June 20, 2009: The serious business of swimming

Originally appeared on The Opinion Shop blog of The News & Observer:

Relieved is what I was when the man finally left the pool with his three beautiful children dragging along behind him. Relaxed is what I had wanted to be, but I had spent two hours neglecting my Kaye Gibbons book and keeping my eye on the man’s middle child.

Within minutes of her arrival, she had jumped right into the pool while her daddy attended to the younger girl, putting the floating device over the small head, making sure it was snug. While Daddy fiddled, the middle child had reached a spot in the pool that was over her head, and she struggled over to the side, frantically grabbing my friend, who stood at the side facing out, talking to someone in a chair.

Daddy never noticed.

But the lifeguard had his eye on her. And every 20 minutes, when a new guard came out to take his or her post on the stand, I got up and whispered a word of warning. Watch that girl.

Watch is what lifeguards do. Scan. Look. Scan again. Chances are, every time the post changed today, the lifeguard taking the post had already been warned by the one leaving to watch that girl. Because that’s what they do. They scan for the people who struggle, who hug the wall, as this girl did. They warn each other. Watch that girl.

But a lifeguard can’t spend her whole shift watching one child when there are 50 other people who need some attention, too. And no matter how vigilant the guard, things happen. Bad things. In the beat of a heart.

Ever since a 6-year-old drowned this summer at a Raleigh pool, a pool at which four guards were on duty, my stomach has clenched every time my 17-year-old daughter has headed out to her lifeguarding job. The lives of those four guards will never be the same. The lives of their parents will never be the same. The lives of the child’s family, I can’t even imagine.

Lifeguarding is serious business. Just think about the actual title for a second. Someone is guarding lives. It’s not whistle-twirling and sun bathing, as the story on today‘s front page about swimming safety made pretty clear. The class required for certification is no cupcake affair, either. My daughter had to “save” a 300-pound classmate, dragging his girth from the bottom of the pool and out. Numerous students in her life-saving class couldn’t cut it, in fact, and dropped out.

The summer my daughter was 15 and so many of her year-round swimming friends were going to be guarding, we decided together that she should wait another year. The responsibility, we realized, was huge. But that’s who, for the most part, is being entrusted with this huge responsibility: teenagers on their first jobs, many as young as 15 because they can guard in their own neighborhoods and walk to the pools.

But the largest responsibility has to fall to the adults, to the parents and the guardians who should understand how incredibly dangerous it is to take a child who cannot swim to a pool, how unfair it is to these teenage guards, who even when they’re doing everything they’re supposed to are still only teenagers and who put forth Herculean efforts at some of these large pools scanning and watching and scanning for the struggling kids who really shouldn’t be in the pool to start with. My daughter could name several such children from her small pool, a fact that keeps me scared.

And I say this as someone who has been on the receiving end of lifeguard help. When my son was toddling what seems like 1,000 years ago, we visited a Cary pool with my best friend and her children. My child was standing beside me in the baby pool in less than a foot of water, patting his hands on the side, watching the water splash this way and that. The next thing my friend and I knew, a tidal wave overtook us as the lifeguard did a belly flop into the shallow water, grabbing my child, who had fallen onto his butt weighed down by his 30-pound diaper and couldn’t get back up. I had my back turned for fewer than 5 seconds.

But that’s the way of the swimming pool. A momentarily distracted parent, a lifeguard’s turned head, a baby sitter drawn into a chat she hadn't planned. Things happen in a split second. Sometimes really bad things, especially when children who cannot swim well enough are allowed to jump into the big pool and spend their time there alone, clinging to the side, going under, struggling back.

Maybe I should have told that daddy today that.