It was about an hour after sunset during the month of July and it was raining "cats and dogs." The wipers on Cliff’s car were operating at full speed as he crossed a bridge over the Edisto River.

During the crossing he saw something out of the corner of his eye that scared him. Cliff stopped at the end of the bridge, pulled on a rain jacket and walked back to the middle of the bridge. It looked like a set of headlights in the middle of the river. It looked like a car sinking in the flooded Edisto.

Quickly, Cliff got on his cell phone and called 911. He told the operator what he was looking at and described his location.

It took longer than Cliff thought it should, but a fire and rescue truck finally pulled up in the middle of the bridge. The fire lieutenant thought the same thing Cliff did—a car was floating in the river.

Cliff, a volunteer fireman, rode with the lieutenant as they looked for a feeder road that would take them to the riverside. Several times they had to turn around or back up. Not knowing the condition of the driver, the rescuers reasoned, "This could be a life-and-death situation."

Of course it took much longer than it should have, but the two men finally arrived at the point along the Edisto where the headlights were shining. But the lights were not shining from the middle of the river. They were shining from the shoreline alongside the river.

Actually, the source of the lights was not a pair of headlights at all. What the rescuers saw were two Coleman lanterns at a riverside campsite placed just four feet apart. Nearby, two fishermen were huddled together under a tarpaulin, waiting for the rain to let up.

Once assured that everything was okay, the fire lieutenant said to the fishermen, "I’d appreciate it if you’d move your lanterns closer together. Somebody that didn’t know any better might see them from the bridge and think they were a set of headlights."