A Picnic By the Lake

It’s hard to deny that things happen for a reason.

This is the story of a strange, unexpected chain of events that led to one unbelievable coincidence.

When my kids were much younger, probably around four and seven, we went camping at Paul Lake, just outside Kamloops. It had been a perfect trip: s’mores, swimming, sticky fingers, and mosquito bites. On the last day, since I had to swap to “Dad Days” on Thursdays, I packed up our little Viking travel trailer and decided to have a nice picnic lunch before heading back to town.

Relaxed and carefree, I spread out a plaid blanket, started unpacking lunch, and was mid–peanut butter sandwich when I heard a sound that made my blood freeze, a chilling, blood-curdling scream. It wasn’t just any scream. It was the kind that says, “Someone’s being murdered, I’m being attacked, or my newborn baby is gone.” It came from the treeline beside the picnic area.

I leapt to my feet, shouted, “Matt! Watch your sister!” and took off running. Well, galloping really, considering I was wearing a bikini top and flip-flops.

When I burst through the trees into a clearing, I found three young women in bikinis and cowboy hats, probably in their early twenties. The one in the pink hat was screaming, open-mouthed, face streaked with two perfect black triangles of mascara beneath her sky-blue eyes - wide with pure terror. I will never forget those eyes.

She held out a baby boy, maybe ten months old, in a little blue dinosaur swimsuit. His eyes were closed. His body lifeless.

I took him and held him carefully. He wasn’t blue, which was a good sign. I pressed my cheek to his mouth. No breath. His skin felt clammy and cold. This was obviously not the kind of lakeside experience I had anticipated. But you do what you have to do. Fear and common sense can get in line behind maternal instinct.

I flipped the baby over my forearm, his tiny chin resting in my palm, his legs dangling. His bum pressed against the crook of my elbow. I raised my eyes to meet the young mom’s.

“You need to stop screaming,” I told her quietly. My voice came out calm, the kind of calm you only fake when everything is absolutely not fine. Her mouth snapped shut. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“I just turned my back for one second,” she sobbed, breath hitching. “Just to put lunch out. He must have tried to follow his sister.”

I scanned the scene. A little girl, about three years old, stood in the shallows sucking her thumb. No life jacket. Just wide eyes and guilt written all over her tiny face. A rubber McDonald’s toy bobbed in the water beside her.

“Okay,” I said, trying to muster confidence, “here we go.”

I gave the baby one firm thump on his bare back with the palm of my hand. The sound cracked the silence like a gunshot. I didn't whack him hard enough to hurt him, but it should have been enough to startle him. Then I flipped him over to look at his face.

His blue eyes opened. Blank, unblinking, staring straight at me.

We locked eyes. There was a heavy, breathless silence. Then the mother gasped, “Oh my God! His eyes are open! He’s awake! Oh thank God, thank God!”

The other women encircled her with excited hugs. I handed him back carefully. “We need an ambulance,” I said. Any baby who gets whacked by a stranger and doesn’t cry about it is not okay. Something is wrong." I could feel it.

There was no cell service at Paul Lake, but someone ran for the park ranger to radio in a 911 call. I told the mother, “Don’t let him fall asleep. Keep him awake, pinch him if you have to.”

Half an hour later, the ambulance arrived. The baby was still drowsy but breathing, tucked against his mother’s chest as she jostled him gently to keep him alert. I knew they would check him for secondary drowning, and once he was in that ambulance, I finally let myself exhale.

"Where is your daughter's life jacket?" I asked, worried that in all the panic, the small child might misjudge the drop off I knew was about a meter offshore, having been to that lake countless times.

"Oh, she's good around water. She just plays in the shallow end."

"Watch this," I said, and picking up the McDonald's toy I tossed it about four feet away into the water. " If she tries to get that toy there, she will be in over her head. Kids are safe until they aren't. My son is seven and still wears the lifejacket. It's just safer."

When I made it back to the picnic area, my kids were sitting on the blanket, clutching each other and sucking their thumbs in wide-eyed silence. Honestly, I felt like sucking my thumb too.

The black mascara triangles and that young woman’s terrified blue eyes are burned into my memory to this very day. Not exactly the camping finale I had envisioned. My entire body was shaking with the aftershocks of adrenaline for hours afterwards. I managed to drive home, pulling the trailer - the kids and I silent and shocked.

As everything was unfolding, an older man had come running to help. He was camping nearby, quietly mourning the loss of his adult daughter, an Olympic athlete who had recently drowned while swimming across a lake. He looked shaken, hollow, and oddly at peace, as if he had been waiting for a reason to be there. He agreed that an ambulance was definitely the right call. With children, it is always better to be safe, rather than sorry.

Later that evening, with my kids at their dad’s and a huge glass of red wine in hand, I told my mom what had happened on the tail end of the trip. Oddly enough, she had just sold an armchair on Craigslist, and the buyer, by some strange twist of fate, turned out to be an old Principal colleague of hers. He told her the same story I had just told her minutes earlier. He was the grandfather of that baby boy. The young mother was his daughter.

As for the baby, he was taken to Royal Inland Hospital, where doctors discovered a small hole in his heart, something no one had known was there. They repaired it, and he recovered beautifully.

If that day had not unfolded exactly the way it did — the screaming, the panic, the picnic gone sideways — they might never have discovered a larger, potentially life-threatening medical issue for that child.

And that’s the thing about life: sometimes, the wildest moments, the ones that leave your heart pounding and your sandwich untouched, happen for a very good reason. You just didn't know it at the time.