The Esquimalt Celebration of Lights takes place this Sunday.
As Christmas parades go, it’s more Mayberry than Macy’s, has a comfy, small-town feel to it.
It starts near the base at 5, goes east on Esquimalt Road and reaches the Archie Browning Centre in time for Christmas carols and hot chocolate at 5:30.
“Cosy” is the word parade co-ordinator Kim Vis uses to describe the vibe. Vis took on the volunteer role a decade ago — 35 years after she “died”.
“The Miracle Child” the newspapers called her back then, after she was coaxed back to life. Her story went coast to coast, even got told in Reader’s Digest.
It happened in 1979, when she was a little girl. “Kimberly Vis, 3 1/2, was by all accounts dead on Feb. 7 when a neighbour plucked her from beneath the ice of a ditch into which she had fallen near her Port Alberni home,” read a Daily 91原创 story that spring. “She had spent, by that time, at least 15 minutes beneath the water.”
It might have been closer to 30 minutes than 15. And it was a log-burling pond in a vacant lot, not a ditch. But yes, it really did seem incredible that she survived.
Vis and a friend of similar age were playing near their homes in rural Beaver Creek when they crawled under the fence surrounding the pond and ventured onto the ice. Vis fell through. Her friend ran home.
Where’s Kim, the friend’s mother asked. Kim fell in the water, the girl replied. She was blowing bubbles.
A newspaper story later reported the friend said Vis was in the water “up and down, up and down … like me in the bathtub.”
The mother became alarmed. What water? The little girl didn’t say, maybe worried about getting in trouble.
The mother called Vis’s mom: I’ll check the pond, you look in the ditches.
The frantic search ended with the first woman spotting Vis’s coat under the ice, leaping the fence and pulling the lifeless little girl from the water.
As Vis’s mother ran to phone for an ambulance, the other woman attempted artificial respiration.
The ambulance crew tried to bring her back, too, when they arrived on the scene. No luck.
Same thing at the Port Alberni hospital; when Vis’s father rushed in, his wife greeted him with “Kimberly fell in the water and drowned.”
But wait. The hospital staff kept trying, eventually finding a heartbeat after shocking Vis with paddles.
With bad weather grounding medevac helicopters, it took over eight hours to get the little girl, still unconscious, to hospital in Victoria.
Her dad, chasing the ambulance to the capital, actually got pulled over for making an illegal left turn onto Bay Street. “I’ll give you an escort,” said the cop after learning what was going on.
“I don’t have time for that,” replied Vis’s father, who took off.
“Over the next few weeks, a multi-disciplinary team of physicians at Royal Jubilee Hospital watched as the youngster fought one battle and then another to hold onto life,” the 91原创 would later report.
“They admit now that they were ready to give up on several occasions when the unconscious youngster — her brain starved for oxygen, her lungs filled with fluid and her kidneys stopped — appeared to have been lost.”
Even if she lived, they feared brain damage was all but certain.
But no, when Vis emerged from her four-week coma, she was the same little girl. It really did feel like a miracle when her parents, at their temporary home in Victoria, got a phone call from the hospital. “Hi Mommy,” said the voice on the other end.
After six weeks and two days in the Jubilee, Vis went home to Port Alberni. Then she grew up, had a family of her own and eventually moved to Esquimalt, where she now runs her own gardening business.
Wild story, but what does it have to do with the Times 91原创 Christmas Fund? Nothing, really, save for a tenuous connection in that both Vis’s Esquimalt Celebration of Lights and the TC fund support the Rainbow Kitchen. (The TC charity has provided grants to the Esquimalt-based feed-the-hungry effort, while non-perishable food collected at the parade will go there, too.)
But perhaps the connection grows stronger when framed as one of those discussions about what’s important in life, how fragile it is, how quickly things can go sideways.
They’re the sort of questions that get lost in day-to-day existence, right up until you get blindsided by fate — a stroke, an accident, a family crisis — and end up needing help from somewhere like the Rainbow Kitchen or one of the other agencies supported by the Christmas Fund.
Vis might be less likely than the rest of us to lose track. There’s nothing like a mortality crisis — or coming back from the dead — to focus perspective.
She doesn’t take things for granted. “I feel lucky,” she says.
She’s grateful for all the years she has had since falling through the ice in 1979. Running the Esquimalt parade, making the kids happy, being surrounded by the people she loves, it’s all happening in bonus time.
“Mostly for me it’s just being thankful, thankful that I’m alive and have family and friends,” she says of her Miracle Child legacy.
Oh, and one more miracle? “I love the water,” she says. “I’m not scared of it at all.”
HOW TO DONATE TO THE CHRISTMAS FUND
• Go online to . That page is linked to CanadaHelps, which is open 24 hours a day and provides an immediate tax receipt.
• Use your credit card by phoning 250-995-4438 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday.
• Cheques should be made out to the Times 91原创 Christmas Fund. Drop them at the Times 91原创 office in Vic West, 201-655 Tyee Road, Victoria.
• Or, for the duration of the postal strike, contact Maximum Express for free pickup and delivery of your cheque. Call dispatch at 250-721-3278 or email [email protected].
