Lifeguard

A little practical advice, and lots of memories, from a former beach lifeguard. Take a little risk. Have a lot of fun. Even if we were not in a world war, no one gets out of this room alive.

An update from my Quora post a few years ago.

Sollipsistic Coffee Addict, updated for substack, August 19, 2022

I’m going to be a lifeguard for the first time this summer. What are some tricks, tips or things I should know?

Steven (Steve) F. Martin

If you are going to be a salt-water (beach) life-guard, here are some tips.

1 - Do a few warm-up exercises and stretches on the beach every morning, and afterwards, head a couple of hundred meters offshore and swim parallel with the beach for at least a kilometer or more.

2 - In your morning warm-up swim, use a breast-stroke with your eyes always above the water. It is also the preferred swimming stroke for rescues as it allows you to keep your eyes on the target.

(A hint that this will not be your typical instructional manual or memoir).

3 - Know what a Rip current is. In my working locale of North Carolina, they were known as ‘offsets’, and more commonly, and erroneously known as ‘rip tides’. (LOL … This ‘local’ boy must have spent 30 minutes frantically looking for ‘offsets’ on Google and thinking WTF? Nobody knows what an offset is?)

I googled, googled, and googled, until I was all googly-eyed. And then googled some more. Google’s motto used to be ‘Do no evil.’ Used to be.

Okay, for everyone else, it is ‘‘rip current’’ or ‘‘rip tide’’. But for me, ‘offsets’ is forever burned into my brain.

A straight, sandy beach will often have an underwater sandbar close to shore. That sandbar is not continuous. There will be breaks in it. Even though you may not be able to see the sandbar, you can identify its location because when incoming waves recede, the water tends to run parallel with the beach until it is funneled through those breaks in the sandbar. That funneled rush of water will be ‘white water’, at least whiter, and choppier than the surrounding sea. The chop is because of the receding water interacting with the incoming wave.

4 - Know how to use a rip current.

Surfers use them all the time. Jump into one, and it will whisk you offshore in a heartbeat. If you need to get to your target in a hurry, look for the nearest rip current. And when you find it, jump on in.

5 - Know the most dangerous area of the beach for swimmers.

Holiday bathers are the least likely to know what a rip current is, and the most likely to be caught in one and swept offshore. If you see a rip current appear near your station, keep the swimmers away from it.

6 - Know the most dangerous situation for swimmers.

Those holiday beach goers who do get caught in a rip current usually make the same mistake of trying to swim against the rip current, fighting against the offshore flow of water to get back to the beach. It is here where they tire out and are most likely to panic.

7 - Know how to use a rip current (part 2)

When seeing a bather struggling in a rip current, use the rip current to get to the victim ASAP, and guide the victim parallel with the beach, to smoother water, and then bring the victim ashore.

8 - As Ranjetta (in the original Quora question) says, if possible, avoid direct contact with a struggling victim. Use props, particularly a torpedo buoy.

9 - If you have never taken part in competitive wrestling, consider it. In cases of direct body contact, those wrestling skills are probably more important than swimming skills.

The majority of double drownings occur when an inexperienced person tries to help someone who has panicked.

As you approach the victim, go under water, grab the victim’s ankles, and twist them so that the victim’s back is facing you. Work your hands up the body.

If the vicim is calm. grasp the swimmer’s chin in the cup of your hand, and lever the swimmer’s body to a position parallel with the water’s surface by positioning your elbow into the swimmer’s back, and do a side stroke for calmer water, and eventually shore.

If the victim is struggling, swim with a side stroke and go into a cross chest carry, positioning the victim on your hip, speak to the victim to reassure him/her, and proceed to calmer water or to the shore using that side stroke.

10 - Will leave treatment of an unconscious victims to any other Quora writers who have that experience. All of my rescues (5, with two double rescues making 7 people) safely reached the shore in full consciousness.

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And now a little trip down memory lane, here are my stories.

I was a marine biology major at UNC-W, class of ’78, though I was on the see-weed, long-term plan. I saw it, smoked it, and unlike a certain past POTUS, might have inhaled.

During the summer of my sophomore year (‘75), I took a summer job as a beach lifeguard at Carolina Beach. A typical day …

The same pier at evening, looking from the south …

I miss those fishing piers, particularly strolling on them at night, night fishing under lamp-lights, couples strolling under moonlight …

Nothing quite like those structures in Japan. Too unstable here, and in most places around the Kanto area — too deep, too soon.

My Japanese fishing buddies are surprised to learn that even a 2 hour boat ride towards the Gulf Stream, well out of sight of land, would only get you about 30 meters deep. In most of Japan, a couple of hundred meters offshore, and you are already 30 meters deep or more.

This is not the only difference between the seas around Japan and the American East Coast. A Japanese fishing buddy had moved to Snohomish, Washington to try his hand as a start-up. I visited one summer, and we fished the Strait of Juan de Fuca, separating the state of Washington from Vancouver, Canada. Though more abundant with marine life, the sea and air smelled similar to that of Japan.

The Atlantic is another beast altogether. The smell of the ocean is completely different. In Japan and Northwest America, a soft, musty smell of seaweed hangs thick in the air.

The Atlantic is noticeably saltier than the pacific, a sting in the nostrils, a stringent, unforgiving saltiness which makes a cold beer all the better, taffy all the sweeter.

Ahh … Quora to back me up … Why is the Atlantic Ocean saltier than the Pacific?

Seems like half my family was tied up with work at the beach. My slightly older cousin was one of the first women to serve as a first mate on one of the charter sports fishing boats. My younger brother was a carnie for awhile. My departed younger brother … dedicated to you …

The shifting sands still move, as well as the wind and waves … but the local culture has also shifted a bit in the 45 years since I last tread that boardwalk. For example, flip flop beach sandals were as embedded in the scene as waves of spartina patens and alterniflora grass.

But now?

So bare feet are okay? What about bare this … ?

Someone in City Hall must have seen Borat, and gotten a bee in his … uh … bonnet. Yeah, that’s it, ‘bonnet’ — not ‘mankini’.

Well, there is still a boardwalk, and I can’t afford a pair of Air Jordan’s, so I’ll just borrow my sister’s pumps.

Desperately trying to look gentrified …

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The sounds of the summer of ’75 found me just stepping into the water of modern jazz and post-Bitches Brew fusion such as found on the CTI, ECM, and BlueNote labels … Bill Evans (more to come on dovetailing hime wit BLM), Coltrane, Davis, early Grover Washington Jr., Weather Report or Mahavishnu — but especially Herbie Hancock and his HeadHunters and Chick Corea’s (RIP) Return to Forever.

Even now in the summer of 2022, Herbie’s Butterfly is my telephone ring tone.

Don’t know if the following is limited to subscriber’s of YouTube Music or Premium, but the live version of ‘Hang Up Your Hang Ups’ is still one of my go-to road songs for the expressway, and came out of that era. While later working the 3rd shift of a convenience store in Chapel Hill (part time stand-up philosophy student), it was Herbie, Chick, and CTI label jazz on the boombox at night, Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos by day. Got lots of conversation from customers thanks to my music choice.

Why oh why is the classic title cut from RTF’s first album piece not on Youtube? This was the first and probably best of Chick Corea's line-ups ... Flora's unique 3 octave scatting can flip in a heartbeat — from soft and breezy to a banshee in heat, her partner and husband, Airto Moreira, limbs flailing out those crazy Brazilian rhythms, Joe Farrell, Stanley Clarke ... and most of all, Chick's relentless piano. By far, early Fusion at its best!

If the above is not viewable without subscription … my modest homage below …

Oh … and I actually met and briefly chatted with Flora and Airto at Blue Note Tokyo some 30 or so years later.

In the meantime, a couple of Chick’s pieces, the first from RTF’s second album ‘Light as a Feather’ (featuring Flora) , the second from the electronic line-up of his 4th album, the Stanley Clarke composition ‘Vulcan Worlds’.

’’500 Miles High’’ … A modern jazz standard.

And still feeling the testosterone, Stanley Clarke’s ‘Vulcan Worlds’ … which pulled me out of the prog rock scene (though I still like early Yes) and into things fusion, jazz, and Brasil. It is hard to believe this firebrand of fusion is on the same album as that earlier link to a Chick Corea RTF piece.

And for late, late at night, Grover Washington Jr. —

But this was was not the kind of stuff you would hear playing on the AM radio or in the beach-side dives of the early-mid 70’s. Maybe late night NPR if you were lucky. Maybe.

So to set the tone, a bit of the soundtrack to the summer of ’75, and a few that were still hanging on in those Carolina breezes, will be included with my tales of the ‘high’ seas.

Was surprised to find that Phoebe was popular in Japan too, more so than Janis Ian.

And a good ol’ boy from North Carolina. His dad taught at Chapel Hill, and from the wiki-read … ‘James later said, "Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the outlying hills, were tranquil, rural, beautiful, but quiet. Thinking of the red soil, caused by local copper mining … plus the seasons, the way things smelled down there, I feel as though my experience of coming of age there was more a matter of landscape and climate than people." I hear ya James.

Oh! And check out the soon to be famous singer-song writer, Carole King, ticklin’ the ivories here …

Gotta add an under appreciated little gem from Carole …

And the BIG hit in the beach side rockin’ bars of ’75 …

Ooops. Not that one. This one.

It was a good year.

Of about a dozen lifeguards, I was probably the smallest and youngest of the lot, but between modest swimming skills, an NASDS certified scuba license, and being the captain of my former high school wrestling team (4th in the State Tournament, and I once pushed a 3 time state champion into overtime, before I lost 😅) … I made the cut.

Notice all that facial hair on the musicians back in the day?

I guess in some way or another, we social primates, when socializing, had to strut our stuff and make a visual display of our hormones, or fade into silent desperation.

I had no facial hair, and to this day — have yet to find my first chest hair. Now when is puberty supposed to start?

A damned Donnie Osmond double.

And my name was not much of a help.

I was just getting into the existential angst of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, exploring the limits of logic through Wittgenstein’s Ladder and Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems, the aesthetics of zen and stoicism … even experimented with my self image by smoking a pipe — meerschaum, not bong (well, maybe a bit).

That pipe didn’t help either. And me in a ‘professorial’ tweed-jacket? Ha.

But the name is what done me in.

On first hearing my name, ‘Steve Martin’, this is what popped into everyone’s head …

(sigh) So much for first impressions.

I wished to god that ‘Stephen Glenn Martin’ had used his real name. Or maybe just ‘Glenn Martin’ would have saved me years of shucking and jiving. It might have been cooler to have had a name like ‘Bill Murray’ or ‘John Belushi’. But I’ve learned to roll with it, consigned to living with an arrow through my head.

Big hair — but too short, too shy, and too nerdy … and definitely not cool enough for the hot girls.

A summer in the sun made me a temporary blonde. But the other life guards were all a bit older than me, taller, bigger hair, more hair - and all over, and waaaay cooler.

My one defense … was to never admit to falling in love.
Ha.
Not much of a wrestling move, or as I was later to find, a good life-strategy.

Bronzed long-haired gods of the beach, and every bar and snack shop owner knew them well enough so that we often got treated to a beer and a meal when the day’s job was done.

But one fine day during my tenure, the party began at the beginning of the day — when the head lifeguard found a couple of doobies in the sand during our morning cleaning of the beach.

Doobies? Amidst the spartina grass?

We all gathered around his station in a tight circle to pass them around. Of course no one inhaled. We engulfed. And then headed offshore for our morning swim … heads as clear as a bell — that big one in Philly, the one with the crack in it.

Wow. I didn’t know Marty Feldman could play the flute. 🤪

Come to think of it, while chatting with buddy (and fellow lifeguard veteran) Magnus, I can’t rule out the probability that all those parties, twixt twilight and dawn, had something to do with our evolving skill-set in navigating those slapping windstreams, swirling eddies, and face-smashing breakers.

No rule-book, no charts, no statistics, science, or ritual can teach a beach lifeguard how to do that. You just kind of slip into a taoist dance with nature … sometimes intimate, sometimes randy and raucous.

sometimes randy and raucous.

How much chuck, would a woodchuck chuck?

As I mentioned in point 10, I never had to deal with an unconscious victim, but the head guard did.

It was a crowded 4th of July weekend, and a middle aged guy, with a bit more than a middle-aged belly and a Bud(weiser), got caught in an offset (rip tide), took on some water, and was unconscious by the time the head guard got him to shore.

We gathered around while the head lifeguard pinched the guy’s nose and administered mouth-to-mouth. The guy came through, but nobody had told me what to expect … spewing a foul fountain of salt water, warm beer, and a cheese burger … or was it a hot dog?

Hard to tell. But I think I skipped any meat dishes for that night. Pick up the pieces.

But all’s well that ends well, tanks to da coconut …

Lemon Tree, Very Pretty

As I mentioned at the end of my lifeguard tips, I only had to go in 5 times. All of the cases were people caught in rip currents, so I should have kept a better eye peeled for those buggers. They don’t even depend on the tides to unexpectedly pop up.

None of my rescues involved particularly panicked swimmers, but one of my two double rescues, was a bit scary. That offset was very close to the remains of a very old shipwreck, and a 9 foot lemon shark was known to frequent the area.

Though not nearly as dangerous as other species such as the bull shark, or ‘George’, an infamous 11 foot great hammerhead that frequented the fishing pier of Wrightsville Beach just north of us, it was still big.

And it had teeth.

And that year, as many before, a fisherman had gone missing. A half eaten body had been found. Though nobody knew for sure, the official city government report was that he had drowned, and his corpse had been partially eaten … ‘afterwards’.

And that was the same summer one of the most influential horror shows of all time came out.

Aw man, I couldn’t help but get a queasy feeling in my stomach on those morning warm-up swims.

We’d seen all kinds of critters out there. But it was what I didn’t see that most scared me. For good or bad, imagination has no end. The monsters of the id. As Stephen King once said, the monster behind the door. That’s what scary.

When those two little girls got swept out towards the wreck on my watch, several of my instincts kicked in, and one was that existential shudder of mortality — after everyone was tucked safely back on shore.

Now what equally scary movie was this first track in?

‘Tubular Bells’ may have been playing in my head while towing to the the two little girls back in with the torpedo buoy, but my response to those girls, with each steady stroke, closer to the safety of sand, was closer to another little Stevie tune …

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Captain or a Rolling Stone?

One of the coolest characters on the beach was an older guy, could have been anywhere between 60 and 90. Imagine a balding Santa Claus on summer break. He went by the name of ‘Cappy’ … and though I’m guessing it was short for ‘Captain’, I never found out what he did, or used to do, other than swim and drink a beer or two in the evenings.
Guessing he was something between these two …

He would head offshore for his daily morning swim even earlier than we did, and didn’t come back in until hours later. Sunbathers would often come to our stands pointing to a bobbing head, maybe 500 meters offshore … we’d look and reassure the bathers, it was just Cappy, doing his thing.

One evening, we found ourselves in a beachside bar, tossing back a beer with Cappy, and someone asked him what was his scariest experience swimming offshore.

He leaned back, pulled on his fraying white beard, and told us of some of the creatures he’d seen and swum with … sharks, turtles, mantas, and porpoises. But the most scared he’d ever been, he described with excruciating detail … how he was raising his head up from a leisurely breast stroke, when something soft, wet, and cold completely covered his face.

Jelly fish? — we were thinking. Maybe the putrid corpse of some sea creature? Or even a land creature? Here in Japan, shortly after a typhoon had passed, and I was a few kilometers offshore fishing a weedline, I’ve come across a dead cat, face down, and a bloated pig, feet up. North Carolina … hmm … could be the remains of any number of critters.

Nobody said it, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking … a human body?

On he went, describing that clinging, cold, and sticky feeling … and there we sat, eyes wide, imaginations foaming and bubbling at what that horror could be. And then he let us have it. His head had emerged from the sea to be draped by …

… an open sheet of newspaper floating on the surface.

A fountain of beer spewed from my mouth, laughing at one of the best salt-water shaggy dog stories I had ever heard.

Got some funny salt water stories from Japan as well. Just a short one for the moment.

One of my Japanese fishing buddies is an architect and owns his own firm. One day, we were fishing a weed line offshore between Numazu and Osezaki, and came upon a ‘toriyama’ (literally translated as a ‘mountain of bird’) … seagulls swooping over a surface school of sardines, and knowing there would be amberjack, dolphin-fish (mahi-mahi or dorado), yellowfin tuna and such underneath, we started casting our jigs into that pandemonium of fish and fowl.

We caught a few ‘peanut’ dolphin (meh … between 20 and 30 inches), but my buddy also had a seagull get tangled up in his line as it fell during the end of a cast. He reeled it in, frantically flapping all the way to the boas, as if we were the Colonel Sanders twins incarnate. He heaved it into the boat, I grabbed a rag to cover its eyes and calm it down while we untangled the line, and for laughs, I took a photo of him, grinning from ear to ear, while holding up the gull just before releasing it.

I made a large, A3 size print-out of the photo for him, and damn if he didn’t frame it and put it up in his office on the wall behind his desk. Clients and customers would come in, stare at that photo, and ask in all seriousness if he goes fishing for seagulls. And is more than clever enough to keep a straight face and say they cook up really fine with 11 tasty herbs and spices.

Of course, this is Japan. He is the boss. And if the boss says orange is the new black, it is the law. Even now, I can’t stop laughing between each stroke of the keyboard wondering what those clients must have been thinking when they left his office.

But all good things come to an end. Hard times to come. And good times. But nothing quite like the summer of ‘75.

This was all decades ago, but it seems like yesterday. Odd that more recent memories seem older.

Offsets off Japan

I jumped to Japan in the early 80’s.

Ten years had come and gone. Another decade, another sound track. Pat Metheny, Oregon, Al Jarreau, Tom Jobim and Brazilian post-bossa MPB and jazz had permanently carved their way into me, but will save those for another post. Well, can’t resist posting just a couple … because one is my go-to soundtracks when driving in the late evening mountains west of Tokyo (and I made the collage).

And the other is just so beautifully haunting, and though in Portuguese … about the edge of the sea …

But the Anglo-pop music of the day had some good ones too. Japanese music, another time.

A new life in Japan, the beginning of a career in academia, and here are these guys singing Arthur Schopenhauer’s theme, a perfect match for the economic Japanese juggernaut roll.

Nah … not everybody. I prefer Huey Lewis’s take on it. No, not Borat’s son. That was ‘Hooey Loois’.

The bubble was picking up steam, and anyone who could speak English could make a living wage, and then some.

But I couldn’t stay away from the water. After all, this is an island nation.

So I used this Tatsuro Yamashita song (without the Spanish subtitles) as an excuse for ‘pronunciation practice’ in Japan for many a year. It was the theme song for a pretty good documentary about the adrenaline-driven summer fun of the West Coast — ‘Big Wave’.

I have only ‘rescued’ one person since moving to Japan. This was back in the mid 80’s, at Kujukuri beach (九十九里町) in Chiba.

Search as you might, you’ll find no doobies in the sands of Japan.

This wasn’t to come until a few years later, but I found it! My new drug.

And then, like this year, it was bit hot. A bit. How hot?

For Japanese buddies …

I was with some of my students at the school I was teaching at the time, Sundai ELS, now Sundai College of Business & Foreign Language.

I went a couple of hundred meters offshore by myself, reminiscing about those glory days by the sea a decade earlier.

A younger Japanese guy, not one of my students, was too far out for his own good, but near enough to cry out for help. The water must have been at least 10 meters deep, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to shore on his own.

I swam over to him. Saw he was struggling to stay afloat, and went through the drill of dropping beneath the water, and grabbing him by the ankles, working my way up to the surface. He was not in panic mode, so I didn’t have to go to a cross-chest carry, so I just brought him back in to shore with a side-stroke chin hold.

He gave me sheepish ‘arigato’ and ran back to his friends, who probably were none the wiser for knowing what had happened, and I don’t think my students had noticed, so I didn’t mention anything to them.

It has taken awhile to figure it out, but saving face makes it difficult for many Japanese to appreciate help from an outsider, especially a foreigner, and to my astonishment, even some volunteer groups will marginalize foreign members. Shogo sheds a bit a light on the subject, but mostly from the view of cultural exceptionalism.

My take on it? Meh, we’re all brothers and sisters. Homo sapiens may be a single species, but I have my share of bonobo in me ..

Just being in that lifeguard setting again, I felt the warm glow of reliving a bit of the past, and possibly keeping just another statistic out of the newspaper.

This could go on for awhile, but past midnight in Japan, and running out of steam.

A safe and memorable summer to you all. — steve

p.s. From everything I’ve heard, the Aussies are the gods of beach rescue. Am hoping to hear some good tales over a Hahn SuperDry, and compare notes. About lifeguards too.