Maggie Dodson started to worry about why her husband was taking so long to mow part of their Harvard-area farm on a Sunday afternoon this summer when she decided to go look for him.

She “followed the tracks” that her husband, Bob Dodson, then 83, and his tractor made. Quickly, she realized that for how long he’d been gone, more grass should have been cut. Maggie Dodson found the tractor overturned in a water-filled ditch near Bunker Hill and Island roads. She yelled Bob’s name, and he answered.

“He answered me, so I knew he was good,” Maggie Dodson said of the July 20 crash.

But he also was pinned under the tractor.

On Tuesday, the Harvard Fire Protection District Board of Trustees recognized Maggie Dodson, the couple’s daughter Robin Dodson, neighbor Bob Gould, firefighter-EMT J.J. Gerish and firefighter-paramedic Josiah Erber with Life Saving Awards for their help in saving Bob Dodson.

Maggie Dodson recalled that her phone battery was low that day, so although she wanted to stay with her husband after she found him and called 911, she had to walk back to the road.

“We were out in the middle of nowhere. There was no address” to send the fire trucks to, and she had to lead them to the site. But she was able to get her daughter, Robin, who came out to help keep her father’s head above the water.

Maggie Dodson also walked to neighbor Bob Gould’s house to get his help. Gould got in his own front-end loader and headed to the site of the crash.

Another neighbor, Kathy O’Brien, was on the scene too.

“We are a big, close-knit neighborhood out here in the country,” O’Brien said.

She watched as the incident unfolded – with the firefighters wrapping chains around the tractor so Gould could use his front-end loader to lift it off Dodson.

“He pulled the tractor off him,” Maggie Dodson said.

By that point, Bob Dodson had been in the water for almost three hours.

“If I hadn’t gotten there when I did, we wouldn’t be telling this story,” Maggie Dodson said.

Once her husband was freed, he was flown to OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Rockford. He was there for nine days, Maggie Dodson said, because the gash on his leg from the crash mixed with the swampy water.

“He had a super-awful infection” from the cut, she said.

Bob Dodson also turned 84 while he was there. “We had a little carrot cake” for him that morning, said Maggie Dodson, 79.

They did what they had to do, she said.

“If we hadn’t got there when we did, I think he would have drowned,” she said.

What those rescuers did also was above and beyond, said Scott Logan, president of the Harvard fire board.

“We need to celebrate and publicize [when residents step up to help],” Logan said. “We have a community of people who, when needed, will come together and help.”

The two young firefighters at the scene, Gerish and Erber, “took charge and took command and got the guy out of there,” Logan said. “It is the sort of thing that we need to celebrate a little more often.”