Quick thinking

Christian Lanz and his two sons were enjoying an afternoon at Sentinel Beach in Yosemite National Park when they heard the unmistakable sound of panic in broken English.

“Please! Please! Please!”

It required no translation.

Lanz turned and saw a man on the opposite shore pointing toward the middle of the Merced River. Scanning the water, he saw a tuft of hair, then an elbow.

The person wasn’t surfacing. Lanz, 49, a voice actor from Los Angeles, doesn’t remember making a conscious decision to jump in to rescue the man on Saturday, July 11.

But once in the water he quickly got a reality check.

“You walk out seven or eight feet into the river, and the bottom drops out,” he told the Mariposa Gazette in an interview.

“You can feel the current sweeping your feet out from under you. And it’s so cold your muscles start cramping up.”

He reached the spot where he spotted the person — and dove under.

He found the man underwater, limp and lifeless.

“I grabbed him by his armpits and got behind him, I didn’t think he was breathing,” Lanz recalled.

As he started kicking backwards, swimming to shore, Lanz began chest compressions on the man.

He also realized the power of the current.

“I felt like I was not making progress. I thought, ‘I can’t drown here in front of my kids,’” he said.

When Lanz made it to shore with the man in tow, he flipped him over and gave four or five chest compressions. He feared the worst.

Then the stranger coughed up water and blood.

Lanz reached for his cell phone, still in his pocket, to call 911. His phone was fried.

No one else was around and the man’s friend didn’t speak English. So, he grabbed his kids, jumped in their car and headed to Yosemite Valley Lodge, where the staff called 911.

When Lanz returned to Sentinel Beach about six minutes later, EMS was just pulling in too.

Paramedics told Lanz there is no doubt he saved the man’s life.

The victim, Ze Sheng, knows it too.

Ze, 28, who is from China, told the Mariposa Gazette by text message that he was visiting the park with two friends and they saw other people swimming in the river on the hot day.

He assumed the middle of the river was just as shallow as the river banks.

“I quickly realized I was wrong,” he wrote.

“The water was much deeper than I expected. I tried to stand up, but I lost my footing on the riverbed. I swallowed a large amount of water and immediately began to panic. The more I struggled, the more water I inhaled. Eventually, I became too exhausted to keep fighting and felt myself losing consciousness,” Ze wrote.

Reflecting on the episode a few days later, Lanz said he is grateful that he’s had CPR training and that his mother forced him to go to swimming meets as a kid.

To his sons, Calvin, 12, and Anson, 9, dad is now a hero, not unlike one of the animated characters he gives voice to in movies and television.

And now they understand why their father makes them wear life jackets even when wading in the shallow water.

For Lanz, there is a cautionary tale.

“Don’t trust the appearance of the water. It gets deep. The shallows are whitewater. When it’s deep you don’t see it on the surface,” he said.

Ze, who has made a full recovery, said he walks away with a similar lesson.

“This experience was a terrifying wake-up call about the dangers of natural bodies of water. I hope my story serves as a reminder to never underestimate moving water, even when it appears calm,” Ze said.

Lucky for everyone, this story came with a Hollywood ending.