FINDING COURAGE UNDER FIRE
It was a split-second moment of courage. Mid-afternoon Sunday, a pickup truck is passing through Goldstream Park when one of its wheels suddenly comes loose. The wheel sails across the Trans-Canada, over a concrete barrier and straight toward a family walking down the side of the road.
That’s when the 36-year-old mother does something incredible. She deliberately puts herself in the tire’s path and takes its impact to protect her husband and their young child, whom he was carrying. The decision lands her in hospital.
“It sounds like it was just a freak accident,” says West Shore RCMP Sgt. Martin Beardsmore. “It just happened to be in a place where there were people on the side of the road.”
Here’s the good news: “She’s fine.”
Or, at least, fine relative to what could have been. The woman, a Victoria-area resident, was released from hospital with soreness and bruising, but no serious injuries.
“She’s in terrifically good spirits about it,” said Beardsmore, who spoke with the woman Monday. In fact, she seemed more concerned about the traumatized truck driver than about herself. “She’s clearly got a good mindset about the whole incident.”
She’s also — in an unfortunate display of sound judgment — reluctant to speak about the incident with me.
It would be great to know what was going through her mind as the wheel came flying toward the ones she loves. Was it maternal instinct that caused her to sacrifice herself? Would she have done so to save a friend? A stranger? An enemy?
And what would you have done?
This is one of those questions that dances at the back of our heads. We might have Walter Mitty dreams about acting heroically in that moment of crisis, but few of us really know how we would act (though some of us suspect we would just freeze like ice cream).
“I don’t think we know the answer to that,” says Clemson University psychology professor Cynthia Pury, on the phone from South Carolina on Monday. Although she has done extensive research into the nature of courage, predicting response is a tricky business. It’s not as though researchers conduct studies in which they hurl large objects across a highway to see how people react.
The University of B.C.’s Stanley Jack Rachman, author of the book Fear and Courage, wrote that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the willingness to act despite being afraid. It’s a matter of overwhelming fear with more noble sentiment.
Pury adds a wrinkle to that: Courage involves taking a “worthwhile risk.”
She uses the example of an author who recently ran into a burning building to retrieve the laptop computer that held his novel. Was that brave or just foolhardy?
Likewise, she tells of a California couple who braked to a halt after their child hurled a beloved stuffy out the car window and over a cliff.
Dad went to retrieve it, but got stuck. Ditto mom. They had to be pulled out by helicopter. Not sure the couple’s decisions would pass a risk/reward analysis.
On the flip side, there are those who would sacrifice others if the alternative is putting themselves in jeopardy.
What influences how we’ll react? It helps to believe in what you’re doing.
Pury points to Wesley Autry, who in 2007 gained fame by throwing himself off a New York subway platform to help a man who had fallen onto the tracks after a seizure. Autry lay on top of the man in a drainage trench, holding him down as a train passed over them.
Autry later said his risk was calculated, that even in the splitsecond he had to make up his mind, he formulated what he thought was a workable plan.
There was no doubt about the Goldstream Park mom’s courage, Pury says. “Risking physical harm to yourself to save your family would, in almost every culture, be considered worthwhile.”
Maybe the woman had to overcome her own fear, or maybe her only fear was for the safety of the ones she loved.
In any case, her actions were remarkable — leaving the rest of us wondering which way we would have jumped in that heartbeat.
The one certainty was voiced by Pury: “I’m really glad that she’s OK.”