Two Teens and a Golden Retriever Pulled a Boy From an Icy Pond. Then the Ice Cracked Under Them
Two Teens and a Golden Retriever Pulled a Boy From an Icy Pond. Then the Ice Cracked Under Them. Here is what happened next.
It was a bitter January afternoon at a town pond north of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seven-year-old Owen Brandt chased his golden retriever, Biscuit, across the ice toward the inlet, right past a sign reading THIN ICE. KEEP OFF. The ice cracked and Owen plunged into the black water.
Two sixteen-year-old hockey players, Nate Kowalski and Diego Ruiz, dropped flat on their stomachs and formed a human chain, Diego gripping Nate’s skates while Nate reached out a hockey stick. Owen grabbed it, but his soaked mittens slipped off and he went under.
Then Biscuit raced back, bit the hood of Owen’s snowsuit and pulled with all four legs until the boys could grab the little boy’s arms and drag him out. Everyone cheered.
Then the ice split beneath Nate’s chest. Cracks shot out between his hands. “Guys,” he whispered. “Don’t move.”
The Ice Gives Way
Nobody moved. For three long seconds, the only sounds were Owen’s sobbing and the wind.
Then the ice under Nate dropped.
He went in up to his shoulders. The cold hit him so hard that the air left his lungs in one shout. Diego, still behind him, was dragged forward a foot by Nate’s weight before he let go of his ankles, exactly the way Nate had screamed at him to do years ago in a joking practice drill: if one of us goes in, the other one does not follow.
“Get Owen to the shore!” Nate gasped. “Go! GO!”
Diego hesitated. Then he wrapped the shaking seven-year-old against his chest, rolled onto his back, and pushed with his skates, sliding them both away across the ice toward the people on the shore. Biscuit followed, belly down.
Nate was alone in the water.
The Picks
He had about a minute before his hands would stop working.
His grandfather, Stan Kowalski, had told him this a hundred times. You have one minute to control your breathing. Ten minutes of useful movement. An hour before you lose consciousness. Do not panic in the first minute.
Nate forced himself to breathe. In. Out. In.
Then he reached under his hockey jersey and pulled out the thing he had worn around his neck at every skate since he was eleven years old: a pair of orange-handled ice picks on a cord, the kind ice fishermen carry. His friends had teased him about them for years. His grandfather had given them to him on his eleventh birthday and made him promise to wear them every time he stepped onto a frozen pond.
Nate jammed one pick into the ice. Then the other. He kicked his legs out behind him, flat, like he was swimming. He pulled. The ice broke. He moved forward and jammed them in again. Pulled. Kicked.
On the fourth try, the ice held. He slid his chest up onto it, then his waist, then his legs, and rolled away from the hole, exactly the way his grandfather had shown him on the living room carpet, over and over, when he was a little boy.
On the shore, Kenzie was still filming. When Nate rolled clear of the hole, the crowd screamed so loudly that the fire crew arriving at the edge of the parking lot started running.
Sixty Years Earlier
The firefighters wrapped all three boys in thermal blankets and rushed them to the hospital. Owen was treated for hypothermia and released the next morning. Nate spent one night for observation. Biscuit got a steak.
The story might have ended there. But two days later, Owen’s grandmother, Ruth Brandt, saw Kenzie’s video on the local news. She called the station and asked for the name of the hockey player with the orange ice picks.
When they told her, she started crying.
In February of 1966, on that very same pond, a twelve-year-old boy named Stan Kowalski fell through the ice near the inlet chasing a hockey puck. A fourteen-year-old girl who was skating nearby lay down flat on the ice, stretched out her scarf, and pulled him out. Her name was Ruth.
Ruth Brandt.
Stan had never forgotten. He spent the rest of his life teaching every kid he knew about ice safety. He bought his grandson the picks. And Ruth’s own grandson was the little boy Stan’s grandson pulled out of the water, sixty years later, on the same patch of ice.
A New Sign
Stan Kowalski passed away the following summer. At his funeral, the whole Brandt family sat in the second row.
That fall, the town installed a new sign by the inlet, and a rescue station with a throw rope, a long pole, and a box of orange-handled ice picks that anyone can borrow.
The sign reads: THIN ICE. KEEP OFF. And underneath, in smaller letters: In memory of Stan Kowalski, who never let a kid skate unprepared.
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