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quick and decisive thinking obliterated any such time wasting. And the authority he employed in explaining why Cesar must be the one, immediately brought him on board this team effort Coincidence #5: One of the rope pullers, Curtis Carpenter a CPR- certified x-ray tech, arrived in time to be 2nd on the rope, after Sandy, pulling me up. Curtis knew exactly what to do. He quickly found and pulled Mr. Gower into the perfect swale in the ground for what he was about to do. He un- cinched and removed the rope (which then was dropped to Cesar, who was brought up lickety-split). Curtis then kneeled next to Mr. Gower's right side, saw that he was blue and unresponsive, felt for his pulse, found none, and immediately began CPR chest compressions. His adrenalin was flowing, and he was pumped to bring this dude back to life. He kept at it for, he says, at least a hundred compressions. (That might have been the adrenalin talking. Jacque says it was more like 40.) After some time the compressions brought up water, after which Curtis tells me I regained a pulse and started breathing, but was unconscious. Curtis then put Mr. Gower in the recovery position. He was as elated as he has ever been. Without someone CPR-certified and having enough stamina to perform and stay with the task until success was achieved, an amateur might have botched the job, and not been able to bring me back to breathing in time. The other part of Coincidence #5 is that in heading west on 26th Street that day, the nagging side of Curtis had been reminding him for a few days that he needed to stop on the way home to take care of an errand. He almost put off that errand again. But he wanted to get that monkey off his back, so he said, "OK, OK already!! I'll do it NOW,"just as Nike says! Running that errand put him at THE corner at the EXACT TIME he was needed there. Without that errand, he would have reached that corner earlier, would have turned and continued south on 74th before the fall. Roxy Larabe was the 3rd car on the scene. She saw that something was amiss...probably a dog in the canal, she thought. Born and bred in Florida, she thought, "I can go in that ditch! Ditches don't scare me." She jumped from her car, leaving it in 74th Avenue's northbound lane, ran to the edge and looked in. When she saw a MAN face down in the water, 15' down, she was taken aback. "Wow! I can't do THAT!!" She felt totally helpless. But when Jacque stopped Cesar, and he brought his rope over, Roxy and others saw that the pulling end was badly tangled. While Cesar and Sandy were working out WHO was going to go down in the rope's loop, she and others set to untangling the opposite end. In no time it was straight, and she was among those on the line lowering Cesar down. In a flash he was out of the loop, had Dick in it and then was pushing Dick's rear end up the embankment as Sandy et al were pulling like crazy. Once up, Roxy saw Curtis take over, laying him flat and performing 8