Midnight Run

A midnight emergency run across Lough Corrib with a badly burned child—fear, mistakes, and instinct collide in this raw story of risk, parenting, and consequence.

“You know what’s the worst thing that can happen on trips like this?” I said, sitting in my picnic chair beside the fire. The dark woods surrounded us. Our camp was on a tiny island out on Lough Corrib, the second-largest lake in Ireland (176 km²). “Burns and scalds.”

Ten minutes later, Isla, my three-year-old daughter, stumbled and instinctively thrust her hands out to steady herself—straight onto the searing-hot top of a petrol lamp beside the fire. It was as hot as a frying pan.

I saw it happen in slow motion. Time stretched. Then came that awful, delayed scream — the kind people make when the pain is so intense it steals even the instant cry of a lesser injury.

I scooped her up in my arms and prayed it was only her fingertips, not both hands. I knew I should plunge her hands into cold water immediately, but there didn’t seem to be anything at hand to do so, and I thought she’d be even more panicked if her dad carried her to the lake and held her hands underwater. This was a big error, and I was too quick to reach for the first aid kit, forgot the time, picked up a pan off a camp stove, not realising it was on and red hot. How I’d slept with my burnt thumb in a pan of water, and how it didn’t even blister. Those vital twenty minutes of soaking would have made a big difference, but I let them slip away, probably out of shame or embarrassment that I’d allowed her to burn herself, and so I was pretending to myself and the other dads that it wasn’t that bad. But it was.

People rushed around — the two other dads and the other six kids. Someone ran for their first aid kit, hoping for a burn dressing, only to come back empty-handed. I grabbed mine in a big waterproof bag. Thankfully, it contained two large Burnshield dressings.

Boys will be boys, and girls.

I’ve always been a Duct tape, Strappel, and grit first aid kit kind of guy, but then the most common emergency for me had been athlete’s foot, both on big walls (just take more clean socks), and expeditions (problem VBL socks unless you take care of your feet). But children had made me take first aid more seriously, especially when going on adventures with other people’s kids.

In my haste, I made another mistake: I put Savlon on her hands, then cut one dressing in half and placed it over her palm and fingers, taping it down (I should have used a gauze bandage, but didn’t have any, just tape). I still wasn’t sure how bad the burn was — the skin hadn’t blistered yet, plus it was dark, I had to put on my reading glasses, and the light from so many headtorches made it hard to see. I also didn’t clean her dirty hands, and was too focused on covering the wounds, to try and stem the pain she was feeling.

Isla was crying, but not her normal cry. It was the breathless, gasping sob of a child in the deepest pain.

Another tiny thing: I’d taken out the Tuff Cut shears and didn't put them back in the kit, so I ended up using the scissors on my Leatherman, which were crap. I also realised I’d put on the dressing without taking off her coat, and now I couldn’t take it off without causing her pain. I needed to make some cuts in the cuffs (it was an old hand-me-down anyway), but I really needed some shears, so I just left it on. This turned out to be a major error.

I gave her some children’s Nurofen and wondered how long it would take to work, wished I’d made a note in my kit about what dose of adult painkiller you can give a child.

I thought about jumping in the boat and heading straight to A&E, but it was 10 p.m., and Lough Corrib is not a lake you want to cross in the dark. By day, it looks like a paradise of islands — a Yank’s Irish wet dream — bordered by the Connemara mountains at one end and Galway Bay at the other. But it’s rarely busy, only home to scattered fishing boats, mainly belonging to pro fishing guides and their clients, people who know the location of every fishing spot and submerged rock on the Corrib. There are no boat clubs or marinas like on the big lakes of Europe or North America. It’s simply too treacherous.

Beyond the narrow marked corridor of green and yellow buoys, the lake is riddled with hidden rocks, submerged limestone pavements, and the summits of drowned peaks — the result of an ancient geological rift, with granite on one side and limestone on the other. Often, the only safe way to navigate is with Google Earth, which reveals where the rocks and shallows lie. You can be a mile from any land and still look over the side of the boat to see a rock rising silently out of the darkness.

The Corrib has claimed many lives, due to both its hidden hazards and its wild Patagonian weather. The lake’s shape funnels the wind, whipping up large waves that can quickly overpower small boats or drive them onto the rocks. It’s not uncommon for the search and rescue team to be called out for a lone missing fisherman who didn’t come home, only to find them benighted on some island for the following morning.

At night, it becomes even more dangerous; you never see boats. The fringes of the lake have few lights or reference points. Out in the middle, when the water is still, you can feel as if you’re floating in deep space or a sensory deprivation tank.

I knew this all too well. Over the winter, I’d been out kayaking alone on the Corrib, pushing further and further as my confidence grew — sometimes looping around islands ten kilometres away, crossing the Corrib, often staying out until midnight. I told everyone I was training for a solo trip around Ireland, but really, I was both testing my nerve and using it as an excuse to avoid bedtime duty.

I always kayaked with the boat connected by a line from the bow to the spraydeck, so if I went in bad weather, my boat wouldn’t blow away. I also learned the art of navigating my GPS in a kayak, sometimes in nighttime mist and fog, so thick that I couldn’t see past the bow of the kayak.

This time, with a group of kids nominally in my charge, I had brought my Garmin eTrex SE (I like the SE because the batteries last forever). I’d plotted the return route on my phone but never synced it. Now my phone was dead — one advantage of a battery-hungry GPS: you can still navigate with proper maps.

I resigned myself to keeping the Burnshield dressings on her hands, putting her to bed, and hoping she’d sleep through the night so I could take her to the hospital in the morning. Or maybe, come the morning, she’d be fine.

Both of us were frazzled. I put her in the tent with my five-year-old son, Noah, and tried to calm her. She was in agony. Lying beside her, stroking her hair, I realised how easy it had always been — on previous trips — to emotionally distance myself from someone else’s pain. It’s very different when it’s your own child.

My mind raced the whole time. Should I call the lifeboat? It was Saturday night — how long would they take? What if she just fell asleep? What if they scrambled one of the rescue helicopters (Ireland has four, scattered around the country)? What risks would that put everyone through, and what danger would it pose to Isla as a helicopter tried to locate us on a black lake on a black night, with nowhere safe to land?

Twice, the pain became so bad that I started preparing to leave, GPS or not. I made a frantic checklist: kids’ life jackets, headtorch and spare, car keys.

Then, thankfully, slowly, Isla began to drift off.

Afraid of rolling onto her injured hands (which she held up like little paws), I crept out of the tent and climbed into a hammock close by, thinking how we’d laugh about this in the morning — how it could have been so much worse.

Ten minutes later, I woke to her screaming. I crawled back inside. She was inconsolable.

Paul, one of the other dads, came over and asked if there was anything he could do, probably just thankful it wasn’t their child. Earlier that night, Paul had said to me, “I think I’d be too stressed to let my kids play like that.” “Like what?” I said, looking around at Noah and his friend Ziggy, sword fighting with burning sticks, like lightsabers in the dark. “I didn’t even notice”, thinking this was a good thing. Now I could see the value of being aware.

“I’m going to have to take her back in the boat,” I said. I felt I had no choice but to act.

I got Isla out of the tent and popped her into a camp chair, with the other kids coming out to see her and try to cheer her up.

I wanted to leave Noah behind, but he was in a fragile state too, so I shoved on his shoes — one sandal and one trainer — along with his coat, and told him to take his sleeping bag and get into the boat. Then I wrapped Isla up in her sleeping bag, checked I had a spare headtorch, car keys, water, and carried her in as well.

The boat was pulled up on the rocky shore beside the camp. I sat Isla at the back, so she’d be beside me, and pushed the boat out into the dark and jumped in. The dads and kids lined up beside the shore, shouting “bye-bye, Isla”. I gave one wave back, to reassure them it was OK, we’d be OK, but in the dark, they never saw it. They said I just slipped into space.

With the tiny 3-horsepower engine pushing us along at just 4 knots (I’ve got this slow but reliable engine, and a faster, unreliable one, so I went for reliability), we headed off into the dark. Noah lay in the bottom of the boat, lifting up his head every now and then, to check this familiar world, having grown up on this boat, on the Corrib, transformed. But, being midnight, he eventually went to sleep.

Isla sat tucked in beside me, in her sleeping bag, one arm for her, the other for the throttle; hard over. Whethater it was the chug-chug of the 2-stroke engine, or the stillness and silence beyond, the half moon hidden by cloud, she stopped crying.

I kissed her head. She kissed my hand. She didn’t seem afraid at all.

Although this was an emergency. A midnight run. All that time out here kayaking in the dark gave me the confidence we’d be OK, as I moved around our island, a big black blob in a less black lake, with a lesser black sky above, the lights of Galways before us, the dark, dark of the mountain behind.

Navigation was part memory, part instinct, always, out from our island blob, into nothing, until another blob appeared, an island I called ‘three tree island’, then out again, across the largest expanse of water, aiming towards a line of wind turbine lights up along the hills.

Twice, I felt like I was just heading into a wall of blackness, unable to tell whether I was five hundred metres from the land or one, but my instinct told me to go on, and each time I found the way through.

The final stretch was the darkest, the shore totally unlit, a boat ramp, my car beside it, close, but impossible to see, hidden rocks in between us. I slowed down to one knot and crept forward, tightening my grip on Isla, trusting the ‘Force’, until my headtorch picked up something, and we bumped into the bank.

The boat tied up, I carried both kids into the car, and drove home, getting there at 2 am. Strangely enough, I’d not intended to take Isla on the trip, but Vanessa (her mum) was doing a wilderness first aid course all weekend, and had also been looking forward to her first night in five years all to herself.

And so, when she heard someone in the house, she had no clue what was going on, only that she had a pen knife next to the bed, and so was relieved when it was me creeping into the bedroom. What do you say at times like this? I said, “Don’t panic, but Isla’s burnt her hands, so I’ve come back”. The response was how any mother would respond.

This reminds me of a story my dad once told me, about running an emergency first aid course, and driving the students to a crag, turning to say “always expect the unexpected”, at which point a guy staggered through the bushes covered in blood, shouting that his mate had just decked out.

We carried the kids in, Noah up to bed, and Isla onto the settee. I grabbed my shears and cut off her coat. She still wasn’t crying; in fact, she started to walk around and play with her toys. The reality of going to Galway’s A&E at 2 am on a Saturday seemed worse than just doing our best here.

One thing that being a parent has taught me is that the resilience and toughness of children is remarkable. I often wonder if it’s coded into them to survive all the trials of childhood, and by failing to understand that, we rob them of something through our constant parental meddling. Safety first, isn’t.

The dressings were still in place, so we just gave her some more Nurophen and put her to bed, where she slept straight through till 10 am.

I had a really awful night's sleep, buzzing, full of guilt, also knowing I had to go back and pick everyone up today. For all that I believe in exposing kids to adventure (journeys of uncertain outcome) and risk, giving them agency over themselves, their lives, their own domain, right now, all that seemed like cult thinking. Your kids’ safety is all that matters. I felt the same the night Vanessa had got frostbite in Alaska, and cried herself to sleep. You drag people into your delusion, and they get hurt, or worse. What’s so bad about kids living in their bedrooms, on their phones, the virtual over the material, as long as you know they’re safe?

I expect some mums would have stayed at home, and looked after Isla, and missed the second day of her first aid course, but instead, Vanessa got up at 6:15 and cycled 30 km to the course. It was my mess to sort. Life must go on.

It was only in the morning, when I took off the dressing, that I realised my biggest mistake of all, and probably why I’m writing this now.

In the light of day, the tape and burn dressings were cut away, and I saw that although she did have penny-sized blisters in four spots on her hands and fingers, by far the most severe burn was on her wrist, where there was no burn dressing at all. There had obviously been a very large 50p-sized blister there that had burst, causing all the pain. I suppose this is a great example of a ‘distracting injury‘, where I was too focused on her hands, not her wrist. Really, although I was acting calm and in control, I wasn’t; I was both panicked and in denial about how bad it was.

And so, with no other option really, I bandaged her up again, properly this time, drove back to the boat, still sat there on the beach, and went back to the Island. I suppose I could have dropped Isla off with the grandparents or with a friend, but it somehow seemed right to carry on the adventure she was part of.

And as we rounded the island, we saw the other kids out on the boat jetty, jumping in, having fun, being kids. And when they saw us, Isla stood up at the bow of the boat in her distinctive life jacket, they all started jumping, waving and shouting “Isla!”. And she jumped up and waved back.

Isla (3), a Celtic word meaning "swelling island" or a pre-Celtic term for "rapidly moving".