YOU’RE GOING TO SWIM across a body of water where someone drowned? That’s what this is about?” A friend back home—not someone steeped in Greek mythology—is asking, and I’m tempted to throw up my hands and conclude that some people just don’t get it. Then I realize that it’s a very smart question. Why did Leander drown in the Hellespont? He was, after all, a capable swimmer who, as Ovid imagined him, confidently stroked his way to Hero night after night, despite the distance:
Excellent advice, which I am happily following on this golden afternoon in a sea full of swimmers, mindful that the tranquil channel we are traversing has the power to turn violent in a New York swimmer’s minute.
“Anybody that’s not afraid of the water is a fool,” Ernie Burgess is telling me. “You’ve got to have a lot of respect for it. You’ve got to know how easy it is to drown.” Burgess has been a lobsterman in Maine for fifty-eight (of his sixty-eight) years. Lobsterboy at first, I guess. I’ve asked him why so many people whose livelihood is fished out of the sea don’t know how to swim. “It’s true,” he goes on, bemused by a question he says he’s never considered. “But I have no idea why—whether it’s a fatalistic attitude or because they didn’t learn when they were little kids or what.” He chuckles—not at the serious subject, but at the way of life for a third-generation lobsterman. “Well, I can swim. Not very well, but I can probably keep myself afloat for three to four minutes, and that’s about all you’ve got anyway.” He means because the water’s so cold. A number of his friends have drowned. And he’s pulled seven people out himself. But Burgess, who spends all day on the water running eight hundred lobster traps in and around Chebeague Island, doesn’t swim for fun. Even in the summer, when it warms up, you won’t find the lobstermen of Maine practicing their breaststroke. “We spend so much time trying to stay out of the water, that’s the last thing you think about,” he says. “‘Cause if you’re getting in, chances are the circumstances aren’t gonna be too rosy!”
In 2008, accidental drownings took the lives of 4,058 people in the United States—more than ten a day. The highest rates were among children from ages one to four; African Americans from five to fourteen were particularly vulnerable. According to a recent study, 60 percent of minority children cannot swim, compared to 40 percent of white children. And the rate of drowning among minorities is at least three times that of white children.
Olympian Cullen Jones, who won two gold medals in Beijing, nearly drowned as a child, a terrifying experience at a water park where he was submerged for about a minute. Learning to swim changed his life. Today he tours the country for Make a Splash, the organization started by the USA Swimming Foundation to get more minority children past cultural stereotyping and into the water. On the day I meet up with Jones at an elementary school in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, he plays to the crowd of eager faces by asking what they think of a Speedo bathing suit. “Tighty-whiteys,” answers one youngster, giggling. Then Jones slips off his shiny black Nike sneakers and tells the kids he got them for free. “Swimming got me shoes,” he says. Whatever works. Others have proposed starting with better facilities and educational outreach in minority communities. Either way, at least one study shows that swimming lessons can reduce fatalities by 88 percent. In some countries, like Holland, where the canals weave through every city, swimming is mandatory for children.
Fear of the water and ineptitude in the pool may be deeply rooted, theorizes one New York psychiatrist. “You can frequently tell where someone is stuck developmentally by what they can’t do in swimming,” he says. “People who can’t float often have trust and intimacy issues. For some, if they’re arrested in development, they hold on to the side of the pool, or can’t let their feet leave the bottom. It’s an aquatic version of apron strings: they can’t take chances.” And it can affect beginners as well as good swimmers. “Putting your face in the water may have to do with the feeling that you won’t be able to control what comes in. Turning your head to breathe is working without a net. It’s all the same fear: that a rug will be pulled out from underneath you.”
The poet Shelley never did learn and drowned at sea. But lessons aren’t the only solution. You can drown in a bathtub. You can get in over your head. Bad things can happen to good swimmers. Eight years after his triumph at the English Channel, Matthew Webb found himself in financial difficulties and, in a desperate attempt at publicity, announced that he would swim the treacherous Niagara River, just below the falls. He was last seen swirling through its rapids, just ahead of the churning whirlpool; his body was found four days later, crushed by the weight of the water.
And it’s not just turbulence. Former Texas coach George Block worries about water quality and temperature in the rapidly mushrooming open-water races around the world. “Suddenly kids who are world-class athletes were sick all the time, and that just scared me to death,” he explains. “Especially the age group I was coaching. We were taking minor females of reproductive age and exposing them to I don’t know what in the way of chemical or biological contaminants. So I feel like we should take a time out from open-water races until we deal with these issues. But there’s money and Olympic medals and national prestige at stake.” He mentions Dubai, where the widely respected marathoner Fran Crippen died during a race in 2010. “The issue there was the water was too hot. Now that’s easily measured. I’m worried about other places where you can’t measure it. And the long-term effects we don’t know about yet.”
Responsible race organizers like Morty Berger of NYC Swim carefully monitor everything from the tides to the temperature to the amount of flotsam and jetsam along swimmers’ routes. Hypothermia gets laser-like attention. I watch him order one swimmer pulled out of the 68-degree water during a particularly difficult race and then ask how he recognized the problem. Berger enumerates the classic symptoms: “His lips were purple, his skin was pale, his stroke rate was down, and he didn’t know where he was.” The swimmer was treated immediately and recovered.
Understanding water and its potential for destruction has only been a priority in the last century and a half. Drowning was a horrific public health issue in the early days of travel by sea. From 1855 to 1875, shipwrecks took the lives of more than 33,000 souls off the coast of England. In the United States some 9,000 people a year were drowning. During one hot July week in 1875, there were 14 deaths by drowning—in a single city, New York. Newspaper editorials called for better supervision and public lessons. “Until the art of swimming becomes more generally practiced,” wrote the New York Times, “deaths by drowning will be numerous. We do not think it is any exaggeration to say that the majority of the people cannot swim.” Ralph Thomas, the aquaphile bibliographer for whom swimming was right up there with breathing, praised the suggestion by Australian Charles Steedman that coroners’ verdicts of drowning victims should be changed to “death caused by a most important feature in the physical education of the victim having been completely ignored, namely, ‘the art of swimming.’ Perhaps a better one is that there should be a law ‘compelling all persons saved from drowning, who were unable to swim, to pay a tithe’ of their property to their rescuers.”
Two particularly dreadful shipwrecks finally motivated public officials. In 1878, the SS Princess Alice, a paddle-steamer running excursion tours on London’s Thames, was rammed by a coal ship and split in half. More than 650 people died, many poisoned by the foul sewage in the river. Of the 339 women aboard, only 1 survived. In 1904, a fire from the forward section ignited the wooden decks of the General Slocum, a passenger steamboat, sending it to the bottom of New York’s East River. It was—until September 11, 2001—the deadliest disaster in the city’s history: 1,021 people died, including hundreds of women whose voluminous skirts and petticoats prevented them from swimming to the nearby shore.
Together, those accidents (murders, some called them) led to a number of reforms, including shipboard regulations for passenger safety and increased agreement that women should learn to swim and be allowed to trim their swimming costumes to water-friendly proportions. There was also, for the first time, public agreement on the need for proper life-saving techniques.
“The hardest part of a rescue is keeping them afloat,” John Ryan Sr. explains. “So our golden rule on the beach is, if you see somebody in trouble, and there’s no lifeguard around, call 911, and get them a flotation device. We can be there in five minutes.” Ryan is telling me about the Junior Lifeguard Program in East Hampton, New York, a summer set of classes and drills for youngsters that reflects more than one hundred years of leadership by the American Red Cross and other organizations dedicated to water safety. Today there are programs like it on beaches across the United States, teaching the skills to make ocean swimming efficient and secure. More than 250 youngsters from nine to fourteen are enrolled in this session, both local residents and renters (city folk, Ryan calls them). It fills, Ryan says, a critical need. “I believe that between 40 and 50 percent of the school-age population cannot swim—that they cannot tread water for five minutes at the deep end of the pool. Yet they will go into the ocean with a boogie board. And that’s dangerous.”
It is a shocking number made more astounding when you consider the geography. The town of East Hampton, a resort and residential community on the very eastern end of New York’s Long Island, occupies a chunk of land and beach that narrows to just half a mile at high tide. Parts of it are tony indeed; others, not so much. All of it is surrounded on three sides by water—the Atlantic Ocean, the bays that lead to Long Island Sound, and the sound that straddles both. It’s just a finger of land in the sea, a sea that has claimed its share of lives over the years. Not knowing how to swim here is like not knowing how to drive at the Indy 500. So Ryan, a white-haired former lifeguard who founded the program twenty years ago, tests the kids during the winter and helps train them in the summer. Not all will graduate to the big chair on the beach as professionals (as Ryan’s own nine children all have), but this “makes them safer in the ocean,” he says. Which is why he shows up every weekend at the beach, where the kids are taught the right way to respect and enjoy the ocean.
On the Sunday morning I stop by, the four-foot waves are as daunting to me as they are to a pair of eleven-year-old girls, hanging back when directed to swim a drill with the rest of their group. “It’s up to you,” Robby Lambert, the twenty-nine-year-old coach is saying. “Do you want to work on that really bad four-letter word, F-E-A-R?” The girls aren’t sure. Lambert challenges them, lets them decide. “I can’t drag a kid into the water,” he tells me. “It has to be on their own terms.” I point out that the ocean is, um, a bit scary. “It’s the same as yesterday, and they went in then,” he replies. “I think we just pushed them so much, so last night they were able to build on that fear of, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go back today.’” Lambert, a surfer by choice and the owner of a plumbing company by profession, gets a small paycheck for teaching. But that’s not why he does it. “When you swim, you’re taking away one of your senses, your hearing,” he says. “So it leaves you the peace of your mind, the cadence of your swim. I love swimming.”
I lose sight of the reticent junior lifeguards that morning, but I see Robby and his colleagues surrounded by youngsters at the other activities run by this thoroughly public-spirited group. One foggy afternoon in July they’re cheering on the grown-up lifeguards at a multi-town tournament that pits the hunkiest guys and the best-toned gals in the county against each other in everything from run-swim-run races to mock rescues from the rough surf. At the beach the next day, I chat with two of the regulars as they put down their binoculars and trade shifts with their buddies. Like Lambert, most are surfers, square-jawed with rippling muscles, in jammers and backwards baseball caps, totally dedicated to the people they’re there to protect, often picking them up before danger has a chance. The day before, they’d rescued a nine-year-old from a rip tide and a woman in her fifties. “She just brought us cookies,” Matt Burns tells me, delighted. How did he know to rescue them? “You can see it coming, on their facial expressions. The kid looked panicked.” He brought them both in with a cross-chest carry. Matt and his twin, Ryan, are college students, fixtures on this beach in the summer. A third lifeguard, Lee Bertrand, drives up in an ATV to check on the situation. Like all of them, he appreciates the benefits of a summer job on the beach. “It’s a pretty good deal if this is your office,” he tells me. “Because this is the place you want to come to when you’re off.”
Lucky for us, they’re not off much. At my first open-water swim, a charity event for cancer called Swim Across America, I’m doing half a mile in a choppy bay in Amagansett, the next-door village. At one point I look up and realize we are surrounded by lifeguards, balanced on paddleboards or surf boards, marking the course (and watching us). “There are as many of you as there are of us,” I remark to one hunky protector. “That’s the way it should be,” he says. “Concierge service.” I put my head back in the water and stroke on, protected.
Then, both my arms growing weary, at the shoulder,Until it didn’t. Some interpret Leander’s death as a sign from the gods, a cautionary tale for humans not to upset the cosmic order, not to offend divine authority. Or perhaps it’s just the peril of forbidden romance, fated from the start to end badly. Others see it as the conflict of the continents, the ongoing struggle between East and West. And then there’s the fellow from our Curaçao swim camp who, on hearing the story, concludes with twenty-first-century moxie that the meaning is clear: Don’t swim at night. And certainly not alone.
I raised myself strongly, high above the wave. . . .
And sudden strength returned to my weary arms,
And the waves seemed calmer to me.
Love aids me, warming my eager hear. . . .
I am more vigorous and the shore comes neare. . . .
Excellent advice, which I am happily following on this golden afternoon in a sea full of swimmers, mindful that the tranquil channel we are traversing has the power to turn violent in a New York swimmer’s minute.
“Anybody that’s not afraid of the water is a fool,” Ernie Burgess is telling me. “You’ve got to have a lot of respect for it. You’ve got to know how easy it is to drown.” Burgess has been a lobsterman in Maine for fifty-eight (of his sixty-eight) years. Lobsterboy at first, I guess. I’ve asked him why so many people whose livelihood is fished out of the sea don’t know how to swim. “It’s true,” he goes on, bemused by a question he says he’s never considered. “But I have no idea why—whether it’s a fatalistic attitude or because they didn’t learn when they were little kids or what.” He chuckles—not at the serious subject, but at the way of life for a third-generation lobsterman. “Well, I can swim. Not very well, but I can probably keep myself afloat for three to four minutes, and that’s about all you’ve got anyway.” He means because the water’s so cold. A number of his friends have drowned. And he’s pulled seven people out himself. But Burgess, who spends all day on the water running eight hundred lobster traps in and around Chebeague Island, doesn’t swim for fun. Even in the summer, when it warms up, you won’t find the lobstermen of Maine practicing their breaststroke. “We spend so much time trying to stay out of the water, that’s the last thing you think about,” he says. “‘Cause if you’re getting in, chances are the circumstances aren’t gonna be too rosy!”
In 2008, accidental drownings took the lives of 4,058 people in the United States—more than ten a day. The highest rates were among children from ages one to four; African Americans from five to fourteen were particularly vulnerable. According to a recent study, 60 percent of minority children cannot swim, compared to 40 percent of white children. And the rate of drowning among minorities is at least three times that of white children.
The poet Shelley never did learn and drowned at sea. But lessons aren’t the only solution. You can drown in a bathtub. You can get in over your head. Bad things can happen to good swimmers. Eight years after his triumph at the English Channel, Matthew Webb found himself in financial difficulties and, in a desperate attempt at publicity, announced that he would swim the treacherous Niagara River, just below the falls. He was last seen swirling through its rapids, just ahead of the churning whirlpool; his body was found four days later, crushed by the weight of the water.
And it’s not just turbulence. Former Texas coach George Block worries about water quality and temperature in the rapidly mushrooming open-water races around the world. “Suddenly kids who are world-class athletes were sick all the time, and that just scared me to death,” he explains. “Especially the age group I was coaching. We were taking minor females of reproductive age and exposing them to I don’t know what in the way of chemical or biological contaminants. So I feel like we should take a time out from open-water races until we deal with these issues. But there’s money and Olympic medals and national prestige at stake.” He mentions Dubai, where the widely respected marathoner Fran Crippen died during a race in 2010. “The issue there was the water was too hot. Now that’s easily measured. I’m worried about other places where you can’t measure it. And the long-term effects we don’t know about yet.”
Responsible race organizers like Morty Berger of NYC Swim carefully monitor everything from the tides to the temperature to the amount of flotsam and jetsam along swimmers’ routes. Hypothermia gets laser-like attention. I watch him order one swimmer pulled out of the 68-degree water during a particularly difficult race and then ask how he recognized the problem. Berger enumerates the classic symptoms: “His lips were purple, his skin was pale, his stroke rate was down, and he didn’t know where he was.” The swimmer was treated immediately and recovered.
Understanding water and its potential for destruction has only been a priority in the last century and a half. Drowning was a horrific public health issue in the early days of travel by sea. From 1855 to 1875, shipwrecks took the lives of more than 33,000 souls off the coast of England. In the United States some 9,000 people a year were drowning. During one hot July week in 1875, there were 14 deaths by drowning—in a single city, New York. Newspaper editorials called for better supervision and public lessons. “Until the art of swimming becomes more generally practiced,” wrote the New York Times, “deaths by drowning will be numerous. We do not think it is any exaggeration to say that the majority of the people cannot swim.” Ralph Thomas, the aquaphile bibliographer for whom swimming was right up there with breathing, praised the suggestion by Australian Charles Steedman that coroners’ verdicts of drowning victims should be changed to “death caused by a most important feature in the physical education of the victim having been completely ignored, namely, ‘the art of swimming.’ Perhaps a better one is that there should be a law ‘compelling all persons saved from drowning, who were unable to swim, to pay a tithe’ of their property to their rescuers.”
Two particularly dreadful shipwrecks finally motivated public officials. In 1878, the SS Princess Alice, a paddle-steamer running excursion tours on London’s Thames, was rammed by a coal ship and split in half. More than 650 people died, many poisoned by the foul sewage in the river. Of the 339 women aboard, only 1 survived. In 1904, a fire from the forward section ignited the wooden decks of the General Slocum, a passenger steamboat, sending it to the bottom of New York’s East River. It was—until September 11, 2001—the deadliest disaster in the city’s history: 1,021 people died, including hundreds of women whose voluminous skirts and petticoats prevented them from swimming to the nearby shore.
Together, those accidents (murders, some called them) led to a number of reforms, including shipboard regulations for passenger safety and increased agreement that women should learn to swim and be allowed to trim their swimming costumes to water-friendly proportions. There was also, for the first time, public agreement on the need for proper life-saving techniques.
“The hardest part of a rescue is keeping them afloat,” John Ryan Sr. explains. “So our golden rule on the beach is, if you see somebody in trouble, and there’s no lifeguard around, call 911, and get them a flotation device. We can be there in five minutes.” Ryan is telling me about the Junior Lifeguard Program in East Hampton, New York, a summer set of classes and drills for youngsters that reflects more than one hundred years of leadership by the American Red Cross and other organizations dedicated to water safety. Today there are programs like it on beaches across the United States, teaching the skills to make ocean swimming efficient and secure. More than 250 youngsters from nine to fourteen are enrolled in this session, both local residents and renters (city folk, Ryan calls them). It fills, Ryan says, a critical need. “I believe that between 40 and 50 percent of the school-age population cannot swim—that they cannot tread water for five minutes at the deep end of the pool. Yet they will go into the ocean with a boogie board. And that’s dangerous.”
It is a shocking number made more astounding when you consider the geography. The town of East Hampton, a resort and residential community on the very eastern end of New York’s Long Island, occupies a chunk of land and beach that narrows to just half a mile at high tide. Parts of it are tony indeed; others, not so much. All of it is surrounded on three sides by water—the Atlantic Ocean, the bays that lead to Long Island Sound, and the sound that straddles both. It’s just a finger of land in the sea, a sea that has claimed its share of lives over the years. Not knowing how to swim here is like not knowing how to drive at the Indy 500. So Ryan, a white-haired former lifeguard who founded the program twenty years ago, tests the kids during the winter and helps train them in the summer. Not all will graduate to the big chair on the beach as professionals (as Ryan’s own nine children all have), but this “makes them safer in the ocean,” he says. Which is why he shows up every weekend at the beach, where the kids are taught the right way to respect and enjoy the ocean.
I lose sight of the reticent junior lifeguards that morning, but I see Robby and his colleagues surrounded by youngsters at the other activities run by this thoroughly public-spirited group. One foggy afternoon in July they’re cheering on the grown-up lifeguards at a multi-town tournament that pits the hunkiest guys and the best-toned gals in the county against each other in everything from run-swim-run races to mock rescues from the rough surf. At the beach the next day, I chat with two of the regulars as they put down their binoculars and trade shifts with their buddies. Like Lambert, most are surfers, square-jawed with rippling muscles, in jammers and backwards baseball caps, totally dedicated to the people they’re there to protect, often picking them up before danger has a chance. The day before, they’d rescued a nine-year-old from a rip tide and a woman in her fifties. “She just brought us cookies,” Matt Burns tells me, delighted. How did he know to rescue them? “You can see it coming, on their facial expressions. The kid looked panicked.” He brought them both in with a cross-chest carry. Matt and his twin, Ryan, are college students, fixtures on this beach in the summer. A third lifeguard, Lee Bertrand, drives up in an ATV to check on the situation. Like all of them, he appreciates the benefits of a summer job on the beach. “It’s a pretty good deal if this is your office,” he tells me. “Because this is the place you want to come to when you’re off.”
Lucky for us, they’re not off much. At my first open-water swim, a charity event for cancer called Swim Across America, I’m doing half a mile in a choppy bay in Amagansett, the next-door village. At one point I look up and realize we are surrounded by lifeguards, balanced on paddleboards or surf boards, marking the course (and watching us). “There are as many of you as there are of us,” I remark to one hunky protector. “That’s the way it should be,” he says. “Concierge service.” I put my head back in the water and stroke on, protected.
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