Awful events often seem to rise from the mundane. Bad assumptions, a lack of information, a series of unforeseen outcomes. Some cable TV stations have lots of programming like that, the wing nut that fails and leads to disaster.

In this case it was personal and not theoretical, and it was happening in front of me and not on some ancient videotape. Eventually, it was not a disaster. But it could have been. For a moment, it seemed as if it might be.

I have mentioned, since arriving at our beach hotel near the southern tip of Sri Lanka, that the surf here is impressive and pretty much relentless. At least one person who has stayed here posted a review that included a complaint about the sound of the surf, and how it made it difficult to sleep. That isn’t a problem for me, but it gives you an idea of a restless sea.

The waves, on the beach side of the little hotel, are irregular but ceaseless. They come in two, three, four at a time, and they break anywhere from 10 yards short of the sand to 40 yards out to sea. Even more.

Also, to study the water is to see that it appears to be channeled by some underground formations. The tide can be coming at a right angle to the shore here, but at a 60-degree angle 30 yards down the beach.

I am not a good swimmer. Never have been. The idea that people find swimming to be pleasurable is something I don’t get. And swimming for fun in a heaving ocean? No way.

Leah, however, is a good swimmer. She was on the swim team in high school. She is likely to get into any pool she encounters. And she has swum in ocean waters before, from Mexico to California to Thailand. And she was intent on getting in some swimming today, a hot sunny day, in warm clean surf. It looked relatively calm to her.

She took me along as her observer, but that was just about the only precaution we took. We could have asked the hotel staff what it is like to swim on their beach. We could have done an internet search. We could have begun the exercise by making a closer study of the currents. We could have asked why no one seems to swim on the beach where we are staying, and we could have asked about a flotation ring somewhere on the grounds. On a stretch of beach with no lifeguard and basically no one in the water, we could have been more careful about everything. We did none of that.

So, I plopped down on the sand with a book and a towel as Leah eagerly strode into the wonderfully warm water. I told her she had 30 minutes before she had to come in, or we both were going to be dealing with sunburn. She seemed OK with that.

I watched as she went out, diving under incoming waves like someone who knows her way around an ocean. I can’t do that, dive under waves. I was impressed.

By the time she went under about her third swell, she was perhaps 50 yards out. I thought that was plenty far. Actually, a bit too far. She was out of range of my help.

She seemed to be having fun, just bobbing as the surf rolled through, paddling a bit. She waved, just before she reached a place where she could no longer stand on the bottom and still have her head above water.

I checked my watch. Another 15 minutes, and I would wave her to come back. At that point, she later said, she was already aware she was farther out than she thought and was getting ready to come in.

Meantime, a Sri Lankan man materialized in front of me. He came from the coconut shack built about 10 yards behind me, facing the road. I thought the place was closed, though I could see some coconuts hanging by a string.

He asked me if I wanted any coconuts. I said, no, thank you. He asked me my name, and I asked him his. He asked where we were staying and how long we would be here.

We had just about exhausted his store of English, by now, when he said, “No wife?” And I pointed out to the water, where Leah’s head was visible in the water. He followed my finger as I pointed and I said, “Good swimmer” and then pointed at myself, “bad swimmer.”

I don’t recall exactly what prompted me, but right about then she was far enough out that I thought she ought to start making her way back. Maybe not knowing what sort of undertow was out there? But I could see her looking in and I rotated my arm towards my face in the universal sign of “come in.” She said later she had already been on her way.

She began stroking with more authority, towards me, but within a few minutes I could see that she was making no progress. The Sri Lankan guy next to me could see the same. I am sure that he perceived we were entering into a serious situation before I did, but not by much.

The Sri Lankan man’s name is Sampat, and he lives about 50 yards from where we were sitting. His primary occupation is as a fisherman, and he seems to be barefoot at all hours of the day. Most of the local residents wear sandals or flip-flops. He, however, is always barefoot.

He pointed out to me that the current where Leah was bobbing was not coming directly on shore. In fact, to follow the current, she needed to veer south (to her right) to reach the shore, and she would do it maybe 50 yards south of where she entered the water. She said that it wasn’t obvious to her she was swimming against the current; she felt no undertow or riptide but was quite aware she was making no progress.

Sampat later said through a translator that as soon as he saw Leah out there, he thought it could be a problem. It turns out he rescued a female tourist who had been in trouble at almost this very spot, and had attempted to rescue two German men, not far from here, who drowned before he could get to them.

With no discussion beyond his observation that Leah was fighting the current by trying to come to me, he stood up, unbuttoned his short-sleeved shirt and dropped it on the sand and went right into the water. He clearly was a strong swimmer, and he was within a few yards of Leah within a few minutes.

By now, Leah knew she had a problem. She has swum in oceans, but she probably was in better shape back then, and she certainly was younger, and she could see she was not getting any closer to where I was sitting, not even when I moved south, to where she ought to try to swim.

For about five minutes, and it seemed longer, she continued to stroke, but got nowhere. She said she never panicked, but she knew she was tiring quickly and she conceded she did think, “So, this is how people drown.” She told me afterward that she was considering her options, and knew I wouldn’t be able to help her.

Later, she would say she could have/should have, turned and floated to catch her breath between efforts, but at that point she was no longer certain whether she would simply float out further to sea, and I was thinking “What am I going to tell her parents?”

Sampat was hovering a few yards ahead of her, blocking her from a 90-degree route back to shore, trying to urge her to make an angled approach to where I was now standing, still urging her to come in.

For what seemed a very long time but I’m sure wasn’t, she made no progress while swimming. I began to wonder if Sampat could bring her all the way in; he is not a big guy.

But in an instant, she seemed to make up about 20 yards. Perhaps it was some surge of onshore tide, or just a renewed effort at a more effective angle, but she was still swimming and definitely had made progress. She couldn’t be far from being able to touch bottom and walk in.

However, she was fast losing her last energy, and Sampat seemed to sense this. He grabbed her right hand with his and begun swimming with his left arm while she kicked furiously. He made rapid progress, and I finally decided that this was going to turn out OK.

In a minute or two, they were close enough to walk. Leah was exhausted, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders were quivering from exhaustion. Her face was red from being out in the sun and from the exertion. She went directly to the blanket on the beach, and sat down, breathing heavily.

I was consumed by the idea of presenting a reward to Sampat. As soon as Leah was on the ground, and drinking water, and said she was OK, I hurried back to the hotel to fetch some rupees.

When I came back, two other local guys had joined Leah and Sampat. They had brought her a coconut with a straw, and she said the coconut milk seemed to revive her. I shook Sampat’s hand again and offered him a reward, and a young man sitting next to him, piped up. “Buddhist people do this because we love your life,” he said. “We do not do it for a reward.”

I asked if I could buy them dinner. He said, yes, that would be fine, and we could use his tuk-tuk to travel to the restaurant. We agreed that we would convene at 5 o’clock in front of the hotel.

It was only with some hindsight that Leah conceded this could have ended badly. She was, she said, very, very tired after what was close to 20 minutes of trying to swim back in.

At 5 p.m., her savior and his younger friend, Pradeep, 25 (to Sampat’s 28), were waiting for us in Sampat’s tuk-tuk. Pradeep drove because Sampat, the lifesaver, is afraid to drive a tuk-tuk, which isn’t at all an unreasonable fear.

We drove to Unawatuna, fairly well known as a scuba diving center, and walked up a big hill  to a Buddhist temple that sits on a short peninsula and offers a view of Galle, the big city to the north. We then went up to Galle, and saw the old Portuguese/Dutch fort and the church and the mosque and the new cricket stadium there, rebuilt since the tsunami.

We stopped for gas, and to buy me a belt, and we headed back south and had dinner at a place on the beach named Happy Banana. All four of us had chicken fried rice.

Pradeep said he learned his English in school, had a sister who had married an Italian, and said he had visited her there and hoped for a job as a mechanic on a cruise ship.

Sampat is trying to save up enough money so he can marry. The tuk-tuk should help.

We paid for dinner, and we headed further south, to Koggala, with Sampat, Leah and I hammed into the back seat and Pradeep at  the bike handles. We shook their hands when we got to the hotel, and I asked Pradeep how much he was going to charge for the transport and the tour. He said, “Whatever you think is right,” and I gave him a sum of money that, added with what we had spent with him and Sampat, equaled the reward I had offered earlier.

We were happy the day was over, and very glad it did not turn out badly.

Back at Unawatuna, at the Buddhist temple, Pradeep (who seems quite devout) recommended that we make an offering at the statue of the Buddha, and we dropped 10 rupees into a slot, and Leah asked that our two benefactors “Have a long life because they saved mine.”