The Off-Season

Undertow

Chapter 19: The Off-Season

September came like a door closing. Not a slam -- the season did not end abruptly, did not terminate in a single event or a single day. Labor Day was the official ending, the calendar's declaration that summer was done and the beach was closed and the lifeguards were finished, but the ending had been approaching for weeks, arriving in the increments of light and temperature and crowds. The daily diminishments accumulated into September, and September was the off-season, the nine months between Labor Day and Memorial Day that were the other life: no stand, no scanning, no swimmers in the water.

The off-season was EMT work. James had been a certified Emergency Medical Technician since 2008, three years into his career on the patrol, the certification being the natural extension of the lifeguarding, the widening of the lifesaving from the water to the land, from the drowning to the cardiac arrest to the car accident to the overdose to the full spectrum of the ways the human body found itself in crisis and that the EMT was trained to respond to, the trained response that was the intervention, the intervention that was the standing-between in its terrestrial form, the standing-between the person and the dying that the lifeguard did in the water and that the EMT did on the ground.

He worked for the Neptune Township First Aid Squad, a volunteer organization that operated two ambulances out of a station on Route 35, the station being a converted gas station that had been donated to the township in 1974 and that had been the first aid station ever since, the building retaining the automotive architecture of its original purpose, the two ambulance bays occupying the space where the service bays had been, the overhead doors the same overhead doors that had opened for the cars that came for oil changes and tire rotations and that now opened for the ambulances that went out for the chest pains and the falls and the difficulty-breathings that were Neptune Township's medical emergencies, the emergencies that the off-season provided in place of the drownings, the inland emergencies, the emergencies that happened in houses and on streets and in parking lots rather than in the water.

The EMT work was different because the medium was different. Lifeguarding happened in the ocean, and the ocean was the variable: tide, wind, swell, sandbars rearranged overnight. The guard read the changes and responded to them. EMT work happened in houses and on sidewalks and in the backs of ambulances, environments that did not produce rip currents or change shape while you were inside them. It was not easier. It was different because the variable was absent.

James worked the off-season shifts three days a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, twelve-hour shifts from six in the morning to six in the evening. The shifts were long and the calls were intermittent and the time between the calls was the waiting, the waiting that the EMT shared with the lifeguard, the two professions having in common the waiting, the readiness, the coiled state of the body and the mind that said: I am prepared, I am here, the emergency has not yet arrived but I am ready for its arrival, and the readiness is the work, and the waiting is the readiness, and the readiness is the thing.

The calls came through the dispatch radio, the Monmouth County 911 dispatch that sent the information in the flat neutral voice that the dispatchers used, the voice that did not panic because the voice could not panic, the voice that said: Neptune Township First Aid, you have a call, 47 Hawthorne Avenue, male patient, age seventy-two, chest pain, and the voice was the information and the information was the going and the going was the driving and the driving was the arriving and the arriving was the assessing and the assessing was the treating and the treating was the transporting and the transporting was the delivery, the delivery of the patient to the emergency room at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, the hospital that was three miles from the first aid station and that received the patients and that was the destination, the end point, the place where the EMT's work ended and the hospital's work began.

The EMT work used the hands. The EMT work used the same hands that the lifeguarding used, the hands that had checked the rescue cans and the towlines and the buckles and the straps, the hands that now checked the blood pressure cuff and the oxygen regulator and the cardiac monitor leads and the IV tubing and the splints and the cervical collars and the backboard straps, the same hands doing different work in a different medium but the same thing, the same fundamental thing, which was the touching, the physical contact between the responder's hands and the patient's body that was the connection, the human connection, the tactile communication that said: I am here, my hands are on you, my hands are doing the thing my hands have been trained to do, and the doing is the caring, and the caring is the thing.

He found, in the off-season, that the hands missed the water. He found that the hands, in November, in December, in the months when the ocean was a memory and the work was the ambulance and the houses and the terrestrial emergencies, the hands wanted the water, wanted the temperature of the water and the texture of the water and the resistance of the water, the physical medium that the hands had worked in for six months and that the hands now worked without, the absence that was the off-season's specific deprivation, the taking-away of the medium that left the hands working in the air, working in the dry, working in the environment that was not the environment the hands had been built for, trained for, shaped by.

He ran the beach in winter. This was the thing he did. This was the off-season practice that maintained the connection, that preserved the contact between the body and the beach that the off-season otherwise severed, the severing being the separation, the nine months of not-being-on-the-stand that was the off-season's condition, the condition that James mitigated by running, by going to the beach three mornings a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at five-thirty, in the dark, in the cold, in the winter, and running.

The winter beach was not the summer beach. The winter beach was the beach without the people, without the stands, without the flags, without the rescue cans, without the equipment building's door being open and the locker being accessible and the morning meeting happening and the patrol assembling and the guards going to their positions. The winter beach was the beach stripped of its human infrastructure, reduced to its essential components, the sand and the water and the sky and the wind, the four elements that comprised the beach in its off-season condition, the condition that was the beach being itself, being the thing it was when the people were gone, being the coastline rather than the beach, the geological feature rather than the recreational facility.

The sand in winter was hard. The sand in winter was packed by the storms and the tides and the absence of the foot traffic that loosened the summer sand, the sand that in July was soft and deep and that resisted the running and that in January was firm and flat and that supported the running the way a track supported the running, the winter sand being the better running surface, the ironic improvement that the off-season provided, the sand at its best for running being the sand at its worst for swimming, the two conditions being inversely related, the relationship that was the winter's character, the everything-for-the-running and the nothing-for-the-swimming, the off-season's equation.

He ran in layers. He ran in the thermal shirt and the wind-resistant jacket and the running tights and the gloves and the watch cap that covered his ears, the layers that the winter required, the clothing that the summer did not require, the summer running being the running in shorts and bare feet and bare chest, the minimal clothing of the warm months, and the winter running being the bundled armored insulated running of the cold months, the body wrapped against the wind that came off the ocean and that carried the ocean's temperature and that the temperature in January was forty degrees and the wind in January was fifteen knots and the combination of the forty degrees and the fifteen knots was the wind chill that the weather service calculated and that James did not calculate because the calculation was unnecessary, because the body calculated the wind chill by feeling it, by the skin's immediate and accurate assessment of the cold, the assessment that said: this is January, this is the ocean's wind, this is the cold that the layers are for, and the layers are working, and the body is working, and the running is happening.

The winter ocean was gray. It was the color of the sky that produced it, the overcast January sky that had stripped away the blue-green the postcards promised. Water, sky, and sand collapsed into one tone. The winter's aesthetic was austerity: the ocean not performing its summer beauty but being its winter self, cold and plain.

He ran and he watched the water. He could not stop watching the water. He ran the three miles, north to the jetty, south to the Third Avenue groin, north to the starting point, and while the legs ran and the lungs breathed and the body performed the mechanical function of the exercise, the eyes watched the water, the eyes scanned, the eyes did the thing the eyes had been trained to do and that the eyes could not stop doing, not in winter, not off-duty, not in the absence of the swimmers who were the reason for the scanning. The eyes scanned the empty water. The eyes looked for the disturbance in the surface, the anomaly, the thing that did not belong, and found nothing, because nothing was there, because the swimmers were not there, because the beach was empty and the water was empty and the scanning was the reflex, the conditioned reflex, the automatic response of a visual system that had been trained for twenty years to look for the drowning and that could not stop looking, that would look for the drowning in an empty ocean the way a combat veteran would look for the threat in a peaceful room, the vigilance that the training had installed and that the off-season could not uninstall, the permanent modification of the visual system that was the lifeguarding's legacy, the legacy that said: you will always scan, you will always look, you will always be the eyes on the water, even when the water does not need the eyes, even when the water is empty, even when the beach is winter and the guard is off-duty and the scanning is the habit that the body will not break.

The absence of the ocean was the off-season's weight. Not physical absence -- the ocean was there, always there, not leaving in September and returning in May. The absence was relational. The guard's relationship to the water existed during the season, while he was on the stand and the swimmers were in the water and he was the person between. The off-season suspended that relationship, stored it with the rescue cans and paddle boards and stands, waiting for Memorial Day to take everything out again.

James felt the absence. He felt it in the mornings, in the five-thirty mornings when the alarm went off and the waking was the waking not to the stand but to the ambulance, not to the scanning but to the waiting, not to the ocean but to the houses and the streets and the terrestrial emergencies of Neptune Township that were the work but that were not the work, the real work, the water work, the work that buzzed in the sternum and that the off-season stilled, the buzzing gone quiet, the buzzing in its dormant state, the hibernation of the instinct that the summer woke and the winter slept.

He felt it in the hands. He felt it when the hands opened a door and the door was not the water, when the hands held a steering wheel and the steering wheel was not the can, when the hands touched a patient's skin and the skin was not the swimmer's skin, the dry skin of the terrestrial patient who was having a cardiac event on the kitchen floor of a house on Hawthorne Avenue and whose skin was the wrong temperature, the too-warm or too-cool temperature of the sick body on the dry ground, not the cold wet skin of the swimmer in the water, the swimmer whose skin James's hands had touched in two hundred rescues, the specific temperature and texture of the saved body in the ocean that was the hands' primary memory, the hands' first language, the language of the wet and the cold and the salt.

He went to the ocean on Sundays. Not the winter runs, which were the exercise. The Sunday visits were not exercise. The Sunday visits were the visiting, the going-to-see, the driving to Asbury Park and parking on Ocean Avenue and walking across the boardwalk and standing on the sand and looking at the water, the looking that was not the scanning but the seeing, the seeing that was the attendance, the being-present at the thing the way Keith was present at the bench, the Sunday presence that said: I am here, I am at the water, the water is the thing and I am at the thing and the being-at is the maintaining of the relationship, the relationship that the off-season suspended but that the Sunday visit preserved, the visit being the thread, the thin thread that connected September to May, the off-season's beginning to the off-season's end.

He stood at the waterline in January and the water was thirty-nine degrees and he did not enter it. The waves hit his feet. This was not the sixty-degree cold that made early-season swimmers gasp and retreat, but the deep winter cold that said: I am not for swimming. I am for looking at. I am for the guard who comes on Sundays in the off-season and maintains the connection by standing beside what he will return to in May.

The off-season ended in May. The off-season ended the way it began, gradually, incrementally, the door opening the way the door had closed, slowly, over weeks, the preparations that preceded the opening -- the equipment inspections, the pre-season training, the CPR recertifications, the fitness tests, the morning meetings that began in the first week of May and that ran through the month, the meetings that were the rehearsal, the practice, the reinstallation of the protocols that the off-season had not erased but had dimmed, the protocols that needed to be refreshed, reminded, re-articulated, the way a house that had been closed for the winter needed to be aired, opened, the windows raised and the dust removed and the systems restarted, the house that was the patrol, the patrol that was the house, the structure that the off-season closed and the May reopened.

James felt the buzzing return. He felt it in the first week of May, in the first morning meeting, in the first standing on the boardwalk with the clipboard and the radio and the twenty-two guards in the semicircle, the buzzing returning to the sternum the way the birds returned to the coast in the spring, the migratory return, the seasonal arrival of the thing that had been elsewhere and that was now back, the buzzing that was the instinct, the instinct that was the readiness, the readiness that was the season, and the season was beginning, and the beginning was the thing, and the thing was the water, and the water was waiting, and the waiting was over.

This was his last off-season. This was the thing he did not say in the September that followed the last summer, the September that was the door closing on the last season, the closing that was the last closing, the off-season that would not end in May with the return to the stand but that would continue, that would extend, that would become the permanent condition, the permanent off-season, the life after the lifeguarding that was the Trenton job and the classroom and the desk and the fluorescent lights and the not-being-at-the-beach, the not-being-at-the-beach that in previous off-seasons had been temporary and that would now be permanent, the temporary becoming the permanent, the nine months becoming the twelve months, the off-season becoming the life.

He did not think about this. He thought about this. He stood at the waterline on a Sunday in January and looked at the winter ocean, not thinking about permanence and thinking about it, the two thoughts coexisting in the same cold. This off-season was the last off-season. After it, the absence would become the condition of a man who had guarded the water for twenty years and would not guard it again, who would stand at the waterline on Sundays not as the guard waiting for the season but as the man remembering the guarding. The water would continue. It would not know the difference between the guard and the man. James stood at the waterline and felt the cold on his feet and the absence in his chest and the love, sharpened rather than diminished by the not-having.