A chance conversation with a teenager whose goal for the summer is to get a job as a Main Beach lifeguard reminded me of my own brief and unremarkable lifeguarding career.
It had begun well enough with the town training program in late spring that year. This is an annual rite in which youthful prospects learn the techniques in the chilly ocean in preparation for the big ocean guard test.
For a test partner, I was paired with Kevin, who had welcomed me to seventh grade some years before with a punch to the stomach. Kevin was a big guy and had little problem towing me to the shore in the various exercises. Then it was my turn.
In the water it was easy enough to maneuver my bulky partner around, but carrying him out of the surfline and up the beach was another matter. Try as I might, I could get no farther than the edge of the sand. Each time I approached, he would slide right off my back. Kevin thought this was highly amusing; it seems impossible that I'll ever forget his, "Heh, heh, heh, Dave," the final failure before the test examiner mercifully told me to stop. Not everyone passes the ocean guard test, which is a good thing when you think about it.
In need of guards, the town hired me anyway, and I was assigned to South Lake in Montauk, popular with the parents of toddlers because the water never got above knee deep.
This was the worst assignment among the town beaches, and we were more babysitters than anything. That was okay, though; I enjoyed being around kids, and my lifeguard stand partner, Jimmy, was a crack-up.
I don't recall us having to make a single rescue that summer, and it was rather dull. In fact, the high point might have been when one mom gave us a stack of her husband's girlie magazines that she had discovered and did not want around the house — at least that's what she told us. We were too young and too dumb to discern whether she had ancillary designs.
High bacteria counts prompted the county to close South Lake to swimming the following year. By then I had moved on from lifeguarding anyway and was working for the local party tent company, but that is a story for another day.