Lifeguarding at Camp Tall Trees

        Book 4 Chapter 3 Section 8: Lifeguarding

         Jeff’s job was to ring the Gong to signal that the craft period was over and that the swim period had begun.  He was the head guard, the only counselor who had was certified as a lifeguard, which was good because he was reliable.  But the part part of being the only guard was that Jeff had to sit in the chair for two hours twice a day, every day.

        After Jeff rang the Gong he began the long walk to the pool.  Jeff’s cabin was as far away from the pool as you could get while still being in the camp.  He hoped that no camper would want to swim that that so that he could have some time to himself but, invariably, a few diehards would show up at the gate no matter how cold the weather was in the morning.

        The campers knew that they couldn’t get into the pool area until Jeff arrived so they hanged around him.  At first it was just one or two campers but by the time he had made it to the front gate there was a swarm of boys surrounding him.  It was the little things that helped the counselors keep their sanity over the course of the long summer and one of those things to Jeff is that he liked to put on a big show of opening the gate.  The crowd of campers turned into an angry mob as Jeff pretended like he had brought the wrong key to unlock the gate.  Or he insisted that the campers take ten steps back until he was ready.  Then the swarm that had surrounded the lifeguard on the way to the pool spread out over the whole deck.

        The campers lined the pool and waited for Jeff to get up into his chair and blow the whistle, which was the signal that they could get into the pool.  Part of Jeff’s schtick as the head guard was to make the kids do a call and response before he let them in.  His favorite was to yell out “Oorah!” And the campers would have to respond with a high pitched “Whoop, Whoop!”  This done, Jeff blew the whistle and all of the campers jumped in at the exact same time.  Yes, the whole routine was silly, but when Jeff was in the dog days of mid-summer, he knew that he had to find a way to lighten up before he spent the next two hours in the chair.

        “My God, this is boring,” Jeff thought to himself daily.  To help pass the time, he memorized important dates in world history, the order of all of the U.S. presidents, and the geography of the major countries in the world.  As the head lifeguard, he was not allowed to read while in the chair so the next best thing was memorization.  The other counselors would not understand his need to keep his mind working all of the time so Jeff kept this exercise in memorization to himself.

        Another way that Jeff amused himself was to challenge the campers to kill as many horseflies as they could, stack them in a pile, and who ever killed the most would get a candy bar.  The campers would do anything for a free candy bar.  The end result was a horsefly holocaust with piles of the dead insects around the pool area.

        Just because he was bored didn’t mean that Jeff didn’t take his job seriously for he knew the consequences of lax discipline when it came to the rules.  On his second week on the job a camper was running inside of the pool area, slipped, and fell and bashed his head on the concrete deck.  Since it was a head wound, it began to bleed immediately.  Jeff picked the kid up and carried him back to the main camp so that he could be taken to the hospital.  There was blood smeared over his stomach and arms by the time he got back.  And since he hadn’t had the time to put on his shoes, he had to run across the gravel path barefooted.  He was so excited that he didn’t feel any pain.  The camper was taken to the hospital and he was fine and didn’t need any stitched.  But is was the image of someone else’s blood all over his upper body that haunted him and that was why he took his job so seriously.

        His main job was to protect the campers and if any of them did something stupid that put themselves or other campers in danger, then he put them in time out.  If the camper was a serial offender then he was sentenced to a ten minute time out on the side of the pool.  This seemed like an eternity to the campers so Jeff gave them an alternative.  If the campers could do a duck walk around the pool once then they were free.  If they couldn’t do it properly, or if they couldn’t go the distance, Jeff would restart the clock for a ten minute time out.  Recidivism usually wasn’t a problem at the Camp Tall Trees pool.

        At the beginning of the summer, when the counselors were still wide eyed and innocent, they would swim in the pool with the kids.  The rule was that the campers could not dunk each other but could dunk the counselors.  Everyone knew this rule so the counselors entered the pool at their own risk and it was like putting blood in shark infested water.  At first the counselors made a game out of it by picking the campers up and throwing them as fas as they could.  However, they sobered up when a camper tried to jump on their back, missed, and then used their fingernails to claw their way back up.  It didn’t matter that they didn’t mean to hurt the counselor because the result was always the same.  The campers would show their friends the skin of their favorite counselor under their nails and the counselor would show his red lined, scratch filled back to the other counselors.  “Well,” their unsympathetic fellow counselors would say, “that is what you get for getting into the pool with feral campers!”