2/14 The life guards in the town I grew up in are asking for donations to buy a new quad. I see this posted by a classmate from back then, whom I never really spoke to, probably not even back then, who is now the vice president of the local life guard chapter. Funny if I were to donate a large sum of money from America to buy that quad.

When I was a kid we were placed on the lake shore with a life guard t-shirt and a walkie-talkie so we could call our HQ a few yards up the hill if anything was amiss. Of course the walkie-talkie was the best part of it and made us feel incredibly important. We were supposed to use it only if anything actually important happened, and not block the airwaves with mindless chatter, trying out the magic of the call signs. Of course I spent the entire day wondering about something that would qualify as important enough to use the walkie-talkie for, and ended up saying something clearly not important enough every ten minutes and getting on everybody’s nerves with it.

One day somebody walked over to us and asked, rather casually, whether we could call someone because there was an emergency with a diver a few hundred yards down the shore in the old quarry. I figured that nobody could fault me for using the walkie-talkie for that, since it was probably somewhat important. So I pressed the button and used the call sign magic and said that somebody had said to me that there was an emergency with a diver.

I did not expect that this was so important that within less than a second one of the older guys, maybe eighteen, who I think was the head of our watch, came running down the hill on the jetty so fast that he almost couldn’t stop himself before the rescue boat that was moored on the shore. He jumped into it with a few others who had also come running down the jetty and they headed off to the quarry, the engine roaring and drawing a wide, circular wave front across the lake.

It is this one image that my brain decided to keep for those past fourty-five years: How he came running down the jetty, bare-foot, and struggled to come to a stop with a few very quick, staggering steps right in front of the boat.