Saving Lives -- Short Story
Some believe all time is a line. Everything that ever was, and ever will be, is happening, right now, somewhere else on that Line. Somewhere else.
I am a child. My father is always comfortable with margins.
He is an attorney. Lawyer jokes are not common. There is no Perry Mason, Johnnie Cochran, L. A. Law.
Dad stops, remembers his early career. He is a farmer. Homesick, he postpones his college career. Then, he has bachelor's degree, a masters in engineering. An engineer in industrial America.
Here is an old photograph of sixteen men and two women. My father and mother are both on law review at St. Joseph's University Law School. Mom is in her early twenties. Law review is a chance for the best and brightest students to compete by writing and editing scholarly articles on the most obscure points of law imaginable. My mother is 25 and beautiful, surrounded by a dozen young, brilliant, upcoming future judges, partners, CEOs. Somehow, Dad gets ahead of her many suitors.
Dad works as a senior attorney at a chemical company, at a private firm. At night, private clients come in. Dad's pleading paper is thick, with double pink lines down each side, to forestall the potential of messy words, spilling forth onto the real world. Not one, but two lines.
The man thinks most clearly with a yellow legal pad in his hand. He teaches me how to make a decision.
Dad says, write down the reasons for, and the reasons against in two columns on a legal pad.
How do you know? Do you count them up?
Yes. Write them down.
In Dad's legal pad, the love for his family fills the left side of the page. The right hand Margin is always empty.
We are not an athletic family. We do not go hiking. What we learn of the outdoors comes at our beach house, on the edge of the old family farm on Atlantic Bay.
I have the great fortune to spend my summers in an endless cycle of extended families, sandy feet running through the wet grass around the bungalows. Thin, spring-loaded screen doors slapping in the salt air are my summer soundtrack.
It is a great place to grow up. There are dozens of trails lining through the scrub woods behind the bungalow. Some lead to the Pirate Ship. The pirate ship is a real boat, or at least it used to be. A 16 foot wooden rowboat, with a fading, hand applied coat of Fiberglas. It is the boat my dad and his brothers had learned to ski behind. No fancy ignition, no high horsepower Mercurys. Just pull the starter cord on the old Johnson, and away you went. My brother and I inherit a landlocked boat with rotting gunwales. We manage to take it to the Caribbean almost daily.
I am thirteen. We have a seaworthy aluminum rowboat. I take it out on crisp, late summer afternoons to go snapper fishing. I watch the wind turning on the water, the blue change of seasons. My rowboat slowly turning on its anchor line. Suddenly, there is electric excitement when the silent wavelet V's suddenly bracket the monofilament. Something is moving at the end of the Line.
I am one day older. It is a brisk morning at Breakwater Beach. A flimsy table and chair stand incongruously on the rocky shore. We are signing up for swimming lessons, run by my father's old soccer Coach. I am never picked first for my junior high gym team. But he sizes me up.
Coach squints. He’s got good shoulders on him. I’ll take him for the Rescue class. Coach Bob Woods rocks on his heels at the beach, mostly forgetting how he started on the water. In his manner and his memories, he is teaching survival swimming to newly minted World War II Navy fliers. He returns from the Navy to coach soccer and just about every other sport at Paumanok High School. He coaches my father and my uncles, although he never teaches my father to swim. Old, simple games. Soccer and lacrosse. Dad still calls him Coach Woods. Even after retirement, the sons and grandsons of his old charges call him Coach. He silently loves it.
Coach's civvies are a uniform - striped polo shirt, shorts with a belt, tinted glasses, socks, and sneakers, and a white fishing cap, raked forward. He wears a simple gold chain around his neck, always at risk of disappearing into the sun-aged, leather crevasses of his neck. He isn’t old as much as weathered, and he was weathered long before I was born.
After swimming lessons, he is motoring around the 20 or so beaches of the North Shore in his white ’65 Impala convertible. The car is immaculate, and possibly better known than Coach, if such a thing is possible in a small town. The top is never down. Ever. He keeps his speed below 35 mph past the temples of my youth. The Shoreview. Town Beach. Breakwater. The Yacht Club.
Coach loves his car. The working lifeguards all joke about stealing that car, borrowing really. Who gets the car when he dies.
And Coach is at ease around the Margins of beaches, pools and bays. He is not a big man. Wiry, and energetic, with the cool calm of a Johnny Carson. He teaches me more about saving people than anyone else.
There are all sorts of ways to save people. In the Red Cross, we begin by teaching how to approach a drowning victim in the water -- the front surface approach, wrist carries, chin carries. Escape moves.
Practical lifeguarding means not being stupid, and not running in after a victim without maximizing your options. That means using equipment.
It is a county requirement that all beaches have a boat or a surfboard for getting out to victims. But the town doesn't have enough money for boats, or for the big, two-man rescue surfboards popular in California. We use one-person surfboards. On busy days, we paddle around on them outside the ropes. We also learn to use rescue buoys and ropes.
I am sixteen, and my brother Danny, fifteen, is finishing up his Rescue classes. We both become lifeguards. We have the same friends, the same job. We both get parts in the local community theater.
Lifeguarding pays well, for a student on a summer job. There is an almost military dash and swagger of lifeguarding, thanks to Coach. The tan. I am needed, I am that man on the tower you can turn to when things go wrong.
Several summers come and go. We all love the beach. We work seven hours a day, six days a week. We still get paid when it rains. Days off, we usually … go to the beach.
There are a lot of late nights. We live on a beach, we work on a beach, and still, most nights, we wind up across the Inlet at Georges Beach. Danny, my cousins, my sister, our friends. Some of us can't get into the bars -- too young -- so we just get beers and sit under the stars. Waiting for the Perseids. Orion will rise, late in August, if we remain long enough.
Town Beach is a family place. Danny & I are the regular lifeguards. We sit on the three person, 12 foot chair, called a tower. Six hours a day, six days a week. My sister and my cousin Jodie work the parking lot booth.
Danny just oozes charm. I can be on the beach for an hour before anyone notices. Everyone sees Danny as soon as he arrives.
Matt Tuthill is sometimes the third guard. I had helped train him, a young kid with good shoulders. Matt has seen some fighter plane movie a few times, wants to stencil our names on the back of our tower. I do not agree.
At the beach, storms never just spring up, full blown, from straight overhead. They always blow in from the edge. The squall lines blow in from the horizon, sweeping down the Sound. The air chills. All the boats start floating the wrong way at anchor, as the wind swings around, now southerly, now easterly. It is impossibly dark. Lightning and rain fill the distance between me and shelter, running, then sitting in my car, alone, while the wind finds every loose crack in the weatherstripping around the window. And then -- like that! -- I'm back in the light, the beach and sky swept clear. Just me and the aftermath.
It's another Saturday, midmorning. I am standing in the street at the beach house, honking the horn, waiting for Danny to get ready.
Let's go. We're late, I say.
I was in the living room waiting for you.
I'm sick of this.
Don't give me any of your older brother shit.
We are yelling on the road in front of our neighbor, who is edging his lawn. We are blazing down the North Road at speeds far above 35 miles per hour. We come burning into the parking lot together, about 15 minutes late. We take the tower, we keep right at it, with poor Matt sandwiched between us.
Matt can't stand it any more. Are you guys going to keep going like this all day, or do I have to get the firehose?
Butt out.
It’s none of your business, Matt.
Nothing like an outsider to provoke a little family unity. Then we are silent. The spell had been broken.
Danny and I are not working together one hot August afternoon, though. I'm on the tower at Town Beach. Danny is at the Breakwater. Coach is late coming to Town Beach. It's after 3:00pm. He's quieter than usual.
He starts, no jokes today. There's been some sort of accident down at the Breakwater.
What happened?
Not sure -- the Rescue Squad got up there around 3:00. I sent your brother home.
Is he all right?
He's fine. Something happened in the water.
I finish my shift. Dan's car is parked roadside when I pull up to the bungalow. Dan stands alone in our room. The air is carved by the late sun, arcing through the blinds and laddering the walls.
He is quiet for a long while. Then he starts.
You remember from first aid -- when they tell you if you're doing the chest right you may break some ribs.
Yeah. (This is right out of the CPR manual -- for chest compressions to have any chance of pumping blood they need to be 1 1/2 to 2 inches deep.)
Dan breathes, continues. Well, I felt them crack. And he was just rolling around in the water. There was water in his mouth. And his skin was just … dead.
There is truly nothing else to say, nothing to fill the distance between us, but the dust motes, turning in the endless gyres in the old camp cottage. We stand there, silently, for a few more minutes in our tiny room. The sun angles ever lower in the sky. I have thousands of questions to ask, and I never will.
Dan stops lifeguarding at the end of the summer. But we are never again so close, nor do we fight as intensely, as we do for those brief months in that long summer.
I keep on lifeguarding for a few years more. I am a year past college and ready to accept an indoor job in the city. I pull more tired swimmers out of the water. I clean the beach. I treat scrapes and jellyfish stings. I finish college, teach grade school. And I have never saved a life.
There is always one nearly perfect day late in the summer. It is that day, brilliant blue. I am working, alone, on a mostly deserted beach. No one comes to swim. I hold a novel I am reading, earning $7.30 an hour. A teenage girl with an indecisive crush bicycles up.
Hi there.
Hi. I brought you lunch, she says.
Thanks.
I will be starting a paralegal job in two weeks. It's my farewell tour of duty.
I look out toward Shelter Island late in the day. I take off my sunglasses -- I want to see something, the sky, the world, as it truly is, as much as one ever can.
It is easy to get lulled into only watching the water in front of me. But just like storms, all the trouble starts on the edge -- somewhere just over that big Margin where the ropes warn of danger beyond. The siren call of swimming for the deeps, going alone over the ropes, always sings. Especially to people who have no idea what awaits. Everything worthwhile, and everything dangerous, floats just beyond.
Two days later I am on the tower at Gull Pond when it happens.
I am drilling early in the morning, practicing rescue techniques. The drill that takes the most coordination is the rescue buoy and line.
The fastest way to get out to a swimmer was usually with a rescue tube. A rescue tube is like a ski belt, with about a ten foot rope and a shoulder harness. I can get down to the water, with more momentum, if I sprint off the tower and grab a rescue tube on the way down to the water. Stopping for a heavy surfboard just slows things down. I am careful not to burn out on the approach stroke, saving strength for the return, pulling the victim back in with you. I get the buoy and line out there as fast as possible. My partner will work the line from shore, to get us in.
This is what I do when the woman begins to scream. I am not drilling, not teaching. Someone is going down, Out There.
Help, help, I'm drowning.
My partner says, What?
My feet hit the sand three, four, five times before I am in the Water. A porpoise entry clears the waves and moves through the shallows faster than you can on a run. Crawlstroking, but always head-up, to keep one eye in the victim in case they go down during your approach. Now I am beyond the ropes. Go, go, go.
She is tossing up weak handfuls of water as she rails against the waves. She can’t keep her head above water. She is in her late 50's or early 60's.
I pass the buoy to her, she clutches it, calms down. I bring her into shore and make sure she is fine. Which, this day, is the case. She comes out of the water. And a few days later, I too, am done with lifeguarding.
Coach dies several years later. Then my father succumbs to cancer several seasons afterwards.
Now it is night, miles up the coast. Here is a cell phone in my hand, years later.
I am driving home tonight after a benefit dinner for the Homeless Shelter. A woman weaves down the sidewalk. She is one of our long-term guests at the Shelter. It is 11:30pm, thirty minutes after last check-in.
One block later I am on the phone to the front desk at the Shelter.
A tired voice answers. I am sorry, but I cannot disclose any guest's whereabouts.
I am on the Board. Why is she on the street tonight.
She has not followed the case management plan from the Shelter.
I am sad to hear this. It is last night at the Shelter, and I am giving her a hug good night. We talk about our kids.
I press the End button on the phone. I am driving home. Another friend passes me, flashes his lights. I do not follow him.
I drive on, drive home. I am home, finishing this story in my quiet room.
I can change nothing about the past. About how the woman I save had finds a way to start drowning in only five feet of water, and probably never needs me. And about how the man who dies at Breakwater dies of a heart attack, instantly, before Danny even reaches the water.
We can do little, if anything, to save the ones we love. We can save ourselves, maybe. We can love those we live with. And we mourn those who get away, those we try to save but cannot, and those who are still Out There.
(c) 1999 Christopher F. McNulty All Rights Reserved
I am a child. My father is always comfortable with margins.
He is an attorney. Lawyer jokes are not common. There is no Perry Mason, Johnnie Cochran, L. A. Law.
Dad stops, remembers his early career. He is a farmer. Homesick, he postpones his college career. Then, he has bachelor's degree, a masters in engineering. An engineer in industrial America.
Here is an old photograph of sixteen men and two women. My father and mother are both on law review at St. Joseph's University Law School. Mom is in her early twenties. Law review is a chance for the best and brightest students to compete by writing and editing scholarly articles on the most obscure points of law imaginable. My mother is 25 and beautiful, surrounded by a dozen young, brilliant, upcoming future judges, partners, CEOs. Somehow, Dad gets ahead of her many suitors.
Dad works as a senior attorney at a chemical company, at a private firm. At night, private clients come in. Dad's pleading paper is thick, with double pink lines down each side, to forestall the potential of messy words, spilling forth onto the real world. Not one, but two lines.
The man thinks most clearly with a yellow legal pad in his hand. He teaches me how to make a decision.
Dad says, write down the reasons for, and the reasons against in two columns on a legal pad.
How do you know? Do you count them up?
Yes. Write them down.
In Dad's legal pad, the love for his family fills the left side of the page. The right hand Margin is always empty.
We are not an athletic family. We do not go hiking. What we learn of the outdoors comes at our beach house, on the edge of the old family farm on Atlantic Bay.
I have the great fortune to spend my summers in an endless cycle of extended families, sandy feet running through the wet grass around the bungalows. Thin, spring-loaded screen doors slapping in the salt air are my summer soundtrack.
It is a great place to grow up. There are dozens of trails lining through the scrub woods behind the bungalow. Some lead to the Pirate Ship. The pirate ship is a real boat, or at least it used to be. A 16 foot wooden rowboat, with a fading, hand applied coat of Fiberglas. It is the boat my dad and his brothers had learned to ski behind. No fancy ignition, no high horsepower Mercurys. Just pull the starter cord on the old Johnson, and away you went. My brother and I inherit a landlocked boat with rotting gunwales. We manage to take it to the Caribbean almost daily.
I am thirteen. We have a seaworthy aluminum rowboat. I take it out on crisp, late summer afternoons to go snapper fishing. I watch the wind turning on the water, the blue change of seasons. My rowboat slowly turning on its anchor line. Suddenly, there is electric excitement when the silent wavelet V's suddenly bracket the monofilament. Something is moving at the end of the Line.
I am one day older. It is a brisk morning at Breakwater Beach. A flimsy table and chair stand incongruously on the rocky shore. We are signing up for swimming lessons, run by my father's old soccer Coach. I am never picked first for my junior high gym team. But he sizes me up.
Coach squints. He’s got good shoulders on him. I’ll take him for the Rescue class. Coach Bob Woods rocks on his heels at the beach, mostly forgetting how he started on the water. In his manner and his memories, he is teaching survival swimming to newly minted World War II Navy fliers. He returns from the Navy to coach soccer and just about every other sport at Paumanok High School. He coaches my father and my uncles, although he never teaches my father to swim. Old, simple games. Soccer and lacrosse. Dad still calls him Coach Woods. Even after retirement, the sons and grandsons of his old charges call him Coach. He silently loves it.
Coach's civvies are a uniform - striped polo shirt, shorts with a belt, tinted glasses, socks, and sneakers, and a white fishing cap, raked forward. He wears a simple gold chain around his neck, always at risk of disappearing into the sun-aged, leather crevasses of his neck. He isn’t old as much as weathered, and he was weathered long before I was born.
After swimming lessons, he is motoring around the 20 or so beaches of the North Shore in his white ’65 Impala convertible. The car is immaculate, and possibly better known than Coach, if such a thing is possible in a small town. The top is never down. Ever. He keeps his speed below 35 mph past the temples of my youth. The Shoreview. Town Beach. Breakwater. The Yacht Club.
Coach loves his car. The working lifeguards all joke about stealing that car, borrowing really. Who gets the car when he dies.
And Coach is at ease around the Margins of beaches, pools and bays. He is not a big man. Wiry, and energetic, with the cool calm of a Johnny Carson. He teaches me more about saving people than anyone else.
There are all sorts of ways to save people. In the Red Cross, we begin by teaching how to approach a drowning victim in the water -- the front surface approach, wrist carries, chin carries. Escape moves.
Practical lifeguarding means not being stupid, and not running in after a victim without maximizing your options. That means using equipment.
It is a county requirement that all beaches have a boat or a surfboard for getting out to victims. But the town doesn't have enough money for boats, or for the big, two-man rescue surfboards popular in California. We use one-person surfboards. On busy days, we paddle around on them outside the ropes. We also learn to use rescue buoys and ropes.
I am sixteen, and my brother Danny, fifteen, is finishing up his Rescue classes. We both become lifeguards. We have the same friends, the same job. We both get parts in the local community theater.
Lifeguarding pays well, for a student on a summer job. There is an almost military dash and swagger of lifeguarding, thanks to Coach. The tan. I am needed, I am that man on the tower you can turn to when things go wrong.
Several summers come and go. We all love the beach. We work seven hours a day, six days a week. We still get paid when it rains. Days off, we usually … go to the beach.
There are a lot of late nights. We live on a beach, we work on a beach, and still, most nights, we wind up across the Inlet at Georges Beach. Danny, my cousins, my sister, our friends. Some of us can't get into the bars -- too young -- so we just get beers and sit under the stars. Waiting for the Perseids. Orion will rise, late in August, if we remain long enough.
Town Beach is a family place. Danny & I are the regular lifeguards. We sit on the three person, 12 foot chair, called a tower. Six hours a day, six days a week. My sister and my cousin Jodie work the parking lot booth.
Danny just oozes charm. I can be on the beach for an hour before anyone notices. Everyone sees Danny as soon as he arrives.
Matt Tuthill is sometimes the third guard. I had helped train him, a young kid with good shoulders. Matt has seen some fighter plane movie a few times, wants to stencil our names on the back of our tower. I do not agree.
At the beach, storms never just spring up, full blown, from straight overhead. They always blow in from the edge. The squall lines blow in from the horizon, sweeping down the Sound. The air chills. All the boats start floating the wrong way at anchor, as the wind swings around, now southerly, now easterly. It is impossibly dark. Lightning and rain fill the distance between me and shelter, running, then sitting in my car, alone, while the wind finds every loose crack in the weatherstripping around the window. And then -- like that! -- I'm back in the light, the beach and sky swept clear. Just me and the aftermath.
It's another Saturday, midmorning. I am standing in the street at the beach house, honking the horn, waiting for Danny to get ready.
Let's go. We're late, I say.
I was in the living room waiting for you.
I'm sick of this.
Don't give me any of your older brother shit.
We are yelling on the road in front of our neighbor, who is edging his lawn. We are blazing down the North Road at speeds far above 35 miles per hour. We come burning into the parking lot together, about 15 minutes late. We take the tower, we keep right at it, with poor Matt sandwiched between us.
Matt can't stand it any more. Are you guys going to keep going like this all day, or do I have to get the firehose?
Butt out.
It’s none of your business, Matt.
Nothing like an outsider to provoke a little family unity. Then we are silent. The spell had been broken.
Danny and I are not working together one hot August afternoon, though. I'm on the tower at Town Beach. Danny is at the Breakwater. Coach is late coming to Town Beach. It's after 3:00pm. He's quieter than usual.
He starts, no jokes today. There's been some sort of accident down at the Breakwater.
What happened?
Not sure -- the Rescue Squad got up there around 3:00. I sent your brother home.
Is he all right?
He's fine. Something happened in the water.
I finish my shift. Dan's car is parked roadside when I pull up to the bungalow. Dan stands alone in our room. The air is carved by the late sun, arcing through the blinds and laddering the walls.
He is quiet for a long while. Then he starts.
You remember from first aid -- when they tell you if you're doing the chest right you may break some ribs.
Yeah. (This is right out of the CPR manual -- for chest compressions to have any chance of pumping blood they need to be 1 1/2 to 2 inches deep.)
Dan breathes, continues. Well, I felt them crack. And he was just rolling around in the water. There was water in his mouth. And his skin was just … dead.
There is truly nothing else to say, nothing to fill the distance between us, but the dust motes, turning in the endless gyres in the old camp cottage. We stand there, silently, for a few more minutes in our tiny room. The sun angles ever lower in the sky. I have thousands of questions to ask, and I never will.
Dan stops lifeguarding at the end of the summer. But we are never again so close, nor do we fight as intensely, as we do for those brief months in that long summer.
I keep on lifeguarding for a few years more. I am a year past college and ready to accept an indoor job in the city. I pull more tired swimmers out of the water. I clean the beach. I treat scrapes and jellyfish stings. I finish college, teach grade school. And I have never saved a life.
There is always one nearly perfect day late in the summer. It is that day, brilliant blue. I am working, alone, on a mostly deserted beach. No one comes to swim. I hold a novel I am reading, earning $7.30 an hour. A teenage girl with an indecisive crush bicycles up.
Hi there.
Hi. I brought you lunch, she says.
Thanks.
I will be starting a paralegal job in two weeks. It's my farewell tour of duty.
I look out toward Shelter Island late in the day. I take off my sunglasses -- I want to see something, the sky, the world, as it truly is, as much as one ever can.
It is easy to get lulled into only watching the water in front of me. But just like storms, all the trouble starts on the edge -- somewhere just over that big Margin where the ropes warn of danger beyond. The siren call of swimming for the deeps, going alone over the ropes, always sings. Especially to people who have no idea what awaits. Everything worthwhile, and everything dangerous, floats just beyond.
Two days later I am on the tower at Gull Pond when it happens.
I am drilling early in the morning, practicing rescue techniques. The drill that takes the most coordination is the rescue buoy and line.
The fastest way to get out to a swimmer was usually with a rescue tube. A rescue tube is like a ski belt, with about a ten foot rope and a shoulder harness. I can get down to the water, with more momentum, if I sprint off the tower and grab a rescue tube on the way down to the water. Stopping for a heavy surfboard just slows things down. I am careful not to burn out on the approach stroke, saving strength for the return, pulling the victim back in with you. I get the buoy and line out there as fast as possible. My partner will work the line from shore, to get us in.
This is what I do when the woman begins to scream. I am not drilling, not teaching. Someone is going down, Out There.
Help, help, I'm drowning.
My partner says, What?
My feet hit the sand three, four, five times before I am in the Water. A porpoise entry clears the waves and moves through the shallows faster than you can on a run. Crawlstroking, but always head-up, to keep one eye in the victim in case they go down during your approach. Now I am beyond the ropes. Go, go, go.
She is tossing up weak handfuls of water as she rails against the waves. She can’t keep her head above water. She is in her late 50's or early 60's.
I pass the buoy to her, she clutches it, calms down. I bring her into shore and make sure she is fine. Which, this day, is the case. She comes out of the water. And a few days later, I too, am done with lifeguarding.
Coach dies several years later. Then my father succumbs to cancer several seasons afterwards.
Now it is night, miles up the coast. Here is a cell phone in my hand, years later.
I am driving home tonight after a benefit dinner for the Homeless Shelter. A woman weaves down the sidewalk. She is one of our long-term guests at the Shelter. It is 11:30pm, thirty minutes after last check-in.
One block later I am on the phone to the front desk at the Shelter.
A tired voice answers. I am sorry, but I cannot disclose any guest's whereabouts.
I am on the Board. Why is she on the street tonight.
She has not followed the case management plan from the Shelter.
I am sad to hear this. It is last night at the Shelter, and I am giving her a hug good night. We talk about our kids.
I press the End button on the phone. I am driving home. Another friend passes me, flashes his lights. I do not follow him.
I drive on, drive home. I am home, finishing this story in my quiet room.
I can change nothing about the past. About how the woman I save had finds a way to start drowning in only five feet of water, and probably never needs me. And about how the man who dies at Breakwater dies of a heart attack, instantly, before Danny even reaches the water.
We can do little, if anything, to save the ones we love. We can save ourselves, maybe. We can love those we live with. And we mourn those who get away, those we try to save but cannot, and those who are still Out There.
(c) 1999 Christopher F. McNulty All Rights Reserved
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