Cultural Spelunking

I am not wearing sunscreen. The nagging sentence that alarm bells in my head anytime I am at work and haven’t lathered up. I feel like I am walking around in my fragile skin, skin that can’t take wear and tear of the daily duties of a lifeguard, skin that might rub off if it were to be handled forcefully, like the thinnest dry layer over a new coat of paint. Cool it, I tell myself. Focus.

Sitting under a canopy behind the station, all the eyes of my coworkers are on a man who is teaching us how to more accurately insert a plastic tube down a drowned person’s throat. Giving them an airway, and an exit for all that sea water they tried to breathe, I think morbidly.

As I listen to this man tell us how you “just have to wiggle, not push” I watch his hands deftly maneuver the device in a way that they have clearly done thousands of times. As an anesthesiologist these things are old hat I guess. He speaks to us with admiration about the unique dedication lifeguarding takes, more nervous about speaking to us as a crowd then the prospect of prying open the jaws of someone who is technically dead to try and change that fact. His experience level with emergency is so far in the experienced end of the spectrum that he forgets to talk to us like we might not know what the fuck we should do in an emergency. We know of course, most of us have just never done it. I shift my exposed shoulder out of the sunlight. I can feel it starting to burn. 

A girl walks by our table from the Snack Shack, and I imagine how serious and studious we all must look. Respectable, trustworthy. Watching us briefly will be a momentary endeavor into seriousness from her day at the beach. A quick word from our sponsors between Teen People and the ice cream in her hand. Maybe she realizes that the dummy we are practicing on could be a substitution for her, or her mom or her little brother. Maybe she has a sobering moment thinking about the fact that people actually do lay their heads back like that, eyes rolling up, lifeless and ashen. Or maybe only I realize these things, and for her it is back to the scheduled programming of relaxation at the beach. 

When I compare the blind faith I put in the technical infallibility of a doctor with how foreign this medical device feels in my hand, I almost want to laugh. 

While my coworkers giggle that he puts KY Jelly on the airway device, all I can think of are words like scraping, tearing, and bleeding. I guess with your lungs full of bile and seawater, a sore throat isn’t the worst of your troubles, but still. I look around as people’s attentions start to slip. Someone mimics the insertion method of the tubing, whispered side conversations start up. This isn’t real. All but a handful of us have never used any medical skill like this in real life (it is considered poor form to let victims get to the point of actually drowning before someone goes to save them). The only times I have held a mask to someone’s face and done chest compressions have been on a coworker, trying not to laugh while we practiced the skill. 

Everyone listens to the speaker like they would listen to any lecture. Not as if their lives depend on it, or as if the life of someone very dear to them depends on it. Not, evidently, with the tendrils of panic I can imagine myself feeling that threaten to lash my brain to my heart, meeting somewhere around my throat. They listen to learn, to dispassionately reenact what we see here when the time is right. Because the job requires the application of a tougher hide. We paint it on with sunscreen, with badges, with radios, with cite books, because when it comes down to the wire all that matters is what you have upstairs. 

Being a lifeguard requires this certain quality, more self-aware than bravado and quieter than cockiness. Guarding requires a calm confidence, the ability to channel your adrenaline into logical action. There is this clear place in my mind I try to reach when I am at work, one where I know that I am prepared, calm and equipped with knowledge. The kind of knowledge that one anesthesiologist was teaching us today. In the end it all comes down to your own ability to turn down the volume of panic in your own brain and reach this clear place, where all thats left is you and your guts. From there it’s a leap of faith that your best is enough.