A recent essay in The Atlantic traces a lifeguard shortage over the last hundred years.
One might imagine that students with “free time” are ideal to fill these roles, and that is certainly one solution. But employers might also consider targeting other groups by highlighting benefits that go beyond the paycheck.
By late 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were in, the pandemic’s grip was starting to ease, and the swimming pools of San Francisco were cautiously beginning to reopen. I needed them open longer hours though: 9 am to 1 pm was barely enough time to resume my daily regime of 2000 meters, more easily manageable pre-COVID when the pools were open all day.
“What will it take for the YMCA to stay open longer hours again?” I called to the lifeguard sitting high above the pool deck.
“More lifeguards,” she called back. “We don’t have enough on staff to stay open past 1 pm.”
“What will it take for you to get more lifeguards?” I pressed.
“What will it take? More people who can pass the lifesaving drills!” she shrugged, and then, suddenly serious, she added: “You’re a good swimmer? Would you be interested?”
Last time I lifeguarded, I was a teenager. It was a natural summer job for a high school swimmer and water polo player saving up for college. I never really stepped away from a pool in the five decades that followed except for the first twelve months of the pandemic when the pools in San Francisco went dark and the only swimming option left was in ice-cold San Francisco Bay.
And though I retired in 2016, I was working on contract as a part-time urban planner, but I did have some free time. “Sure,” I said. “I’d lifeguard again.”
That’s how badly I missed swimming in a heated pool.
The YMCA’s Head of Aquatics immediately sent a job application and enrolled me in the next round of Lifeguarding, CPR, Basic First Aid and Emergency Oxygen courses, which kept me busy through January. At the same time, he scheduled me to shadow lifeguards who were already in the chair so I could learn the ropes by observation. “You can’t actually work until you have all your certifications,” he apologized, “but we’ll pay you for all your time in the courses and on the pool deck.”
The background checks cleared, the certifications were emailed, and by my 61st birthday in March, I was in the chair, wearing the red shirt with the white cross, whistle around my neck, red buoy strapped around my shoulder.
Watching swimmers doing laps, I couldn’t help but compare the differences between lifeguarding at age 16 and age 61.
The first one I noticed was the buoy. Lifeguards in the 1970s did not have to be strapped to one, whereas today, by law, they do.
The second was my own personal state of mind as an employed lifeguard. I was a hungry teenager, eager to save up for college, taking extra shifts in the summer to tide me over for the school year. Luckily, California’s public universities were relatively affordable: full-time tuition at Cal Poly in 1979 was only $55 a semester. Still, my wages were only $3.00/hour, and room and board in San Luis Obispo was as comparatively expensive then as now, so I remained ever-anxiously uncertain about having enough money to get through Architecture School.
I wasn’t even sure what might happen if and when I did get through. I lifeguarded not because I loved the work, but because it was the path that was supposed to lead me to work I’d love. What if there was no degree, no career waiting for me afterward?
What if lifeguarding was as far as I’d ever get?
Now, I am a retiree whose 35-plus-year career in architecture and city planning taught me volumes in managing uncertainty. I don’t need the lifeguard wages the way I did back then: what I need now is a swimming pool open long enough for me to resume a daily head-clearing, nerve-soothing 2000-meter workout. Getting hourly wages plus a free YMCA membership are nice supplements to my retirement income, but they are just that: perks, a nice byproduct of the primary mission to keep my pool open.
I immediately recognized this mindset was a key difference from my co-workers. Almost all the other lifeguards were in their early twenties or teenagers, in college or starting soon, struggling with the same uncertainties I faced 45 years ago, but with the crushing burdens of college fees and rent today.
I related this to Eric, a 20-year-old with a hipster fade-cut and ear stud who regularly opens the pool at 5:30 am. He was captain of his high school swim team, so when we work out together after our shifts, he likes to bark motivational challenges at me (“C’mon, one more set of 50 sprints and we’re done!”); for the most part I’m up for the push. Eric is currently enrolled at City College and hopes to finish his Physical Education degree at San Francisco State, but he worries that he’s taking “too long.”
“Too long? Why do you say that?”
“My dad says that! Every morning, he tells me I’m stupid and lazy because I’m 20 and still going to City College. When he was my age in China,” Eric clarified, “he already had his engineering degree.”
I laughed. “You got up at 4:45 this morning, Eric. You’re getting course credits for nickels and a dime at City College so that when you transfer to San Francisco State, you’ll have your General Education already taken care of. You are neither lazy nor stupid!”
“Well, tell that to my dad…. He says I’m wasting my money and time. He says no boss will take me seriously because I pierced my ear. If I got a tattoo,” he scoffed darkly, “he’d kick me out of the house!”
“He’s not from here,” I reminded Eric. “My grandparents were immigrants too, and they pushed my parents to get good educations and to work hard. It’s how they show their love. I know your dad is really proud of you.”
It was as if I was speaking a language Eric had heard all his life but was only now beginning to understand. “Look, I’m a dad too,” I reassured him. “I worried about my kids when they were just starting out because I wanted them to be able to make it on their own. Both my kids are good now. Your dad isn’t there yet, but he will be.”
I reflected on all this as my shift of scanning swimmers in the lanes below came to an end. Marta, the teenager coming over to relieve me, had her buoy strapped across her red shirt and a scowl tattooed on her youthful face. She’s a freshman in San Francisco State’s Kinesiology program, the first in her family to go to college. She had been struggling this morning needing more shifts to cover school costs while being too tired from studying to keep her eyes open.
I gave her a smile. She barely managed one in return. “It gets better,” I assured her.
“What… why?” Marta stopped, staring into sprinters in the fast lane. “Was there a problem in here?”
“No,” I replied. “Life gets better. This is the hardest part, and you’re getting through it.”
“Really?” Her glance to me was so plaintive it almost hurt.
“Yes,” I answered as we both scanned the swimmers. “You’re working as a lifeguard because school is expensive. And then you work on your homework and you don’t earn any money for that. Instead, you have to pay for that, which is why you come back here for another shift.”
“It is hard!” Marta fretted. “I’m so tired!”
“I remember being like that, and school wasn’t anywhere the cost back then it was today. But you’re smart, and you’re a hard worker, and when you graduate you’ll get a job like that! And then you won’t be working all the hours you’re now spending between school and here at the pool, but you will be paid so much more for every hour you do work, and it will be the kind of work you want to do, not just what you need to do…”
“Jeeez, that sounds nice!” Marta exhaled.
“Nice? It’s the truth! That’s why you’re working here, right?” I laughed. “Or did you forget?”
Now Marta laughed. As I headed to downguard position, I checked back: she was settled in the chair, scanning the swimming lanes, but this time with a smile.
Could a path to health and well being be found in community service and purpose?
This, I decided, is my real value to the YMCA. Yes, the YMCA needs lifeguards. But if you add up Eric and Marta, they are still barely half my age. Their future seems a swirling, murky mess. I’m on the other side of the puzzle they can’t yet figure out. I remember my own dark consternation like it was yesterday and my co-workers seem to like hearing this. At least Marta is smiling now. Earlier in the morning she was ready to quit.
The next day, Marta asked, if lifeguarding wasn’t what I needed for college anymore, why was I doing it?
“Because I like it,” I replied.
“You don’t think it’s boring?”
“I used the analytical part of my brain for 35 years. It was exciting, and my projects were amazing, but my brain had to always be on. I had to know what to say to this community member, that newspaper reporter; to know when to listen and not talk. Now I’m sitting in a chair, watching swimmers. It’s a bit like watching fish in an aquarium…
“We have to use our brain all the time here too. We have to be on; we have to keep things safe and think about what accident might happen and how we avoid it. But that’s a different part of our brain. My old job was satisfying, but I’d lose sleep about it. It was stressful; a different kind of problem-solving than here.”
“Yeah,” Marta nodded. “It’s like my brain is just doing laps here, nice and steady. My homework problems are on my mind day and night. But the minute I walk out the door here, I leave this place behind.”
“Exactly!” I said. “That’s a great way to put it!”
Marta smiled appreciably, and after a moment, she went on: “I think our brain needs both. We need to wrestle with big problems that shape our future. But this thinking is important, too; it’s like ‘Walk, don’t run!’ Or ‘Time to check the pool chemicals!’”
She fastened the buoy straps around her shoulders and turned to me with a laugh. “You make things sound…so sensible. Talking with you really helps make my day go by faster”.
“Thanks,” I agreed. “Same!”
I thought about Dan Buettner, National Geographic fellow and author of the New York Times bestseller “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest,” a study of five places in the world with a high index of life satisfaction and which include a remarkably high number of centenarians. In a 2023 USA Today podcast hosted by reporter Dana Taylor, Buettner observed that, in addition to eating healthy foods and exercising moderately but regularly, people in these blue zones:
“…have a clear sense of where they fit in their family or in their community or the larger social construct of their place. With this sense of purpose, there’s always an element of service to it. So they know what they’re good at, they know their values and they know an outlet for that.”
As Marta settled in the chair, my eyes drifted to the digital clock above, where figures flashed through various configurations, creating new numbers from the limited set of positioned options, illuminating, darkening and repeating, telling the dedicated happy swimmers one thing, the tired young lifeguards another.
Both were messages I’d long understood. Now, for the split-second moment before I blinked, they were a red blur to my 62-year-old eyes, and it was beautiful.
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Peter Albert