The Ottawa Awesomes
Chaudière

She attracted a media stir when she declined the gold medal she inadvertently earned as a result and because of her immediate departure from competitive swimming. Having offered no interviews and no explanation probably made the story last longer than it should have, but in the long run it’s meant virtually no record of it anywhere. She even edits here her Wikipedia thumbnail regularly to keep the details to a minimum. There. It’s like it never happened.

Immediately afterwards she went home to Gatineau to go into hiding. Not being seen is something Beatrice has always been good at. Especially in the water.

She still doesn’t know how or why it happened, but she remembers the day. It was the summer of 1985 and she had just turned nine the day before. She and her older brother were playing in the water near the bottom of the Deschênes Rapids in Aylmer. Climbing on the rocks above the old hydro structure, she had slipped into the boiling river. Later, she learned that he’d gone in after her. It took a week to recover his body. Her father never spoke to her again. Not really.

She tried to stay away from the river, but she couldn’t. It literally called to her. Burbling and babbling. Drawing her in. As an adolescent, she started patrolling the Ottawa, the Rideau, the Gatineau, and sometimes even the Madawaska and Mississippi. There were just so many rivers to explore, and far too many dams! She was still quite young when she started rescuing boaters, swimmers, people who’d been swept away, or even those who had gone through the ice (the cold never bothered her anyway). Those who did speak to the media afterwards spoke of being carried to safety by a current or a water spirit, and in some cases even a giant muskie or mermaid. She still collects those stories. These days she prints them off so she can cut them out and add them to her scrapbook.

It was on an evening walk next to the river that she decided to stop hiding.

A 25th Anniversary mini-documentary of the Atlanta Olympics had featured her story as a small curiosity, driving her out of the house. She came out of the river at dusk and found a water-stained paper with a drawing obviously by a child, thanking the “magic water fairy” for rescuing her daddy. She couldn’t even remember which one that was. When she looked at the water, she could have sworn she saw the bright eyes of a tiny sprite staring at her, before it disappeared beneath the surface. Or maybe it was just a frog. Funny looking frog, though.

She thought of her brother again and wiped away a tear. “This is not curse,” she told the river. The next day she reached out to the Ottawa Awesomes, to see if there was some more good she could do by being just a little less invisible.