10 minutes, the deputy pulled from above while Reinhardt pushed frombelow. But the deputy couldn’t get any footing on the steep, muddy embankment, and Reinhardt, barefoot and in his underwear, had nothing to stand on. He’d been in the water for at least 20 minutes and was in the early stages of hypothermia himself— shivering and going numb in his extremities. At last, a volunteer firefighter showed up with a 20-foot rope. He passed one end down to Reinhardt, who quickly tied it to the ratchet strap and then scrambled up the bank. The three of them, standing on dry ground, pulled, but Bennett kept slipping back down the bank, his limbs and clothing snag- ging in the roots. “Hold on,” Reinhardt said. He climbed back down the bank and slid, again, into the frigid water. He set his right shoulder under Bennett’s butt, dug his hands and feet into the muddy bank, and called out “One, two, three, 112 August/september 2026 reader ’ s digest Drama in Real Life lift!” With all his strength, he pushed up while the firefighter and deputy pulled on the rope. Bennett’s nearly lifeless body rose a few inches. Reinhardt braced himself and called the cadence again. Inch by inch, using every ounce of their energy, the three men hauled Bennett up onto dry ground. He lay there, unable to move, scarcely able to speak. Smith had arrived with the gear, and when she saw her brother shivering in his boxers, covered in mud and exhausted, her mouth dropped open. “Just another day in the life of John Reinhardt,” he quipped. Moments later, the EMS arrived, loaded Bennett onto a stretcher and took him to Athens-Limestone Hospital. His core temperature had dropped into the low 80s, near the threshold of potentially deadly Stage 3 hypother- mia. He later estimated he’d been in the water for nearly 90 minutes. He missed his daughter’s T-ball game, but by that evening, he was resting in his parents’ home with his little girl by his side. He was sore and exhausted, yet blessedly alive. It wouldn’t be until almost bedtime that evening, huddled beside the camp- fire at his family’s campsite, that Rein- hardt would really feel warm again. But for themoment, back at the Easter Ferry Boat Launch, he dried himself off, put his clothes back on—and unloaded the kids’ rods and reels from the truck. They’d come here to fish, after all. readersdigest.com.au 113