The Angel of Des Moines
Work, the day, the man, like all which came before. The work tiring and long and hard on the body. The men strong from it, knowing their strength; not a thing displayed or boasted of but rather held in reserve, known too well by each that their pay was exacted only in the measure of their toil; hence that though to be injured was not to stop working – never that – it was to work forevermore belaboured by injury. Plenty enough of that known by the men.
Oglesbee one amongst many that morning, workingmen, and proud of it. Men unnumbered across American miles, across Iowa, or the world entire. Men who built things; whose cause was the transforming by labour of myriad arcane raw materials into the recognisable; who began each day anew and ended wearied, dust-covered, begrimed with the sweat of risk and measure. Men returning home or out to bars or the homes of others to bring to rest bodies at once enervate and wired with exertion by whatever means. Oglesbee, his crew, men, many for whom the end of day was the fulcrum, its enticements, and this, the work, the vehicle to that destination only.
Possessors each of thick workstained jeans and boots inured through tread from what brand or design ever once existed on them. The high-visibility tabard over the vest, the identifier as workingman. The faces, sunbeaten, the straightforwardness in expression. The height, the strength in the arms. The coarseness of speech in accents beyond number not matched by the fluidity, the discipline in action: it all unextraordinary amongst the crews and crews of all-enduring sweat-weathered semi-fluorescent men at work the world over – all, all, but for the moment and the man of its choosing.
They were working on a footbridge across the Des Moines River when they saw the boat go over the dam. They watched first in disinterest, then disbelief, then in dawning horror as the boat was pulled irresistibly nearer and nearer by the draw of water to the edge. The dam was steep, a sheer vertical drop into a raging torrent beneath. The boat was powerless to resist gravity’s ordinance despite the calls, the exhortations evermore gravely intoned from above; the men could only watch as the boat crested the edge and seemed for one moment to hang, completely still, in empty air. The slowness of motion. The in-held breath of the watchers. The awful permanence, once begun, of the fall.
The boat plunged down the steep-sided dam to crash against the lower level of water. The welter, the spray, of infuriate river. The boat upended and quick in sinking, bereft of purpose and thus of shape, form: an object underwater. The man at its helm, Alan Ralph-Neely, cast from it in the impact, losing his life-preserver; the woman, Patti, his wife, retaining hers. The work crew watched from the footbridge as the bodies fought the current, made small by perspective, the boat and the people subsumed in the boil, the pitiless cascade from above creating a cyclone which churned with furious energy, rendering them helpless in the mighty arrangement of water.
Oglesbee, the men, realising now the moment, the call, rarer known than unheralded: the full import of it. The watchers rushing now through an impulse, a human will, its origin in their hearts, to help. With every second more bystanders gathered, the first alarum of sirens on approach, as the crewmen and the onlookers worked to throw out into the raging water all manner of inflatables gathered from its edge. The body of the man inert; the figure of the woman surfacing here, then gone as again and again she was driven under in the river’s violent turnover, fast surrounded by rings and floats of emergency-orange. Soon rapid deployment in practised coordination of one boat of rescuers and another, engines fighting to drive them against the current to the dam. The crewmen and the crowd watching as the boats contested the aggression of the water and met their match, unable to advance; watched too the woman, the shape, the shadow plunging and emerging and plunging again.
None knew what time elapsed: knew only, in the desperation which charged the voices of the rescuers, the crewmen, the shouts, the screams of the bodies aggregating in shared human horror upon the scene, that this was crisis.
That Patti Ralph-Neely could not fight the water forever.
Emergent an idea, the germ of a thought seized upon, shared, entered into enactment. The man hastily behind the controls of the nearby crane, guided by others as close as possible to the edge of the footbridge, the men staring from the crane down to the water with calculating eyes, some compound of the discernment of experts and of prayer. The man in the crane arresting the caterpillar tracks, moving the arm, adjudging. Waiting.
This, then, the call. This the moment. It had become it. Not ever imagined before its arrival – that inherent to it – but vast and incipient, arising from nothing with a profound gulf between the vanished everyday which came before and the immensity of this moment here, now, seizing a person and asking of them with no time, no forewarning: will they meet it.
Oglesbee was wearing the harness. He was wearing the harness and so he stepped forward. To anguish in all faces, he affixed himself in a loop of chains hung from the crane’s arm. One carabiner on a strap fastened high above his head, another strap around his waist, the rest of the chains held tight in one arm, the weight of his whole lower body in the loop. This. Now. No signal needed, so overt his readiness, though he nodded. The controller of the crane raising the arm, lifting the man with infinite care, never so precious a cargo, his body swinging in suspension high out over the water and the woman wreathed in it below.
Lowering, lowering, and the roar of the water over everything. Patti-Neely lost to all sense but to hold her breath when she knew she was going under and to gasp, to choke, to lunge for air as for life when she rearose. The world receding to the cyclical course of water, all vision lost to blindness, all sense abandoned but for a strength felt to be failing moment by moment and a coldness like death spreading inexorably through her. Every cycle, closer. Colder. Limbs powerless against the misrule of water and with the unknowable passage of time, the interminable rotations, the dimming of the light into a great darkness gathering ahead: the end.
She saw water and she saw nothingness, deadened by the effort to remain afloat, driven once more down into death and dark and supreme cold and then through it all impossibly a hand, an arm, a figure, a man, solidity in the chaos, and she who was so lost knew in that moment with every fibre of her being that in that outstretched work-callused hand was life, life, and she reached and reached and he too, trying at first to stay above the water and then damning all to strive with all his might to seize her, the immensity of water crashing everywhere around them, to reach and to seize her and she him, human touch, skin, muscle, and the two to lock together, him with one arm around the chains and the other around her with everything in him, all of his strength, and to shout to her and to himself and to all time as the pull of the crane overcame the water and they lifted, life: ‘You don’t have to worry. I won’t let go. I won’t let go.’
‘River Rescue in Downtown Des Moines’ by Mary Chind, for which she would win the 2010 Breaking News Photography Pulitzer Prize.
Jason Oglesbee saved the life of Patti Ralph-Neely when the boat she owned with her husband, Alan, went over a dam on the Des Moines River on June 20th, 2009. Oglesbee would disclaim any heroism, refusing interviews with national news networks, stating only his sorrow that he could not have saved both lives that day. Interviewed after the event, Ralph-Neely said of him: ‘He just appeared like an angel.’
Jason Oglesbee passed away in 2017.