It was a sunny mid-December day in Westfield, Ind., and the iced-over pond across the street from David Fisher’s home was starting to melt when his son rushed in from the driveway.
A large dog had fallen in the pond while chasing geese, Mr. Fisher’s 19-year-old son, Felix, said. The dog’s owners, a mother and her teenage son, were frantically trying to figure out what to do.
David Fisher, 61, a professional rope-jumping performer, scrambled to toss on a sweatshirt and a coat. When he reached the door, Felix had a new report: The teenager had fallen into the water, too.
Mr. Fisher instinctively reached for his prized possessions: two 16-foot-long cloth jump ropes, each nearly a half-inch in diameter, and knotted at both ends. Then he raced out to the pond.
The dog was somehow crawling its way to safety, Felix recalled in an interview on Sunday. But the teenager was still struggling in the frigid water some 60 feet from the shore, shouting that he was drowning, David Fisher said.
With a long rope in tow, he crouched with his legs wide and began to creep carefully onto the thin ice as it crackled beneath him.
“I left one of the two ropes by the shore in case the ice broke as I went,” Mr. Fisher recalled on Sunday. “If I went in, I figured maybe we could make a chain, and they could get me at the other end with the other rope.”
Mr. Fisher’s three decades of double Dutch rope jumping came in handy, he said. In double Dutch, two so-called turners swing ropes around a jumper, and Mr. Fisher said he often practices throwing ropes to his partner, a habit that helped give him a sense of how close he needed to be to the teenager.
When he thought he was within range, he tossed the rope to the teenager, who was about 16 feet away.
The teenager grabbed the rope, but as he struggled to get out of the water, a section of ice broke, Mr. Fisher said. He managed to reorient his body, and Mr. Fisher slowly pulled him up and out.
The rescue took just a few minutes, according to the Fishers. They brought the boy, whose torso was bloodied by cuts from the ice, to their home to dry off and put on warm clothes.
On Monday, the City of Westfield, which is about 20 miles north of Indianapolis, celebrated David and Felix Fisher for the rescue, honoring them with a joint Lifesaving Citizen Award to recognize their bravery.
The teenager, whom the city did not identify out of respect for his privacy, attended the award ceremony, said the city’s mayor, Scott Willis. He said it was the first time his city had given out the award.
In an interview, the mayor said that the city wanted to take a special step to “honor and recognize the heroism of these two individuals.”
“To have a resident act as quickly as he did, and to put, quite frankly, his life on the line to save another, is really remarkable,” Mr. Willis said. “It’s not something you see every day.”
For Mr. Fisher, who took up rope jumping as a training exercise while playing volleyball in college, the rescue was the culmination of a lifetime of dreaming about different ways to use ropes.
He jumps rope while seated on a floor. He jumps rope while dribbling balls with his feet. He has jumped rope while inside a giant pink balloon.
Mr. Fisher has performed for presidents, once leaving Bill Clinton slack-jawed, and has published two novels, “Adventures of the Rope Warrior: A Legend is Launched,” and “Adventures of the Rope Warrior: Survival of the Fit,” about a superhero with a glowing orange jump rope.
He likes to say that there is no end to the number of ways to use a rope. But last month, he said, he found his “most consequential” use yet.
It was, he said, his “greatest achievement with a jump rope.”
