“We all work together,” said Deer Isle Memorial Ambulance Corps’s (MAC) Service Chief Wilda Eaton, of the way islanders join forces to help when someone is hurt.
“Because we’re an island, we have definite boundaries like other people don’t,” added Susan Oliver, of Stonington,. “If you live in Blue Hill, you have all these surrounding towns. You know people in one [town], but not another. Everybody on an island is like family; you take care of them.”
Fishermen, members of the ambulance crew and fire department, and other Deer Isle residents who just wanted to help that family member in need gathered on June 4th, almost as if each wore a pager, responding to a 911 call for help at 7 a.m. on a cold, wet Monday.
Charles Nevells, 60, of Stonington, had come down to Stonington Lobster Co-op #1 to check his skiff and bail it out. Co-op manager Stephen Robbins III just happened to be in the dooryard with dockworkers Richard Nevells, Sr. (Richie) and Jr. (Poochie) as Charlie Nevells headed down the steep ramp. The tide was out.
A couple of minutes later, fisherman Peter Collins called Robbins from the boat float, saying Charlie was unconscious and to call 911. Poochie Nevells, who said he is related to the victim “in some way,” dialed 911 while Robbins raced down the ramp. It appeared as if Nevells had had a heart attack.
“Charlie was face down with his rear end sticking straight up in the air,” Robbins said. “He was unconscious. We couldn’t find a pulse. He was turning blue.”
Fortunately for Nevells, both Collins and Robbins had been trained in CPR, and they applied their training. “For a good period of time,” Robbins recalled, “I thought he wasn’t going to make it.”
By then, in addition to fishermen making their morning trip to the co-op, others who’d heard the 911 call go out began showing up to help. Fisherman Kenneth Dunham pulled into the yard to lend a hand. Collins, who is on the ambulance crew, acting as a first responder, asked him to get one of the island’s three Automatic External Defibulators (AED) at Boyce’s Motel.
Ambulance corps member and EMT Tim Kinchla, who’d heard the 911 call on his pager, also showed up to help. Collins asked Kinchla to go to his truck and bring him his bag with a tank of oxygen and a non-re-breather mask, which Kinchla did, climbing into the skiff and applied the mask to Nevells. By the time he returned, Kinchla said that the patient’s color had begun to lighten up and he wasn’t as blue. As soon as Nevells got the oxygen and non-re-breathing mask on, Kinchla said, “His color improved greatly.”
At this point, chief Eaton arrived in her car, also acting as a first responder with blanket in hand. Collins, Kinchla, and Robbins slid the blanket under Nevells, wrapping the flaps around him to keep him warm.
Someone suggested moving the boat to shore to facilitate removing Nevells. Kinchla paddled the boat in, and by the time fishermen pulled it up on the rocky shore, the ambulance arrived. One of the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT)’s handed Kinchla a backboard.
“This is when Mike Shepard was wonderful,” Kinchla said. Because Nevells appeared “somewhat agitated,” Kinchla had asked that fisherman Michael Shepard, who lives close to the co-op, come to help calm him.
At the Shepard house, the phone rang. Shepard said handyman Bobby Powers, who has a scanner he keeps on all the time, was calling to relay the message. Shepard’s wife, Susan, remembered her husband saying, “Now, what can I possibly do? There’s probably a crowd there already,” but put his shoes on and drove to the scene where he found Nevells moaning and appearing as if he was having a heart attack.
Shepard recalled, “Stevie Three (Robbins) was in an outboard, bent down and trying to assist the one in need, He said to me, `Could you jump aboard and try to comfort him?’ He [Nevells] was making a lot of uncomfortable noises. There was a lot of pain inside him, so I lay down on the floor of the boat and put my arms around him. I told him all the fishermen were there and they were all wanting to help him.” He said, “I’m a minister, so I said, `Not only are the fishermen concerned about you, but the Good Lord is also watching down upon you.’ And that seemed to ease him. As I held him, in a few moments I could feel the stress leaving him.”
Kinchla said Nevells’s daughter, Laurie Ray, was in the water by the boat, “Trying to ease his tension, too.” He said, “She may have been equally as successful as Mike was.”
The ambulance crew on duty plus Kinchla, Collins and Eaton, seven ambulance crew members in all, and between 15 and 20 fishermen and off-duty volunteer firemen either helped or were standing around, willing to help with removing Nevells from the boat to the backboard and carrying him to the ambulance.
“It’s a terrible place to do an extrication,” Kinchla said. “They had to hoist him up over the concrete [retainer] wall.” But, he said, “There were so many people carrying him.”
Nevells recovered fully, and a few days later, according to a family member, looked as if nothing had happened. (Nevells declined an interview, saying that he didn’t want to be made a fuss over.)
It wasn’t a heart attack after all. Nevells had suffered an acute asthma attack. The cold, damp air that morning made his throat contract, and he couldn’t breathe.
Afterwards, Shepard said: “The one thing that really stuck out: Fishermen have a sense of being independent, and have a way of being separate from each other. But when something happens to someone, then you see all the fishermen unite. There must have been 15 or 20 there that morning. They was all there just to see what they could do to help. They all wanted to carry the stretcher up over the beach.” He observed, “When somebody is in trouble, they just seem to come out of the woodwork, and I don’t know where they all come from, but there was plenty of them there. There’ll be one call, and everybody seems to hear that call. They drop whatever they’re doing and come to the rescue.” As the ambulance corps’ Eaton said of islanders when someone is hurt, “It’s everybody pulling together.”