Silver Beach sits on a bluff, with stairs leading down to beaches that look across to Queens and the Manhattan skyline in the far distance, and it has a lifeguard at its largest beach.
The undertow "is so strong that it will pull you out before you realize it," Kim Haber, a lifeguard at Gulf Shores, Ala., said.
Once it was a lifeguard bar called the Rescue, and when they bought it, the Harmons found boxes of framed photographs of lifeguards and boats in vintage seaside tableaus that they are putting back up on the walls.
It has a lifeguard and two beach attendants.
"We have inside jokes, and my friends are like, 'Oh, my God, it's a lifeguard thing".' One joke involves speculation about the motives of a certain lifeguard, a young woman who enforces the rules with special toughness.
There was a low steel sink that sprayed a half circle of arcing warm water, and Perry and the other little girls had loved to sit in it until a lifeguard came in to chase them out.
But Notre Dame, with its long, rich and suffocating tradition of independence, is acting as if it were a lifeguard watching a friend drowning and weighing the pros and cons of jumping to the rescue: "If I go in, will I drown?" The Irish want to see if they can weather a brutal football season and also how the newly configured Big East fares.
It should be patrolled by a lifeguard and it should have his or her approval.
Here, for example, is his description of Reagan's work as a lifeguard: It was "a job he loved -- perhaps because it allowed him to be narcissistic and altruistic at the same time".
You must also be able to stay afloat for one minute in eight feet of water without using your hands, a requirement that is harder than it seems, as Javier Rodriguez, a lifeguard coördinator, explained before a recent session.
