…The meagerest American house
is a gross Hilton compared to where most people
make shelter on the inclement world.
To start with, feel fortunate.
—quote from “The American Living Room: A Tract” in Partial Accounts: New & Selected Poems by William Meredith (Alfred A Knopf Press 1987)
When the president of your country, the most powerful country in the world, is unable to complete a compound sentence without some kind of falsity imbedded in it, it’s helpful to turn to poets who hold the long view. The long view’s never cheerful — everyone dies in the end — but it’s balanced as it surveys the larger world and its uneven history. I think of these poets as our moral lifeguards, pulling us out of the riptides of anger and depression as we read our daily papers. William Meredith is one of those poets, and I’ve taken his line, “To start with, feel fortunate,” as the title of our new book (a collection of these essays and Jeanne’s drawings). And this thought reminded me that at one time in my life I was an actual lifeguard.
Jeanne and I have almost always felt fortunate, despite the weight of inequality (women in a men’s world), and the lack of respect for teachers and artists (idealists in a practical world). From the beginning we were lucky with both our homes and our jobs. Our first rental — $75 a month in 1957 — was a tiny pink-shingled cottage in Lake Arrowhead, New Jersey, perched precariously on a cliff above busy Route 46 at the end of a narrow road winding around the wooded lake. We loved it.
My salary for teaching 7th-grade English was $4,400, and suddenly we had two children (“What were you thinking of?” my mother cried.) We needed a second job to keep us out of debt, so when I saw an ad looking for a lifeguard at Mt. Lakes Beach, I applied. I was a decent swimmer, though I’d never taught or taken a lesson, but they hired me on the spot. They gave me a list of young children I was to teach how to swim in the morning, and then, after lunch when the beach began to fill, I sat on my tall lifeguard chair. I was nervous, studying the pamphlet on lifesaving techniques they’d given me, but the beach was shallow for a long ways. I broke up squabbles, and watched the children carefully.
But just before the end of swimming season, I watched a boy bobbing in the water — and suddenly he was gone. I leaped down, raced through the shallow part and swam to where he had disappeared. Diving under the water, I saw him struggling sluggishly, and grabbed him by the waist, completely forgetting every rescue technique I’d studied. Holding him as high as I could (I could see the surface), I marched him toward the beach, breaking by a long shot my record for not breathing under water. It must have been a sight, seeing the wriggling boy advance toward the beach propelled by some submarine force. When my gasping head finally appeared, a cry came from the onlookers. The mother ran to her child, took him in her arms, and thanked me profusely for saving him. I just smiled, because I couldn’t get my breath back. I finished up my week, and told the directors that I was resigning from the lifeguard business for good. I knew I had been lucky.
One pleasure of these columns is that it leads me back to poems I loved years ago, and this story reminded me of a great one by James Dickey, in which a lifeguard dreams about a child he failed to save. If you haven’t read it, look it up.
I wash the black mud from my hands.
On a light given off by the grave
I kneel in the quick of the moon
At the heart of a distant forest
And hold in my arms a child
Of water, water, water.
—quote from “The Lifeguard” in James Dickey Poems 1957-67 (Wesleyan University Press 1967)
This article appears in Mar 23-30, 2017.