An 11-year-old Greenfield, Ind., girl survived her trip to Lakeview Beach in Beverly Shores over the weekend because a Valparaiso man very nearly didn’t.

Shortly before 1 p.m. Sunday, the girl and her father were playing near shore when a rip current began pulling them into deeper water. Brendan Grube, 42, saw the pair struggling, swam to them, and—at her father’s fervent request—took the girl under his wing. Then, as his own family watched in horror from the beach, Grube himself with the girl in tow was slipstreamed into the lake by the rip. Grube only just managed to keep the girl afloat, came perilously close to drowning himself, and certainly would have had not his brother, Kris, commandeered a boogie board and at some risk to himself rescued both Grube and the girl.

That’s the story, boiled down. Grube’s heroics don’t need a great deal of elaboration. Few men ever wake of a morning, look themselves in the mirror, and know that they’ve hazarded absolutely everything on an inside straight and won, know too that someone else is alive today and not dead because they went all in. Yet the story, not without a moral or two, is worth telling in full. It begins on the previous Saturday night.

That’s when the National Weather Service (NWS), forecasting strong north winds, issued a rip-current advisory, in effect through 7 p.m. Sunday, for Indiana’s Lake Michigan shoreline.

Rip currents are a deadly but not very complicated phenomenon. In this part of the world they’re created when masses of waves, pushed against a shoreline by north winds, become trapped between the beach and a sandbar. There they remain, a roiling cauldron of potential energy, until their sheer weight crashes a narrow channel into the sandbar, through which the water rushes back into the lake like a river, sweeping anything and anyone in the current along with it.

Even the strongest swimmers are unable to paddle against a rip current. It’s too strong and too fast and will quickly exhaust an Olympian. Instead, a person’s best bet is to swim parallel to the beach until safely out of the rip’s grip, then head back to shore.

NWS does not technically forecast rip currents. Its advisory merely warns, under certain conditions, of an increased risk of them. So when the only two life-guarded beaches in Porter County—West Beach at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the beach at Indiana Dunes State Park (IDSP)—opened for business on Sunday, no obvious rip currents had actually formed.

By midday, however, rips at both West Beach and the IDSP beach had been observed by the guards, who promptly closed their respective beaches to swimming—on account of “water conditions” is how National Lakeshore spokesperson Lynda Lancaster put it—and duly reported that they’d done so to the Dorothy Buell Memorial Visitor Center.

At that point, the National Park Service’s manager at the Visitor Center collected all of the available seasonal employees at the National Lakeshore—around 30 of them—and divided them in half, instructing one contingent to begin at Porter Beach and move east, the other at Central Beach and move west, and inform all visitors to those unguarded beaches that, with rip currents making swimming dangerous, they were best advised to get out and stay out of the water, Lancaster told the Chesterton Tribune.

(Lancaster noted that the National Park Service does not actually close the unguarded beaches at any time, whatever the water conditions—rip currents, elevated E. coli levels, or shelf ice—happen to be. But, beginning last year—following two drownings in 2008 apparently caused by rip currents at the unguarded Porter and Kemil beaches—the National Park Service has tasked employees to warn visitors when water conditions could put swimmers at risk. Visitors are free to heed that warning or not.)

As events proved, the water conditions around noon on Sunday were indeed putting swimmers at risk. At both Porter and Kemil beaches, the seasonals made contact with “several” folks who had run afoul of the rips, Lancaster said, including a trained life guard and some U.S. Marines. But they had managed to “self-rescue” and agreed with the seasonals that returning to the water any more on Sunday would probably not be a good idea.

Gradually, the two contingents of seasonals, the one eastbound, the other westbound, were converging on Lakeview Beach, roughly halfway between their starting points at Porter and Central beaches.

Brendan Grube needed no one to tell him that swimming would be a bad idea. As it happens, Grube is something of celebrity, at least to the tiny sliver of Northwest Indiana residents who know him to be one of the finest birders in the state. Possessed of a brilliant eye for detail and an encyclopedic knowledge of field marks, Grube is also—more to the point—a lake-watch specialist and as such is well acquainted with the vagaries of Lake Michigan. Grube’s wife, Jennie, is familiar with them too. She sails, and on their arrival at Lakeview Beach on Sunday they both noticed something peculiar about the water.

“The waves weren’t breaking in front of us,” Jennie said, indicating that the water was not rolling in but, on the contrary, gushing out, in what was very likely a rip current.

So the word was spread to the members of their party: if you go into the water, stay at ankle-depth.

At some point, shortly before 1 p.m., Grube noticed a man and a girl “not very far out,” probably at a depth “where they could stand up,” he said. But “they looked like they were having trouble. I yelled, the man yelled back, and I dove into a wave to get there. The girl was in trouble.”

“I got to her,” Grub continued. “I was going to swim her in. It was no big deal to me. But I couldn’t hold her up. She had to weigh 100 pounds. And then we began drifting out. It was pretty traumatic. I kept looking for a reaction from people on the shore. My family knew I was out there.”

Jennie did know. “When Brendan dove in, my first reaction was ‘No, don’t do it,’” she said. “I saw heads bobbing around and I was sure they were in trouble. I grabbed my cell to call 911. It had worked earlier in the day but the signal was garbled. This time I couldn’t get through. I ran up to the picnic area by the parking lot and tried there. When I finally did get through, 911 said they had no Beverly Shores in their area. I saw a couple and I begged them to help. The gentleman was able to get through on his phone. Brendan was being swept out further and further. I told 911 they needed to send a boat. There was no way we could reach them. It was genuinely terrifying.”

Terrifying for Grube, to be sure. “I’m out there floating around,” he said. “And at this point I’m exhausted. I’m 42. I’m not in the best of shape. I told the girl a couple of times I had to let her go. She was yelling ‘Please don’t let me go.’ I think she was going into shock. By this time we’re 100 yards out. I was being pulled, and all my effort was put into staying afloat.”

Then Grube saw “somebody coming out on a boogie board”: his brother, Kris, who’d grabbed the board from a bystander. “He almost didn’t make it. He got knocked off by a big wave and he had to recover it. But he made it out with the board. I remember it said ‘Not a Flotation Device.’ But it was enough so I didn’t have to hold the girl up anymore.”

By the time they made shore, Grube said, “I couldn’t even stand up. I had to crawl out. The girl probably took in a lot of water. I’d swallowed some.”

Also at the scene by this point, Lancaster said: a National Park Service interpretive ranger, Beverly Shores firefighters, and—though unknown when exactly it arrived—a U.S. Coast Guard boat.

Grube’s suspicion: “I think they had a hard time deciding who was in trouble and who wasn’t.”

Grube may be right. Not everything about the sequence of events which led to the first-responders’ arrival at the scene is clear.

One thing is, though: “If you call 911 from the park, depending on where your phone is, it will go to the 911 in that phone’s area code,” Lancaster said. “My 407 cell would go to the Orlando, Fla., 911.”

That’s why visitors to the National Lakeshore, in the event of an emergency, must call the (800) PARK-TIPS line. Lancaster said that this number is posted on signage throughout the National Lakeshore.

Whether visitors grasp the significance of that signage—whether, not to put too fine a point on it, that signage emphasizes strongly enough that a call to the well-known 911 is likely to be useless in the park—is an open question.

Who, in the end, got the ambulance to the scene, is another question. Lancaster said that it was the National Park Service interpretive ranger, who contacted his dispatcher via radio.

But to which scene, on the other hand, was that ambulance initially dispatched? Because, it turns out, two other people, at roughly the same time, were reported to be struggling in a different rip current off Beverly Shores.

“EMS was helping the folks there,” Lancaster said—where is “there”?—“so the ranger started going further west where two more people in the water were having trouble.”

Did the ranger chance upon Grube at his first stop along the beach? Or did he do so at his second stop?

Probably the former. “Part of the confusion with the EMS response,” Jennie said, “is that they were also responding to an incident at Kemil Beach,” which is west of Lakeview Beach.

In any event, the ranger by this time thought it prudent to summon a USCG boat. “Then the folks managed to get themselves out of the water,” Lancaster said—which folks? Grube and the girl or the other struggling pair?—“and the Coast Guard boat was disregarded.”

But the USCG evidently dispatched a boat anyway. At least Grube saw an orange Zodiac off shore sometime after his rescue.

Also summoned to the scene—at 12:58 p.m.—was the Porter Fire Department’s Dive/Rescue Team, which—only four minutes later—was similarly disregarded, Fire Chief Lewis Craig told the Tribune. Under whose direction the PFD was disregarded is unknown. Nevertheless, Assistant Fire Chief Jay Craig made it to the scene—one of the scenes—anyway.

On one issue Lancaster was adamant. At one of the two scenes—again, which one specifically is unknown—a woman on the beach was urging EMS first-responders to enter the water themselves in a rescue attempt. “EMS and National Park Service rangers are trained not to get in the water,” Lancaster said. “They’re trained not to create another victim.”

Water rescues, Lancaster added, are left to USCG or Department of Natural Resources personnel who have both the training and the craft for them.

Jennie has her own ideas about water safety at the National Lakeshore. “There’s no flag system to warn of rip currents. There’s no flotation device—like a life buoy—permanently available on the beach. There’s no blue-light emergency phone for direct contact to the Beverly Shores Fire Department. I felt really helpless. There’s no cell phone coverage and no resources to call for help.”

Two families, almost two victims. “The little girl’s grandmother was there,” Jennie said. “They were all very humble and grateful. Some of us were angry and happy and scared. Both Brendan and the little girl were administered oxygen and released.”

Grube, for his part, doesn’t feel much like a hero. “I’m getting over it,” he said on Tuesday. “Being there and putting myself through that.”

“I’m putting it behind me,” he said simply.

Posted 6/11/2010