The Rescue
My first job, outside of cleaning kennels at my father’s veterinary hospital, was as a lifeguard at a place called Oak Island Lakes in Ravenna, Ohio. I was 17. In reality I shouldn’t have been a lifeguard since you had to be at least 18 to legally work as a lifeguard in Ohio in 1966, but I was hired anyway. I had passed my Junior and Senior Life Saving courses so technically---on paper---I was a lifeguard.
Oak Island Lakes was located on a large rural property. It contained a pond/swamp full of snapping turtles, frogs, and lots of deer flies whose sting felt like a hot nail pushing into your flesh. That pond supplied water for two shoe box-shaped pits that had been bulldozed to create two “swimming pools”, one about three feet deep for wading, and another had been dredged to about ten or eleven feet deep in the center where there was a floating dock you could use as a diving platform. Both “pools” had clay bottoms and the water was murky at the best of times. There was no beach, just a grassy area surrounding them where you could put down a towel and your cooler and spend some time.
There was a long dirt road leading off the highway that brought you into the place and to the gravel parking lot. A wooden concession stand where you paid to get access to swimming stood near the parking lot. It offered patrons cold drinks, chips, candy bars, hot dogs and burgers, etc. The owners---the Coles, Dale and Rena, lived in a trailer near the concession stand. The whole outfit was a pretty basic facility.
Oak Island Lakes was mainly frequented by families of factory workers from Ravenna, the lion’s share of them having moved north from Southern Ohio and West Virginia to find work in factories, and most of the time visitors to the park were teenagers or young people in their early twenties. They would arrive in clouds of dust, roaring down the dirt road to the parking lot in aging jalopies with moon discs, dice hanging from the rear view mirrors, lake pipes, flames painted on the fenders---stuff like that. Many of them---male and female both---had those tattoos you make by stabbing yourself in the arm with a needle dipped in indelible ink, so whatever design they came up with---names, hearts, guns, whatever, they were outlined with a series of dots.
Sometimes they’d get in fights. They were racists, as were the owners of Oak Island Lakes---the guy was anyway---and once when a few carloads of black people arrived Dale emerged from the trailer with his deer rifle to block their entry. His wife had phoned the cops, though, and several Highway Patrol cars arrived in time to diffuse the situation so nobody got shot. The visitors never made it into the swimming pools, though.
Among the regulars, the young guys were blustery buffoons, the girls were flirty but at the same time distant. All of them swore like sailors. They smoked filterless cigarettes---Camels, Lucky Strikes, Philip Morris and Chesterfields---and flicked them into the water in the swimming area. They regularly drank too much. Some of them would throw up after drinking too much. They left garbage all over the place and it was up to me and the girl who worked the concession stand to pick stuff up before we went home each night.
They tolerated me but did their best to be intimidating and cool, particularly if they had the chance to perform in front of the opposite sex, male or female. None of them could swim worth a damn and spent most of the time that they were in the water splashing and wrestling, shouting and screaming, swearing and laughing.
Every fifty minutes I’d blow my Acme Thunderer whistle and order everyone out of the water for a ten minute break. During one of those breaks on a busy weekend one of the young guys came over to me and said he couldn’t find his friend, that his friend managed to wade out to the floating dock on the shallow side, and eventually jumped off the dock to show off for some girls. He also told me the guy didn’t know how to swim.
I nearly panicked. Here I was, an underage lifeguard with a possible drowning on my hands. Every lifeguard thinks about that---someone drowning on their watch.
Immediately I ran and dived into the murky pond water. When I got near the dock I went under and began feeling around on the bottom. Within seconds I’d found the guy, a big kid---who couldn’t swim. As I reached for him he grabbed me around my whole torso and clung like a baby monkey. We were face to face. I couldn’t break his grip, couldn’t get loose. He was too strong. It was time to get creative.
I knew which way it was to the shore so I began to bounce, kind of like a pogo stick---thrusting us both upward by pushing off the bottom. When I reached the surface I’d gulp some air and we’d sink back down again. I repeated that a few times, leaning towards the shore with each thrust. We didn’t have far to go but it seemed like a mile. When we got into shallow water three other guys dragged us onshore, got him unhooked from me and laid him on his back. He was out cold and as blue as a pair of Levis.
I tried “mouth to mouth” to get him breathing but that didn’t work. Out of desperation I straddled him, put my hands together, lifted them over my head and brought them down hard on his stomach.
Whoosh! He spewed water like a geyser, spluttering and coughing, and started to breathe. A minute or so later, convinced he was coming back into the world, I climbed off, went to the lawn chair that passed as my lifeguard station and toweled off, shaking like a leaf.
About an hour later I noticed the same guy sitting on a beach towel with some girls, laughing, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. He never thanked me for saving his life. Never said a damn word.
I worked as a lifeguard for four more years, moving up in the lifeguard world to finish my career at a private lake where nothing like the Oak Island Lakes escapades occurred. But once a lifeguard, always a lifeguard. You find yourself automatically scanning the water at any beach you visit, squinting and surveying like a meerkat to identify potential problems.
And twenty-one years later, on a beach on the Dordogne River in the south of France where my wife, Charlotte, our daughter Maggie, and I found ourselves when Charlotte and I were working at an international summer school in Martel, a young French guy jumped out of a canoe to show off for some girls. And he couldn’t swim.
Instinctively I saw something was wrong and watched him as he struggled and began to splash frantically. At that point I was in the river in an instant, swam to him and brought him to shore where his friends gathered around him. He stayed at the beach for the rest of the afternoon, hanging out with the girls he was trying to impress, and he, too, never said a word to me.
© Kent Jones 2016
My first job, outside of cleaning kennels at my father’s veterinary hospital, was as a lifeguard at a place called Oak Island Lakes in Ravenna, Ohio. I was 17. In reality I shouldn’t have been a lifeguard since you had to be at least 18 to legally work as a lifeguard in Ohio in 1966, but I was hired anyway. I had passed my Junior and Senior Life Saving courses so technically---on paper---I was a lifeguard.
Oak Island Lakes was located on a large rural property. It contained a pond/swamp full of snapping turtles, frogs, and lots of deer flies whose sting felt like a hot nail pushing into your flesh. That pond supplied water for two shoe box-shaped pits that had been bulldozed to create two “swimming pools”, one about three feet deep for wading, and another had been dredged to about ten or eleven feet deep in the center where there was a floating dock you could use as a diving platform. Both “pools” had clay bottoms and the water was murky at the best of times. There was no beach, just a grassy area surrounding them where you could put down a towel and your cooler and spend some time.
There was a long dirt road leading off the highway that brought you into the place and to the gravel parking lot. A wooden concession stand where you paid to get access to swimming stood near the parking lot. It offered patrons cold drinks, chips, candy bars, hot dogs and burgers, etc. The owners---the Coles, Dale and Rena, lived in a trailer near the concession stand. The whole outfit was a pretty basic facility.
Oak Island Lakes was mainly frequented by families of factory workers from Ravenna, the lion’s share of them having moved north from Southern Ohio and West Virginia to find work in factories, and most of the time visitors to the park were teenagers or young people in their early twenties. They would arrive in clouds of dust, roaring down the dirt road to the parking lot in aging jalopies with moon discs, dice hanging from the rear view mirrors, lake pipes, flames painted on the fenders---stuff like that. Many of them---male and female both---had those tattoos you make by stabbing yourself in the arm with a needle dipped in indelible ink, so whatever design they came up with---names, hearts, guns, whatever, they were outlined with a series of dots.
Sometimes they’d get in fights. They were racists, as were the owners of Oak Island Lakes---the guy was anyway---and once when a few carloads of black people arrived Dale emerged from the trailer with his deer rifle to block their entry. His wife had phoned the cops, though, and several Highway Patrol cars arrived in time to diffuse the situation so nobody got shot. The visitors never made it into the swimming pools, though.
Among the regulars, the young guys were blustery buffoons, the girls were flirty but at the same time distant. All of them swore like sailors. They smoked filterless cigarettes---Camels, Lucky Strikes, Philip Morris and Chesterfields---and flicked them into the water in the swimming area. They regularly drank too much. Some of them would throw up after drinking too much. They left garbage all over the place and it was up to me and the girl who worked the concession stand to pick stuff up before we went home each night.
They tolerated me but did their best to be intimidating and cool, particularly if they had the chance to perform in front of the opposite sex, male or female. None of them could swim worth a damn and spent most of the time that they were in the water splashing and wrestling, shouting and screaming, swearing and laughing.
Every fifty minutes I’d blow my Acme Thunderer whistle and order everyone out of the water for a ten minute break. During one of those breaks on a busy weekend one of the young guys came over to me and said he couldn’t find his friend, that his friend managed to wade out to the floating dock on the shallow side, and eventually jumped off the dock to show off for some girls. He also told me the guy didn’t know how to swim.
I nearly panicked. Here I was, an underage lifeguard with a possible drowning on my hands. Every lifeguard thinks about that---someone drowning on their watch.
Immediately I ran and dived into the murky pond water. When I got near the dock I went under and began feeling around on the bottom. Within seconds I’d found the guy, a big kid---who couldn’t swim. As I reached for him he grabbed me around my whole torso and clung like a baby monkey. We were face to face. I couldn’t break his grip, couldn’t get loose. He was too strong. It was time to get creative.
I knew which way it was to the shore so I began to bounce, kind of like a pogo stick---thrusting us both upward by pushing off the bottom. When I reached the surface I’d gulp some air and we’d sink back down again. I repeated that a few times, leaning towards the shore with each thrust. We didn’t have far to go but it seemed like a mile. When we got into shallow water three other guys dragged us onshore, got him unhooked from me and laid him on his back. He was out cold and as blue as a pair of Levis.
I tried “mouth to mouth” to get him breathing but that didn’t work. Out of desperation I straddled him, put my hands together, lifted them over my head and brought them down hard on his stomach.
Whoosh! He spewed water like a geyser, spluttering and coughing, and started to breathe. A minute or so later, convinced he was coming back into the world, I climbed off, went to the lawn chair that passed as my lifeguard station and toweled off, shaking like a leaf.
About an hour later I noticed the same guy sitting on a beach towel with some girls, laughing, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. He never thanked me for saving his life. Never said a damn word.
I worked as a lifeguard for four more years, moving up in the lifeguard world to finish my career at a private lake where nothing like the Oak Island Lakes escapades occurred. But once a lifeguard, always a lifeguard. You find yourself automatically scanning the water at any beach you visit, squinting and surveying like a meerkat to identify potential problems.
And twenty-one years later, on a beach on the Dordogne River in the south of France where my wife, Charlotte, our daughter Maggie, and I found ourselves when Charlotte and I were working at an international summer school in Martel, a young French guy jumped out of a canoe to show off for some girls. And he couldn’t swim.
Instinctively I saw something was wrong and watched him as he struggled and began to splash frantically. At that point I was in the river in an instant, swam to him and brought him to shore where his friends gathered around him. He stayed at the beach for the rest of the afternoon, hanging out with the girls he was trying to impress, and he, too, never said a word to me.
© Kent Jones 2016