This I Believe
9 10 2014Ten people drown in the U.S. every day. While accidents happen, and many drowning deaths are not 100% preventable, I believe that everyone, adults and children alike, ought to know how swim.
The summer after my junior year of high school, I worked at the Bonner Springs Aquatic Park in Bonner Springs, KS as the head lifeguard. I had dealt with a lot of different rescues before, usually young kids who went into water over their heads, but one really stuck with me. A twenty-something nonswimmer jumped off the diving board and went straight into the arms-over-head active drowning position. One of my coworkers, a friend and teammate on the local swim team, jumped in and rescued her. The shock of the rescue threw the victim into a seizure, and, as the head lifeguard, I had to respond. I swear, it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and her chest thrusted up and down as if she was possessed. The ambulance came and took her away, and I’m not sure what happened to the woman after that.
I spend a lot of time around water, whether swimming, lifeguarding, coaching, or teaching swimming lessons. And I’ve seen a lot of people go into water too deep or lose their footing and start to drown. Each time, the look in their eyes is haunting. The wide, darting eyes, desperately searching for help. The mouth gulping for air like a beached goldfish. The tensed muscles and flailing arms and legs. And that final look of resignation as they start to slip beneath the surface.
For me, swimming is not just a sport or something you do for fun. It’s one of the most essential life skills. Somewhere between a third and one half of American adults cannot swim the length of a typical pool. In addition, 54% of American children between 12 and 18 can’t swim in the deep end of a pool.
In the end, I believe that in this day and age, all people (with the exception of infants and very small children, although this video shows a lot of promise for reducing drowning deaths in infants and toddlers) ought to learn to swim through either self-teaching or formal lessons.
So, have you now done the “scary story” that I wasn’t going to
assign until Halloween? My mom is/was scared of water. I don’t
know if she’s ever been swimming. She says that’s why she
made sure all of her kids had swimming lessons early. I
getting lessons before I was in the first grade.
“I remember….” Somehow I dropped a word. I hate
when that happens.