Tim and Pam Reynolds enjoyed life's pleasures together. They rode their horses, they tended to their vegetable garden and they drove from their Floyd County farm to separate jobs in the city -- together.

In early October every year, they celebrated their wedding anniversary by spending a week in Ocean City, Md. And every summer for the past 15 years, they traveled to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and stayed at a friend's condo.

It was there Friday, as they held hands and waded off shore, that a current pulled them toward the ocean, and all of the sudden their feet couldn't touch the sand anymore.

The way Pam Reynolds recalls, they yelled for help and three men responded. Tim Reynolds forced his wife toward the beach by pushing his hand on her back. She was taken safely to shore. Meanwhile, he was dragged farther by the current, and by the time his body was rescued, he was floating and unresponsive.

"For him to have pushed Pam to safety first," said niece Jessica Cook, 32, "was just a typical Tim thing to do."

Tim Reynolds, 50, of Copper Hill, was pronounced dead about 4:30 p.m. Friday at a Myrtle Beach hospital, according to Tamara Willard, deputy coroner of Horry County. He suffered asphyxiation due to drowning in a typically safe area of the beach, she said.

It was at least the third ocean drowning somehow related to rip tides in that area during the last month, Willard said.

Reynolds' last actions capped the life of a man who devoted himself to life at home with his wife. Until he was laid off in June, he drove a forklift and shipped orders at Salem's Novozymes Biologicals Inc., a producer of enzyme-based materials.

"He was a guy who worked hard at work, and went home and continued working," company president Ted Melnik said.

Tim and Pam Reynolds married 24 years ago. They met when she visited the envelope company warehouse where he worked to help her mother, who also worked there.

"We hit it off," Pam Reynolds said. "We'd go out on dates the way couples do. ... We would just talk all the time."

Soon after, they built a house in Elliston, where her parents gave them 5 acres. After doctors told them in the mid-1990s that they had inexplicable fertility complications, Pam Reynolds said, they moved to their farm in Copper Hill.

There, they remodeled an old house, Tim Reynolds made wood crafts, they worked together in the garden, and they kept the two horses they rode together.

"It was always just me and him," she said.

The couple, who didn't have children, doted on their many nieces and nephews, Cook said. Tim Reynolds would make jokes at family gatherings, such as saying that if Cook didn't make her signature dip for potato chips, that she couldn't come into the house.

"To be expected, none of us can believe that he's gone," said Linda King, one of Pam Reynolds' sisters.

Now, Pam Reynolds wears her husband's wedding band on her thumb and his watch on her wrist.