Woman wants 413 crew to know they did more than they realize
Terry Avery will mark her son’s 41st birthday June 11 like she always has: as a blessing. She wants 413 (Transport and Rescue) Squadron personnel to know what their actions meant June 11, 1985 – and continue to mean today.
“The people that saved Clint (her baby) and me saved three others,” Avery says: Clint, at age 20, himself saved three strangers from drowning in a Prince Edward Island beach riptide.
‘We’re going to take care of you’
“I was 30 years old, seven months pregnant, and not very well – I was ill,” Avery says from her Charlottetown home. From the time it took her to go from a doctor’s appointment to the city hospital – “maybe an hour,” expecting two months’ bedrest, she was violently ill, her baby was in distress and “I was running out of time.”
Hospital staff contemplated a Caesarean, but there was no pediatric ventilator. They told Avery they would deliver the baby, make it as comfortable as possible, but it would die very shortly. Avery herself wasn’t in any better shape: “I knew I was dying.
“We’re Catholic, and I couldn’t do it. We’d tried for years to have a child, and we thought this was our only shot to have a baby. I remember feeling how blessed I was to be pregnant.”
With her husband, Kent, and her own doctor’s arrival, their doctor suggested a call to 413 Squadron, then based in Summerside, and a potential medevac to Halifax. Avery remembers lying on a stretcher outside the Charlottetown hospital after midnight, with the helicopter, its double rotors spinning, coming down nearby.
“One of the military fellows on it said, ‘we’re going to take care of you,’” she says.
The helicopter headed straight to Windsor Park, just blocks from the hospital in Halifax. Avery’s blood pressure was so bad, hospital staff met her with lights off and head lamps on, for fear too much stimulation would cause her to have a stroke. Her kidneys were shutting down. They asked her if she wanted a priest. They couldn’t risk operating to deliver the baby, so they induced her. Within 20 fast minutes, baby Clint was born, umbilical cord knotted – and also wrapped around his neck. He was three pounds, 15 ounces and 19 inches long; with multiple health issues of his own.
Avery spent three more days in the delivery room – too sick to move even elsewhere in the hospital. She and Clint stayed in Halifax hospital for two months before they were able to return to Charlottetown. They spent a few more days in hospital here before finally being able to go home.
“They said swimming was the best thing Clint could do: we lived 150 feet from the Charlottetown Y, and he was two years old, swimming four times a week, until he was 16.”
Clint does a brave, ‘hard thing’
July 1, 2005, Clint, 20, and two friends were at Blooming Point Beach. They heard calls for help and saw three people struggling in a rip current: a mother, her 14-year-old daughter and the daughter’s young friend. All three young men started swimming out: Clint, by far the strongest, saw his friends taking on water and told them to go back to shore and get help.
“Clint stayed out there for 40 minutes, and kept those three people afloat,” Avery says. “He kept them up – from drowning.”
The local fire department arrived, and Paul Zakem grabbed a boogie board and swam it out to Clint and the women. Once the trio was in safe hands – people on the beach had made a human chain out into the water to help reach them, Clint swam himself to shore.
“He collapsed on the beach, then called me and said, ‘I’m OK,’” Avery says.
Clint still doesn’t talk much about what he did that Canada Day. Avery says it was surreal.
“He was scratched all over; he said all he did was pray that whole time. He knew he had to stay. Really, sending his two friends back to shore saved them, too. It was a hard thing. He talked to the girl’s father the next day, but we never had their names. Later, he got a tattoo of choppy water, two hands clasped in prayer holding a rosary.”
Avery says she found out Clint had saved a friend from drowning the year before, but they didn’t tell anyone for fear their parents wouldn’t let them go back to the beach.
June 21, 2007, Clint, Zakem, Chris MacLean and Stephen Mallett were awarded the Medal of Bravery from that beach rescue effort. They were invested at Rideau Hall by then-Governor-General Michaëlle Jean June 19, 2009. Avery and her husband realized, watching the posthumous presentations of other medals to family of recipients, how lucky they were their son was alive to receive his.
‘They saved three others they don’t even know about’
Today, at 41, Clint is 6’2” and 200 pounds; working in a store that sells gaming and collectible items on the shelves and online. Avery says that beach rescue 20 years ago changed Clint, taking a lot out of him, but his friends and people he meets all agree, “he would do anything, for anyone. You’d never meet a nicer guy.” He lives with his parents, who say his birthday is still a big deal for the whole family.
“There was a reason I went to the hospital when I was pregnant 40 years ago. If Clint hadn’t have come early, there would have been no swimming. He has no fear of the water. The people that saved me and Clint? They saved three others they don’t even know about.”
