Vox Meditantis

What’s the most “I can’t believe I survived that” story from your younger years?

You ask what’s my most “I can’t believe I survived that” story, and my mind goes straight to the winter of 1947, when I was nine years old and nearly drowned in the Delaware River. It’s the sort of story that still wakes me up some nights, even after all these decades, even after surviving Vietnam and a heart attack and the slow decline of this city I’ve never managed to leave.

That winter was brutal – colder than anything we’d seen in years. The Delaware had frozen over in patches, great sheets of grey ice that looked solid as pavement but were treacherous as sin. My mother had told me a dozen times to stay away from the riverfront, but I was nine, and the river was everything to us boys back then. It was where the city lived and breathed, where my father worked at the Naval Shipyard building landing craft for a war that had ended two years before but still kept New Corinth humming with purpose.

The Dare

It started, as these things do, with Tony Benedetto daring me. Tony lived three houses down from us in what folks now call the historic district but back then was just our neighbourhood – row houses pressed together near Minerva Creek, close enough to the shipyards that we could hear the riveting guns and smell the paint and metal. His father worked the docks as a stevedore, part of that wave of Italian families who’d settled near the river and made Little Italy what it was. Tony was tough in the way that dockworkers’ sons were tough, and when he said I was too scared to walk out onto the ice near the old freight yards, I couldn’t back down.

The woman who wrote about the forty-three-dollar lavender oil – Barbara, I think – she’d understand this. Not the recklessness, exactly, but that feeling of wanting to prove you’re worth something expensive, worth noticing. For me at nine, that meant being brave enough to follow Tony Benedetto onto the frozen Delaware on a January afternoon whilst our mothers thought we were sledding up on the western hills.

The Crossing

We went down past the Pennsylvania Railroad depot, through the rail yards where freight cars sat like sleeping giants, and out to where the industrial corridor met the river. The ice looked thick near the shore – maybe six inches, solid grey-white with snow blown across it in ripples. Tony went first, testing each step, and I followed because that’s what you did. You followed.

I remember the sound more than anything else. That creaking groan the ice makes when it’s bearing weight it shouldn’t, like the river itself was complaining. We were maybe twenty feet from shore when I heard it change pitch – a sharper crack, like a rifle shot. Tony turned to shout something, and then the world just opened up beneath me.

The cold was instantaneous and total. Not cold like winter air or even like snow – cold like a physical blow, like being hit in the chest with a hammer made of ice. I went under immediately, the current catching me, pulling me downstream beneath the ice shelf. I remember seeing the grey underside of the frozen surface above me, shot through with bubbles and weak winter light, and thinking with perfect clarity: I’m going to die here. I’m going to die in the Delaware, and my mother will never forgive me.

The Rescue

What saved me was pure luck and the quick thinking of a man whose name I never learnt. He was a coloured man, working the loading docks near the DuPont facility that still operated then, producing chemicals in that massive complex that had expanded so dramatically during the war. He must have seen us boys out on the ice, must have watched us with the concerned focus adults pay to children doing something dangerous and stupid.

When I went through, he ran. Ran along the shore to where the current would carry me, found a gap in the ice where the river ran faster, and when I surfaced – gasping, already half-frozen, my coat heavy as stone – he lay flat on his belly on the ice and reached out with a loading hook, the kind they used for bales and crates. I grabbed it more by instinct than thought, and he pulled. God, he pulled. Dragged me up onto the ice and then onto the muddy frozen shore, where I lay shaking so hard my teeth rattled.

He wrapped me in his own coat – I remember it was wool, rough and warm and smelling of tobacco – and walked me up to Market Street to find my mother. She was shopping, carrying bags from the grocer, living in that brief window after the war when New Corinth was still prosperous, still Delaware’s second-largest city, before everything started its long slide.

What Remains

I never saw that man again. In the chaos that followed – my mother’s tears, the doctor checking me for hypothermia, my father’s silent fury that spoke louder than any yelling – I never even got his name. This was 1947, three years after the war, in a city where the Riverside district had been home to New Corinth’s Negro community for half a century, where people had built churches and schools and businesses despite discrimination that was as real as the ice I’d fallen through. That man saved my life, and I never thanked him properly.

Harold Mitchell wrote about walking out of the Iron Works for the last time in 1978, about what it means to walk away from something. But I think just as often about what it means to reach out – to lie down on dangerous ice and extend your hand to pull someone from drowning. That unnamed man did that for a white kid who’d been stupid enough to risk the Delaware in January, and he did it without hesitation, without calculation.

I’m eighty-seven now. I’ve watched this city go through more transformations than I can count – the prosperity of my childhood, the slow decline that began in the fifties, the civil unrest of ’68, the crack epidemic, Market Street emptying out until it was nothing but pawnshops and ghosts. I’ve outlived two wives, buried friends, seen my children move away to suburbs I don’t recognise. But I still live here, in a flat near Minerva Creek, within sight of that river that nearly killed me.

The young woman who wrote about not caring whether she wears Crocs to buy brussels sprouts – she said New Corinth is real, that people here show up for each other. I’ve spent my whole life learning what that means. Sometimes it means big gestures, dramatic exits or entrances. Sometimes it’s just a man lying down on ice to save a stupid boy who should have known better.

The Delaware flows past my window every day. Navigable depth of thirty-five to forty feet, they say – deep enough for ocean-going vessels, deep enough to swallow a nine-year-old and not even pause. I watch it now and think about survival, about the cold, about anonymous hands reaching into dark water. I think about a city that’s survived its own near-drownings, over and over, pulled back from the edge by people whose names we often don’t remember.

I can’t believe I survived that day. But more than that, I can’t believe how lucky I was – lucky that someone was watching, someone cared, someone reached. That’s the real miracle, isn’t it? Not the survival, but the reaching.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.