214

Undertow

Chapter 6: 214

The notebook was a composition book, the kind sold in drugstores and office supply chains, black-and-white marbled cover, wide-ruled pages, the binding stitched rather than spiral because spiral bindings caught on things in the locker and bent and eventually the pages tore free and were lost, and James could not afford to lose pages, because the pages were the record, the private accounting of twenty years of entering the water and bringing people back from it.

He had bought it at the Staples on Route 35 in Neptune Township in the summer of 2005, his first season on the patrol. He had bought it because he had made his first save and the save had felt like a thing that needed to be recorded, not in the city's incident report system, which captured the facts -- date, time, location, conditions, victim, method, outcome -- but in some other system, some personal system that captured the thing the facts did not capture, which was the experience, the specific quality of each moment when his body entered the water and the water contained a person who was dying and he reached the person and the person stopped dying. The incident reports were data. The notebook was testimony.

He kept it in his locker at the equipment building. Bottom shelf, behind the extra pair of board shorts and the tube of zinc oxide and the dog-eared copy of Kon-Tiki that he had been reading intermittently for three years and that he would finish someday or would not finish, because the finishing was not the point of having the book, the point was the having, the presence of a book about the ocean in a locker at the beach, a talisman, an object that said: the ocean is not just the thing I work in but the thing I think about, the thing I read about, the thing that occupies my mind when my mind is not occupied by the scanning.

The first entry was dated June 28, 2005.

Rip rescue, Stand 2. Female, approx. 9 yrs. Caught in rip at south end near sandbar. Current SE, 2 ft swell, incoming tide. Victim spotted from Stand 2 at approximately 14:17. Solo rescue. Beach entry, swim to victim approx. 80 yds. Victim conscious, panicked, not submersing. Secured rescue can. Swam lateral to rip, then to shore. Victim ambulatory on beach. Mother present. No medical transport required.

He had written it that evening, sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment he shared with two other guards in a house on Bangs Avenue. He had written it in the language of the incident report because that was the only language he had for rescue at that point, the institutional language, the clinical language that described the event without entering it. Over the years the language changed. The entries grew shorter in some ways and longer in others -- shorter on the clinical details, longer on the things the clinical details did not contain. The water. The specific water. The way it looked and felt and moved on that particular day in that particular hour at that particular tide. Because the water was the character in every entry, the water was the antagonist, the water was the thing that had taken the person and that James had entered to get the person back, and the water was different every time, was a different ocean every time, was a new opponent with a new strategy and a new set of conditions that James had never faced before in exactly that combination and would never face again in exactly that combination, because the ocean did not repeat, the ocean performed variations, and each save was a variation, and each variation was a day, and each day was a life.

Save number twelve. August 2006. His first multiple.

Stand 1, north end. Three teenagers, male, 15-17 yrs, caught in rip near jetty. Heavy surf, 4-5 ft, strong longshore current S to N pushing swimmers toward jetty rocks. Victims entered water south of jetty, drifted north with longshore, entered rip at jetty channel. All three submersing intermittently on arrival. I took victim nearest to rocks, Hernandez (Stand 1) took second victim, third victim self-rescued to sandbar. All three to shore. One victim vomited seawater. EMT transport for observation. All survived.

Three boys in the water. Three heads going under. The mathematics of rescue: two guards, three victims, one rescue can each. The arithmetic that did not add up and that had to add up anyway, because the not-adding-up was not an option, the not-adding-up was three bodies in the water and the water was taking them and the taking did not pause while the guards calculated the optimal distribution of resources. James had swum for the one nearest the rocks because the rocks were the additional danger, the rocks were the hard edge of the problem, the place where the water met the stone and the meeting was violent, and a body caught between water and stone was a body that would be broken, and the breaking was worse than the drowning because the breaking was immediate, was mechanical, was the physics of mass and velocity applied to bone and tissue, and the physics did not negotiate.

He reached the boy. The boy grabbed him. They always grabbed. The grabbing was the instinct, the primal clutching of the drowning for the not-drowning, the hands that seized whatever was solid, whatever was buoyant, whatever was not water. The boy grabbed James's shoulders and climbed him like a ladder, the way drowning people climbed, pushing the rescuer under to push themselves up, the hydraulic exchange that the training had prepared James for, that the training said: expect the grab, control the grab, turn the victim, place the can between you, because the can was the barrier, the can was the third body, the plastic intermediary that gave the victim something to hold that was not the guard and that floated enough for two.

He controlled the grab. He turned the boy. He placed the can. He said, "Hold this. Don't let go." The boy held it. James swam them away from the rocks, lateral to the current, out of the rip, and to the sandbar where the third boy was standing, chest-deep, coughing, alive. Hernandez brought the second boy in from the other direction. They walked the three boys through the shallows to the beach, where an off-duty EMT who had been sitting on a towel reading a paperback was already calling for an ambulance, because the off-duty EMT had seen the rescue and had known, from the seeing, what was needed, which was the competence of observation, which was the civilian version of the scanning.

Save number forty-one. July 2009. The one James thought about at night sometimes, not because it was the most dramatic or the most dangerous but because of the quiet of it, the strange underwater quiet.

Stand 4. Male, approx. 55 yrs, submerged. Flat calm, 1 ft swell, no significant current. Victim walking in waist-deep water, stepped into hole (bottom contour irregularity), submerged. Did not surface. I entered water at approx 10:45. Located victim on bottom in 4 ft of water approx 30 yds from shore. Victim unconscious, not breathing. Towed to shore. CPR initiated. Victim breathing restored after approx 2 min. EMT transport to Jersey Shore University Medical Center. Victim survived.

A man walking in calm water. Waist-deep. Stepped into a hole -- a depression in the sand bottom, a place where the sand had been scoured by some minor current variation, some passing eddy that had removed eighteen inches of bottom and left a pocket, a well, a trap. The man stepped in. The step took him from waist-deep to chest-deep to neck-deep in one stride, and the stride was the surprise, and the surprise was the gasp, and the gasp was the inhalation of water, and the inhalation was the beginning. James saw him go down from the stand. He saw a man standing, and then he saw a man not standing, and the transition was instantaneous, the way a light goes off -- on, then not on, the between state too brief to perceive. He went in. The water was calm. The swim was easy. He reached the spot and dove and found the man on the bottom in four feet of water, arms at his sides, face up, eyes open, the absolute stillness of the unconscious that was different from the absolute stillness of the dead, though the difference was not visible, the difference was faith, the faith that the still body still contained a life and the life could be restarted if the body was brought to the air and the air was pushed into the lungs and the heart was compressed and the compressions were rhythmic and the rhythm was the rhythm of living, thirty-to-two, thirty compressions, two breaths, the protocol that was muscle memory and that James performed on the sand while a crowd gathered and the crowd watched and the watching was the helplessness of people who could not do the thing they were watching and who could only watch, which was its own kind of drowning, the drowning of the witness.

The man breathed. The man coughed. The man opened his eyes and looked at James with an expression that James had seen many times and that he could not name, an expression that was not gratitude and not confusion and not fear but all three at once and something else besides, something that lived in the eyes of a person who had been dead and was now alive and who looked at the person responsible for the transition and saw, in that person's face, the face of the thing that had happened, the face of the intervention, the face of the moment between.

Save number eighty-seven. July Fourth, 2012. Father and daughter.

Stand 2. Male, approx. 40 yrs, with female child approx. 7 yrs. Caught in rip, south of Stand 2. Heavy surf, 5-6 ft, strong rip, crowded conditions (July 4th, est. 30,000 on beach). Victim (father) holding child above water, unable to swim. Both submersing on approach. I responded from ATV (mobile patrol). Entered water with rescue can and backup can. Reached victims approx 80 yds offshore. Father conscious but exhausted, child conscious and crying. Secured both on rescue cans. Towed to shore. Father treated for exhaustion. Child uninjured. No transport.

The father had been holding his daughter above his head. James saw this from the ATV as he drove along the waterline on a July Fourth that was too crowded and too rough, a day when the beach should have been yellow-flagged but the city had said green because the city said green on July Fourth because July Fourth was revenue and revenue was the city's language and the city's language did not include the word rip current. James saw the father from two hundred yards. He saw the arms above the water -- not waving, not flailing, but holding. The arms were holding a child above the surface the way you hold a thing above a flood, the way you raise the valuable thing above the rising water, and the raising was the father's final act, the act that said: I am going under but this child is not going under, I will hold this child above me until my arms give out or until someone comes, and the holding was the thing James saw from the ATV, the thing that made him stop the ATV and grab two rescue cans and enter the water at a sprint, because the holding was temporary, the holding was a borrowed interval, the holding was the father's body being used as a platform and the platform was sinking.

He reached them. The father was chin-deep and sinking. The daughter was above the surface, her father's hands around her waist, her face wet, her eyes enormous. James clipped the first rescue can on the father. "Let go of her," he said. "Hold this. I have her." The father did not let go. The father held his daughter with the grip of a man who had been holding the thing that mattered most in the world above the thing that was trying to take it, and the grip did not release on command, the grip had to be persuaded, the grip had to be shown that the command came from a person who could be trusted, and the trust was the red suit and the rescue can and the calm voice that said again: "I have her. I have her. Let go. Hold the can."

The father let go. James took the girl. She weighed perhaps fifty pounds. She put her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and held him with the same grip her father had held her, the inherited grip, the genetic clutch of the threatened young for the thing that meant safety, and James was the thing, James was the safety, James was the platform that was not sinking. He clipped the second can between them. He swam them lateral to the rip, out of the pull, and then shoreward, the father holding the first can and kicking, the daughter holding James and not kicking, just holding, just gripping, just being held.

On the beach the father knelt. The father put his hands on his knees and put his head down and breathed and did not speak and did not look up for a long time, and the not-looking-up was the aftermath, the decompression, the moment when the body that had been in the water came back to the body that was on the land and the two bodies reconciled, the aquatic crisis body and the terrestrial living body merging back into one, and the merging took time, took silence, took the kneeling on the sand with the head down and the breathing, the breathing that was the opposite of the not-breathing, the breathing that was the evidence that the save had worked, that the intervention had succeeded, that the counting could continue.

Save number one hundred and nine. The fastest. August 2013.

Stand 4. Male child, approx. 4 yrs. Submersed in shore break, 12 ft from waterline. Moderate surf, 3 ft. Victim knocked down by wave in ankle-deep water, unable to self-recover in shore break. I responded from Stand 4. Reached victim in approx. 7 seconds (beach sprint, no swim). Lifted victim from water. Victim conscious, coughing, crying. Returned to mother at waterline. No transport.

Seven seconds. Stand to sand in two seconds, sprint to waterline in five. He picked the boy up from the water the way you pick up a thing the water has knocked over -- a chair, a cooler, a four-year-old who had been standing in three inches of water and had been hit by a wave that was not large but that was large enough, because large enough was relative, large enough was a function of the size of the body relative to the size of the wave, and a three-foot wave was a wall to a three-foot child, and the wall hit the child and the child went down and the shore break held the child down, the receding water pinning the small body to the sand, and the pinning was a few seconds, and a few seconds was an eternity to a body that small, and the eternity was the gap that James closed in seven seconds, which was fast, which was the fastest he had ever moved between the stand and a victim, and the speed was not heroism but geometry -- the child was twelve feet from the waterline, the stand was forty feet from the waterline, the total distance was fifty-two feet, and fifty-two feet at a sprint was seven seconds, and seven seconds was enough, and the enough was the grace, the mechanical grace of distance and speed and the body's ability to cover the distance at the speed required to arrive before the eternity became permanent.

Save number one hundred and fifty-six. June 2017. The year after Tommy.

Stand 3. Male, approx. 21 yrs. Spinal injury, shore break. Heavy surf, 5-6 ft, strong shore break. Victim dove into wave and struck sandbar. Victim face-down in 3 ft of water, not moving. I responded from Stand 4 (nearest available, Stand 3 guard on rescue at Stand 2). Entered water. Immobilized victim's head and neck (suspected C-spine). Turned victim face-up maintaining immobilization. Victim conscious, could not move extremities. Backboarded in water with assistance from Stand 2 guard (Hernandez). Carried to beach. EMT transport to Jersey Shore University Medical Center. Victim survived. Subsequent information: C5 fracture, partial quadriplegia.

The college student who dove into a wave and hit the sandbar and broke his neck and lived. James found him face-down in three feet of water, his body motionless in the wash, his head at an angle that told James everything before his hands confirmed it -- the neck was broken, the spine was compromised, the body that had been a diving body, a voluntary body, a body that had chosen to enter the wave headfirst with the confident abandon of twenty-one, was now an involuntary body, a body that could not choose, a body that was subject to the water and to gravity and to the guard's hands, which were the only things standing between the broken neck and the dead body, because a broken neck in water was a dead body if the neck was moved, if the head was turned, if the spine was manipulated in any direction that increased the damage, and the not-manipulating was the discipline, the terrible careful discipline of holding a person's head perfectly still while turning their body face-up in moving water with waves hitting your legs and the shore break pulling at your feet and the whole ocean trying to do the thing you were trying to prevent, which was move the body, which was shift the neck, which was turn the fracture into a severance and the severance into a death.

He held the head. He turned the body. He held the head steady while Hernandez slid the backboard under the body and they strapped the head and the body and carried the board through the shore break to the sand, the waves hitting their legs with each step, each wave a force that wanted to destabilize the board, that wanted to jolt the body, that wanted to do the thing the water always wanted to do, which was move things, which was rearrange things, which was assert its authority over everything in it, and the guard's job was to refuse the authority, to say: not this body, not this neck, not this spine, you will not move this person, I am holding this person still and the stillness is the thing between life and death and I am the stillness.

The student survived. Partial quadriplegia. He would not walk the way he had walked. He would not dive the way he had dived. He would live, but the living would be different from the living he had imagined, and the difference was the sandbar and the wave and the angle of entry and the physics that did not forgive the angle, that enforced the consequences of the angle with the absolute indifference of a force that did not know what a neck was, did not know what a spine was, did not know what walking was, did not know what the boy had lost when his head hit the sand at the speed the wave gave it.

James wrote each entry on the evening of the save. He sat in his truck or at his kitchen table or on the bench on the boardwalk after the stands closed, and he wrote, and the writing was not therapy and was not documentation and was not memory-keeping in any conventional sense. The writing was acknowledgment. The writing was the private ceremony of acknowledging that a thing had happened, that a person had been in the water and the water had been taking them and James had entered the water and the water had stopped taking them, and the stopping was not guaranteed, was never guaranteed, was the product of training and speed and knowledge and the particular conditions of the particular moment, and the moment was unique, was unrepeatable, was the only time that specific confluence of water and body and danger and response would ever occur, and the notebook was the record of those confluences, the testimony that they had happened, that they were real, that two hundred and fourteen times a person had been between the living and the dying and James had been between the person and the dying and the between was the save and the save was the entry and the entry was the evidence that the life had been lived, that the twenty years on the stand had been more than time spent, had been time used, time applied to the purpose of keeping people alive in water that wanted to do what water does, which is not killing but not caring, and the not-caring was the thing, the vast impersonal thing, the ocean's defining characteristic that made the guard's caring necessary, that made the guard's caring the only caring present in the equation, the only force in the water that had an opinion about whether the person in the water lived or died.

Two hundred and fourteen entries. Twenty years of water. And two gaps -- two entries that were not saves but losses, two entries written in the same notebook in the same handwriting on the same kind of page but that weighed differently, that occupied a different kind of space, that were not testimony but confession, not acknowledgment but reckoning, the two entries that James did not reread, that he did not need to reread because they were written not on the page but in the body, in the chest, in the sternum that buzzed when the water spoke the word danger, the buzzing that had been there since the first save and that had intensified after the first loss and that would be there after the last save, whenever the last save was, which might be today or might be next week or might be Labor Day, the last day, the day he would climb down from Stand 4 for the final time and walk across the sand and put the notebook in the box with the other things he would take from the locker and drive to Neptune Township with the box on the passenger seat and the number in his head, whatever the number was by then, 215 or 220 or whatever the summer added to the total that was not a total but a count, a running count, a count that would stop when he stopped, a count that would become final when the season became final, a count that would be his number, his private number, the number that no one knew but him and that meant nothing to anyone but him and that meant everything to him because the number was the measure of the life, the quantification of the thing that could not be quantified but that he quantified anyway, because the counting was the keeping and the keeping was the remembering and the remembering was the honor, the honor he paid to each person he had pulled from the water, each person who had been dying and was now living, each person who had gone home and eaten dinner and gone to bed and woken up the next morning and lived another day because James Calloway had been on the stand and had seen the disturbance and had entered the water and had reached them in time.

In time. The phrase was the whole of it. The phrase contained the career. In time meant before the dying became the dead. In time meant the gap between the submersion and the cessation was still open, still traversable, still a distance that could be covered by a body swimming at the speed the body could swim through water moving at the speed the water was moving. In time was the equation -- the guard's speed minus the water's speed, multiplied by the victim's remaining buoyancy, divided by the distance, and the result was either positive or negative, and positive meant a save and negative meant a loss, and the equation was not mathematical but physical, was solved not by calculation but by swimming, by the body entering the water and the body moving through the water and the body reaching the other body and the reaching being the answer, the answer that was always the same -- I have you, hold this, we are going to shore -- and the answer being enough, the answer being the thing, the answer being the number in the notebook that went from 1 to 214 and that would go higher because the summer was not over and the water was still the water and the people were still coming to the beach and the coming was the beginning and the scanning was the watching and the watching was the waiting and the waiting was the readiness and the readiness was the career and the career was the life.

James closed the notebook. He put it back on the bottom shelf of his locker, behind the board shorts and the zinc oxide and the unfinished book about a raft crossing the Pacific, a book about a man who trusted the ocean to carry him, which was a kind of faith James understood and did not share, because James did not trust the ocean, James respected the ocean, and the respect and the trust were different things, were opposite things, were the difference between a sailor and a lifeguard, between a person who asked the ocean to take them somewhere and a person who asked the ocean to give someone back.

He closed the locker. He walked out of the equipment room, across the boardwalk, down the ramp, across the sand, to Stand 4. He climbed the four steps. He settled into the chair. He put the whistle in his mouth. He adjusted his sunglasses.

He scanned.

Somewhere in the water, the 215th save was waiting. Not waiting -- forming. The conditions were assembling themselves. The sandbar was shifting. The current was building. The swimmer was driving to the beach, parking the car, unfolding the chair, walking across the sand, entering the water. The swimmer did not know that the entry was the beginning. The swimmer did not know that the water was composing a sentence that contained the swimmer's name. The swimmer did not know that a man on a wooden stand a quarter mile away was reading the water's sentences and would read this one when it appeared, would see the grammar shift, would feel the buzzing in his chest, would blow his whistle, would grab his can, would descend the four steps, would sprint across the sand, would enter the water, would swim.

The swimmer did not know. The swimmer did not need to know. The knowing was the guard's work. The knowing was the scanning. The scanning continued.