July Fourth

Undertow

Chapter 10: July Fourth

The day began in the dark. James arrived at the beach at four-thirty in the morning, ninety minutes before the first guard, three hours before the stands opened, five hours before the crowds came, and the coming would be immense, would be the annual tidal event that was not the ocean's tide but the human tide, the forty thousand bodies that would pour across the boardwalk and down the ramps and onto the sand and into the water and that would test every system, every protocol, every guard, every rescue can, every radio, every whistle, every inch of the mile of beach that was the Asbury Park Beach Patrol's jurisdiction and that on this day, on the Fourth of July, would be compressed by the density of bodies into something closer to a stadium than a shoreline, a venue, a container for the collective desire of forty thousand people to be near the ocean on the day the country told them to celebrate, and the celebration, for the ocean, was nothing, was a human concept the ocean did not understand, and the not-understanding was the danger, because the ocean on July Fourth was the same ocean as July Third and July Fifth, the same currents, the same rips, the same shore break, the same indifferent hydraulic machinery that did not know what a holiday was and that would perform its operations regardless of the flags and the hot dogs and the fireworks and the particular American conviction that the beach on the Fourth was a right, a birthright, a constitutional entitlement to sand and water and sun that superseded the lifeguard's red flag and the lifeguard's whistle and the lifeguard's voice at the waterline saying: sir, the conditions are dangerous, please stay out of the water.

James walked the beach in the dark. He carried a flashlight. He checked the sand for debris -- glass, metal, the things the previous day's crowds had left and that the previous evening's cleanup had missed, the things that became hazards when forty thousand pairs of feet walked over them. He found a broken bottle near Stand 2. He found a rusted tent stake near Stand 3. He found, at the waterline, a child's sandal, pink, size four, the artifact of someone's yesterday, someone's daughter's shoe left behind in the rush of departure, the end-of-day gathering of towels and coolers and children that always missed something, always left some small object behind as a deposit, a tribute, a thing surrendered to the beach the way the ocean surrendered its foam to the sand, involuntarily, as a cost of the encounter.

He picked up the sandal. He put it in the lost and found bin at the equipment building. He checked the equipment. He checked every rescue can -- twelve today, double the normal allocation. He checked every radio -- eight handhelds plus the base station. He checked the ATV -- battery charged, tires inflated, first aid kit stocked. He checked the paddle boards -- two, strapped to the ATV roof rack. He checked the oxygen kit. He checked the spinal immobilization board. He checked the beach wheelchairs -- two, for disabled visitors, the wide-wheeled chairs that rolled on sand and that on July Fourth would be requested six or eight times by families who had someone in a regular wheelchair and who wanted that someone to reach the water, to feel the water, to be part of the celebration that included the water, and the wanting was reasonable and the providing was part of the job, the part of the job that was not rescue but access, not saving but serving, the secondary mission that existed alongside the primary mission the way the shore existed alongside the water.

Elena arrived at five. She carried two cups of coffee from the Dunkin' Donuts on Cookman Avenue, one for her and one for James, and the coffee was a ritual, a daily offering, a small act of partnership that was not in the operations manual but that was in the partnership, in the ten years of mornings that had built the thing between them that was not friendship exactly and not hierarchy exactly but something in between, the professional intimacy of two people who had shared a stand and a purpose and a set of dangers for long enough that the sharing had become structural, had become the architecture of their working days, and the architecture included coffee, two cups, one cream no sugar for James, black for Elena, delivered at five in the morning on the biggest day of the season.

They drank the coffee on the boardwalk, standing at the railing, looking at the ocean in the pre-dawn light. The ocean was dark. The waves were audible before they were visible -- the crash and the hiss, the crash and the hiss, the rhythm that was the heartbeat of the coast, the sound that James had heard every morning of every summer for twenty years and that he would hear for one more summer and then would not hear, not as a daily sound, not as the first sound of the working day, not as the sound that said: the ocean is here, the ocean is doing its work, the ocean is producing its conditions, and the conditions are the thing you must now assess and prepare for and manage and survive.

"Forecast," Elena said. She had checked it on her phone. "Southwest wind ten to fifteen, gusting to twenty by afternoon. Swell three to four feet, six-second period. Incoming tide through noon, outgoing after. Water temp sixty-eight."

"Green flag at open," James said. "Reassess at ten. If the wind picks up and the rip strengthens at the jetty, we go yellow."

"The city won't like yellow on the Fourth."

"The city doesn't swim the rip at the jetty."

Elena nodded. The nod was the agreement that did not need to be spoken, the consensus of two people who understood that the flag system was not a suggestion but a communication, not a recommendation but a fact, a fact about the water's conditions that the guard assessed and reported and that the public was supposed to heed and sometimes did and sometimes did not, and the sometimes-did-not was the gap, the gap between the guard's knowledge and the public's behavior, the gap in which drownings happened, the gap that was widest on July Fourth because the crowds were largest and the desire was strongest and the desire overwhelmed the knowledge, the desire to be in the water on this day, this hot day, this holiday, this celebration of a nation whose coastline was twelve thousand miles long and whose relationship to that coastline was complicated -- recreational, economic, mythological -- and whose citizens came to the coast on the Fourth of July in numbers that exceeded the coast's capacity to safely hold them.

The guards arrived at six. All twenty-two. No absences on July Fourth -- the Fourth was mandatory, all hands, the one day of the season when the patrol operated at full strength because full strength was the minimum required to manage the thing that was coming. James held the morning meeting on the boardwalk in the gray-blue light. He stood at the center of the semicircle. Elena stood to his right.

"Today is the Fourth," he said. "You know what that means. Forty thousand people on this beach by noon. Half of them in the water by two. The water doesn't know it's the Fourth. The water is the water. The rips don't take holidays. The shore break doesn't take holidays. You don't take holidays."

He assigned stands. Double coverage on all four -- eight guards on stands, rotating every sixty minutes instead of ninety because the intensity of the scanning on a day this crowded burned the eyes and the attention faster than a normal day. Six guards on roving patrol, walking the waterline in pairs, making contacts, positioning for rapid response. Two guards on the ATV, running the beach from the jetty to the south boundary. Four guards in reserve, in the equipment room, resting in rotation, available for surge response.

"Radio discipline," James said. "Channel six for patrol operations. Channel nine for dispatch only. Do not use channel nine unless you are calling for EMS or Coast Guard. If I hear channel nine used for a routine contact, the person who used it will run the beach twice after shift."

He looked at the faces. The veterans were steady, composed, the faces of people who had worked July Fourths before and who knew what was coming. The rookies were alert, nervous, the faces of people who had heard about July Fourth but who had not lived it, who had not stood on a stand and looked at forty thousand people on a beach and understood that each of those forty thousand people was a potential rescue, a potential victim, a potential body in the water that the guard would have to go after.

"Standard rescue protocol," James said. "Can carry, beach approach, water entry, lateral swim. If you're in a multiple -- more than one victim -- clip your can on the first victim and swim to the second with your body. Call for backup on the radio before you enter the water if you can. If you can't -- if the victim is going under and you don't have time to key the radio -- go. Go and trust that someone on the stand will see you go and will send backup. The stands are your backup. The patrol is your backup. You are not alone in the water."

He paused. The pause was the breath before the plunge.

"No losses today," he said. "That's not a goal. That's an expectation."

The stands opened at seven. By eight the beach was already filling. By nine the boardwalk was a river of bodies -- families with wagons loaded with chairs and coolers and umbrellas, couples with towels slung over shoulders, groups of teenagers with the portable speakers that emitted the collective soundtrack of forty thousand people's individual musical preferences, the overlapping waves of sound that were the auditory analog of the ocean's overlapping waves of water, the human noise that layered over the natural noise and that, by noon, would be so dense that the whistle's blast would have to be loud, would have to be three Fox 40 Classics blown at full lung capacity, to cut through the sound and reach the ears of the people in the water who needed to hear it.

By ten the water was crowded. James was on Stand 4, scanning. The scanning on July Fourth was different from the scanning on a normal day. On a normal day the water contained dozens of swimmers -- twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred -- and the scanning could track individuals, could follow a specific swimmer from entry to exit, could monitor the position and the movement and the progress of each body in the water with the personalized attention that the normal crowd allowed. On July Fourth the water contained thousands. The scanning could not track individuals. The scanning tracked patterns -- the density of bodies in each section of the zone, the movement of the density relative to the current, the position of the density relative to the known hazards, the rip channels and the deep spots and the shore break zones. The scanning looked for anomalies in the pattern -- a gap where there should be density, which meant a swimmer had gone under; a cluster that was too far out, which meant the current had drifted a group; an agitation in the surface, arms and splashing, which meant someone was in trouble.

At ten-fifteen he saw the first one. A gap in the pattern near Stand 3. A space in the water where bodies had been and where bodies were not, and the not-being-there was the signal, the absence that spoke louder than the presence, the hole in the crowd that said: something happened here, someone went down, the water took someone.

He keyed the radio. "Stand 3, gap in your pattern, forty yards out, mid-zone."

Thompson, Stand 3, was already moving. He had seen it too, or Elena had seen it and Thompson had heard Elena's whistle, two blasts, attention, the whistle that cut through the noise of forty thousand people and reached Thompson's ears and turned Thompson's head and Thompson's head turned to the gap and the gap told him what the gap told James, and Thompson was off the stand and running.

James watched from Stand 4. Thompson hit the waterline at a sprint, entered the surf, dove through the first wave, emerged, stroked toward the gap. James counted. Nine seconds from stand to water. Thirty seconds from water to the gap. Thompson reached a woman -- mid-thirties, dark hair, she was under and then she was up and then Thompson's arm was around her and the rescue can was between them and Thompson was swimming her lateral to the current and then shoreward and then through the shore break and then onto the sand and the woman was coughing and the woman was alive and the save was done.

Save one. Before noon.

At eleven-twenty the second one. Stand 1, north end, near the jetty. The rip. The rip was always at the jetty. The rip was the jetty's permanent companion, the current that the rocks created by deflecting the longshore flow, the hydraulic consequence of putting a wall of stone into the path of moving water. A boy, twelve, thirteen, too close to the jetty, pulled into the rip, moving seaward. Kyle Dermott, Stand 1, went after him. James watched through binoculars. Kyle's entry was good -- fast, clean, through the shore break in two strokes. His approach was good -- he swam the angle, not directly at the boy but at the point ahead of the boy where the rip was carrying the boy and where Kyle would intersect the boy's trajectory. The intersection happened sixty yards out. Kyle reached the boy. The boy grabbed. Kyle controlled the grab. The can went between them. They came to shore.

Save two.

At eleven-forty-five the third. Stand 2. Not a rip rescue but a shore break rescue -- a man, heavy, sixties, standing in knee-deep water when a set came through and the third wave of the set was larger than the first two and the larger wave hit the man at chest height and the man went down and the shore break held him down and the receding water pulled him seaward and the next wave pushed him shoreward and the push-pull was the washing machine, the tumbling, the disorientation that turned up into down and air into water and the standing into the not-standing. Hernandez, Stand 2, was at the waterline in six seconds. He waded in, grabbed the man under the arms, dragged him up the beach slope out of the wash zone. The man sat on the sand, gasping, bleeding from a cut on his forehead where his face had hit the sand bottom. Hernandez applied a gauze pad, called for the first aid kit, treated the cut. The man's wife arrived, running across the sand from the towel where she had been reading a magazine, the magazine still in her hand, the magazine that she had been reading while her husband was in the water being washed by the shore break that did not care about magazines or wives or the particular vulnerability of a heavy man in his sixties standing in knee-deep water on a day when the waves were three to four feet and the wave was taller than the knee-deep and the taller-than was the mathematics that the man had not calculated and that the ocean had calculated for him, with the indifferent precision of a force that did not calculate but that produced calculations as a byproduct of its motion.

Save three. Before noon.

James scanned. The crowds thickened. The heat rose. By one in the afternoon the air temperature was ninety-one degrees and the sand temperature was one hundred and thirty and the water temperature was sixty-eight and the differential between the air and the water was twenty-three degrees and the differential was the incentive, the thermal incentive that drove the bodies from the sand into the water, the basic animal logic that said: it is hot here and it is cool there and the cool is better than the hot and the better is the water and the water is where I want to be. The logic was sound. The logic did not include the rip current or the shore break or the longshore drift or any of the things the water did with the bodies that entered it seeking cool, seeking relief, seeking the simple mammalian comfort of temperature regulation in a medium that was not designed for mammals, that was not designed for anything, that was designed by the physics of salt water and gravity and wind and moon and the rotation of the earth, the impersonal enormous forces that produced the specific local conditions of this beach on this day in this hour, the conditions that James read from the stand and that the forty thousand people in the water did not read and could not read and did not know they needed to read because the reading was not their job, the reading was his job, and his job was the thing between them and the consequences of the not-reading.

At two in the afternoon the rip at Stand 2 opened. Not the permanent rip at the jetty but a flash rip, a temporary channel that formed when the incoming tide shifted a section of sandbar and the shifting created a gap and the gap became a channel and the channel became a current and the current became a rip that pulled seaward at two feet per second, which was fast, which was faster than most swimmers could sustain, which was the speed that turned a swimmer into a victim.

James saw it from Stand 4. He saw the water change -- the color darkening in a strip perpendicular to the shore, the surface smoothing as the current organized, the foam beginning to slide seaward. He saw it and he keyed the radio and he said, "All stands, flash rip forming at Stand 2, mid-zone. Stand 2, clear the water in front of the channel. Everyone on the waterline."

The response was automatic, was the trained coordinated response of a patrol that had drilled this scenario, that had rehearsed this scenario, that knew the protocol for a flash rip in a crowded zone: clear the water, get the swimmers out, reduce the number of bodies in the current's path because reducing the number was reducing the risk and reducing the risk was the job.

But the swimmers were not cooperating. The swimmers were forty thousand people who had come to the beach on the Fourth of July and who were in the water because the water was where they wanted to be and who did not understand why the lifeguards were blowing whistles and waving them toward shore and who resisted the waving the way people resist being told to leave the place they want to be, with the passive stubborn inertia of bodies that are comfortable and that do not want to be uncomfortable, that are cool and that do not want to be hot, that are in the water and that do not want to be on the sand.

The rip took four of them. A cluster of swimmers in waist-deep water, thirty feet from the channel, who felt the bottom shift under their feet and felt the pull begin and who went from standing to drifting in three seconds, the three seconds that the flash rip needed to establish its flow and to begin its work, which was the work of all rips: taking bodies seaward.

James was off the stand. He grabbed a rescue can and a backup can and he ran. Not to Stand 2 -- Stand 2 was two hundred yards north, and two hundred yards of soft sand was too far, was too slow, was the distance that the running could not cover in the time the drowning required. He ran to the waterline directly in front of Stand 4 and he entered the water and he swam north, parallel to the shore, riding the longshore current, which was running north to south, which meant he was swimming against it, which meant the swimming was hard, which meant the hundred yards between his entry and the rip channel took him sixty seconds instead of the thirty it would have taken with the current, but sixty seconds was acceptable, sixty seconds was within the window, sixty seconds brought him to the rip channel where the four swimmers were now fifty yards offshore and separating -- two together, two apart, the current pulling them at different speeds because their bodies were different sizes and different shapes and the water's force on each body was proportional to the body's surface area and the body's buoyancy and the body's position in the water column, and the proportionality meant the four were not a group but four individuals in four slightly different predicaments.

Elena was in the water behind him. She had come off the stand thirty seconds after James, had grabbed a can, had entered the water and swum the same path. Hernandez was in from the other direction, from Stand 2, swimming south toward the cluster. Three guards for four swimmers.

James reached the nearest pair -- a man and a woman, twenties, holding each other, the holding that was the clutching that was the panic that was the beginning of the drowning for both of them because the holding was mutual submersion, each body pulling the other under, the hydraulic reciprocity of two panicking people in moving water. He separated them. He broke the grip with his hands, physically pried the arms apart, and the prying was not gentle because gentle was not the priority, the priority was separation, the priority was getting the rescue can between them, the priority was establishing buoyancy before the holding took them both under.

He clipped the can between them. "Hold this," he said. "Both of you. Hold this and don't hold each other."

They held the can. He swam them lateral to the rip, out of the pull, and then he released them on the can and swam back into the rip to find the other two, but Elena had the third swimmer -- a woman, fifties, who was calm, who was floating on her back, who had done the thing the training said to do, the thing James told every rookie: if you are caught in a rip, float. Do not fight. Float. The current will take you out and the current will release you and the floating will keep you alive until the guard reaches you. The woman was floating. Elena reached her. Elena clipped the can. Elena swam her to shore.

Hernandez had the fourth. A teenage boy, sixteen, seventeen, who was swimming hard, who was swimming against the rip with the frantic energy of a strong young body that believed it could beat the current, that believed the current was a contest and the contest could be won. The current could not be won. The current was two feet per second and the boy was two feet per second and the mathematics of equal velocities was zero progress, was the treadmill, was the swimming that went nowhere, and the going nowhere was the exhaustion and the exhaustion was the end of the swimming and the end of the swimming was the beginning of the drowning. Hernandez reached him. Hernandez clipped the can. Hernandez told the boy to stop swimming, to hold the can, to let the guard do the swimming, because the guard's swimming was informed, was directional, was the lateral swimming that crossed the rip instead of fighting it, and the crossing was thirty yards and the thirty yards took forty seconds and the forty seconds brought them out of the rip and into the ambient water where the current was negligible and the swimming to shore was just swimming, was the thing the body did when the body was in the water and the shore was the destination.

Four swimmers. Three guards. Four saves. No losses.

James climbed back on Stand 4. He was wet. His suit was heavy with water. His legs were salted and sanded. His chest heaved with the breathing that followed the swimming, the deep involuntary gulping of air that the body demanded after the exertion, the body's reclamation of the oxygen it had spent, the restoration of the reserves that the rescue had drawn down.

He scanned.

The afternoon continued. The crowds did not diminish. The heat did not diminish. The ocean did not diminish. The rip at the jetty ran all day. The flash rip at Stand 2 closed after an hour, the sandbar shifting again, the channel filling, the current dissipating, the temporary hazard returning to the temporary safety that was all the ocean ever offered, the conditional safety that was not safe but only not-currently-dangerous, which was the best the ocean could do, which was the best the guard could ask for.

The fireworks began at nine. James was on the boardwalk, off duty, the stands closed at seven, the beach officially cleared, the patrol's jurisdiction ended by the darkness that the patrol could not scan because the scanning required light and the light was gone and the darkness was the ocean's private time, the hours when the water did what the water did without witnesses, without guards, without the human gaze that imposed its categories of safe and dangerous on a medium that did not recognize those categories.

He stood on the boardwalk railing and watched the fireworks over the ocean. The explosions of light reflected in the water -- red, white, blue, the national colors rendered in gunpowder and magnesium and strontium and copper, the chemistry of celebration, the periodic table expressed as spectacle. The reflections wavered on the surface, the light breaking apart on the waves, the waves doing what the waves always did, which was move, and the moving fractured the reflections into a thousand shimmering fragments, the fireworks in the sky whole and the fireworks in the water broken, the image and its reflection, the intention and its distortion.

Elena stood beside him. They watched the fireworks together, not speaking, the not-speaking of two people who had spent the day in the water together and who did not need to speak because the day had been the speaking, the rescues had been the speaking, the four swimmers in the rip had been the speaking, the coordination of three guards in moving water to recover four bodies and bring them to shore had been the conversation, the only conversation that mattered, the conversation that said: we can do this, we can do this together, we can do this when the water opens its channels and the current takes the bodies and the bodies need us and we go.

The fireworks ended. The crowd dispersed. The boardwalk emptied. James and Elena walked to the equipment building. They checked the equipment. They locked the locker. They filed the incident reports -- seven saves total for the day, James's four in the rip plus the three before noon, seven saves on the biggest day of the season, seven people who had come to the beach to celebrate the Fourth of July and who had entered the water and the water had taken them or tried to take them and the patrol had taken them back.

Seven saves. No losses.

The no-losses was not celebrated. The no-losses was expected. The patrol did not celebrate survival. The patrol noted it, filed it, recorded it in the daily report that went to the Department of Public Safety, and moved on. The moving on was the professionalism, the specific professional discipline that did not allow celebration because celebration implied surprise and surprise implied doubt and doubt implied that the outcome might have been different, and the might-have-been-different was not something the patrol acknowledged on a day when the outcome was the expected outcome, which was: no one dies.

No one died today. That was the sentence. No one died today. The sentence was ordinary. The sentence was the most extraordinary sentence in the language. No one died today meant that every system worked, every guard performed, every scan found the thing it was supposed to find, every rescue reached the victim in time, every time was enough time, every enough was sufficient, and the sufficiency was the result and the result was the sentence and the sentence was ordinary and the ordinariness was the point, because the point was that no one dying should be ordinary, should be expected, should be the baseline against which every day was measured, and the measuring was the weight, the specific weight of a job where the expected outcome was the preservation of human life and the unexpected outcome was the failure to preserve it and the failure was the thing that could not be tolerated, could not be explained, could not be filed in a report and moved on from, because the failure was Tommy Raines, the failure was Margaret Daly, the failure was the weight that James carried and that the patrol carried and that the Fourth of July, with its seven saves and its no losses, did not lighten.

James drove to Neptune Township. He ate dinner alone. He went to bed. Outside, the ocean did what the ocean did at night, the same thing it had done during the day, the same thing it would do tomorrow, which was not the Fourth of July, which was July Fifth, which was an ordinary day, which was the kind of day the patrol preferred, the quiet days, the days when the crowds were small and the water was calm and the scanning found nothing because there was nothing to find, and the nothing was the best thing, the nothing was the goal, the nothing was the ideal that the job aspired to: a day when the lifeguard was unnecessary, a day when the water and the swimmers coexisted without crisis, a day when the stand was just a wooden platform and the guard was just a person sitting on it and the ocean was just the ocean, beautiful and cold and moving, moving, always moving.