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The red Volkswagen Passat was almost submerged, just part of the rear window visible above the surface of the frigid Iowa River. That bright, sinking speck was the first thing that caught Steve McGuire's eye as he crossed Iowa City's Park Road bridge at the start of a long early-evening bike ride last December. Then he saw the crowd of agitated onlookers on the riverbank. Someone was in the water -- and once again McGuire was about to risk his life to save a stranger.
"I put my bike down and ran to the river, thinking about what I should do," says McGuire, an art education professor at the University of Iowa. "Then I realized that thinking wasn't going to do any good, so I started swimming -- with my bike helmet still on."
Michelle Kehoe, the 34-year-old mother of two who had skidded into the river after hitting an icy curb that freezing evening, had already slipped below the surface several times. When McGuire reached her, her arms and legs were numbed by hypothermia, and her blue lips trembled in the 24-degree air. McGuire, who had worked as a lifeguard in his teens, grabbed Kehoe's arm. "Don't worry," he told her. "We're both making it to shore." For several interminable minutes, he dragged her through the 12-foot-deep water, their extremities growing heavier and heavier as the icy current pulled at them.
On the riverbank, an ambulance crew, with the help of bystanders, pulled McGuire and Kehoe from the river and wrapped them in blankets. Within minutes, Kehoe was reunited with her sons, Sean, 6, and Seth, 14 months. Just before McGuire went to her rescue, three local men, Josh Shepherd, Mark Petersen, and Cory Rath, swam out to the sinking car to grab the children as she passed them through an open window.
McGuire, whose neoprene cold-weather pants had helped protect him from the worst effects of the frigid water, abandoned his plans for a bike ride and instead headed home just as a light dusting of snow began to fall. But that night, his heart pounding as adrenaline still coursed through his veins, he struggled to sleep -- and with good reason. Saving a drowning person is, at most, a once-in-a-lifetime event. But Michelle Kehoe was the third person Steve McGuire had pulled from the Iowa River.
The first time was during the Great Flood of 1993, when a university student fell into the river while trying to retrieve his hat. McGuire, who had just finished lunch, slid down a gravel embankment and let the fast-moving water carry him to the tree branch where the young man clung, held underwater by the surging current. McGuire reached down, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him to the surface. Then they floated downstream to the safety of the Iowa Avenue bridge.
Ten years later, on a brisk October afternoon, when an elderly fisherman's boat capsized, a panicked neighbor alerted McGuire, whose house stands less than 200 yards from the riverbank. Once again, he jumped in. Reaching the boat, he tried to tug the man toward shore. Realizing that the fisherman's leg was tangled in a nylon rope attached to the boat, McGuire dragged both man and vessel to shore.
Waiting for him was a police officer who had met him by the Iowa Avenue bridge ten years earlier. "McGuire," he said, "I don't want to see you in the water anymore." Now 50, Steve McGuire is an avid long-distance cyclist who has ridden the circumference of Iceland and pedaled from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Iowa City -- twice. His extreme fitness and experience in the outdoors, he says, give him the confidence to jump into the river while others stand by. His serial lifesaving, however, he attributes to mere coincidence. "I'm always by the river," he says, "and just happen to be capable of helping."
Even though he won't admit it, McGuire is no stranger to altruism. He started a group that uses special tandem recumbent bikes to pair an able-bodied rider and a disabled person for long rides (his son Chris, 23, has cerebral palsy). Last year he and a local high school teacher took 42 kids to compete in the Iowa Special Olympics.
McGuire also began campaigning for a safer community: In June, as the Iowa, a tributary of the Mississippi, started to rise, he realized something had to be done. He contacted the city engineer, suggesting that it was time to build a levee around Mosquito Flats, the neighborhood where he lives with his wife, junior high school teacher Lori, 44, Chris, and their other son, Daniel, 24. The engineer agreed, so McGuire and a group of neighbors went to work from 5 a.m. to midnight every day, piling up sandbags as high as eight feet in some places.
It turned out not to be enough. This time the river got the better of Steve McGuire. On June 12, the Iowa burst its banks, brushing aside the makeshift levee and inundating the neighborhood, including the McGuires' house, where the water nearly filled the first floor. The University of Iowa campus was also flooded; the arts buildings, where McGuire teaches, were especially hard-hit: All of them were at least partly underwater. Although McGuire and his family got out with their valuables -- and their lives -- before the river broke through, their house is a total loss. Many Mosquito Flats residents want Iowa City to buy their 136-home neighborhood and turn it into a park. As for McGuire, he hopes to relocate in the same area, just on higher ground.
"You can't change the river," says the man who has gone up against it four times now. "You have to accept that it's always present."
• Do More
Send a donation: American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013, or 2008 Iowa Disaster Fund, P.O. Box 310239, Des Moines, Iowa 50331-0239.
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