Lifeguarding and Car Accidents

There are car accidents on our corner ALL THE TIME.

The people coming down our street get to the 2-way stop, and can't see the cross-traffic (which doesn't stop, as it says just below the stop sign). So instead, many people just gun it and hope for the best. Most of the time this works. Most of the time.

In the two years we've been in this townhouse, I've been on the scene of probably five accidents at this intersection, and heard of several others from the other folks who live in the area.

Case in point: Tuesday morning, I went out on my porch in the morning before work to soak up some fresh air. I'd been out there no more than a minute when I heard screeching tires. I looked over to see a taxi smashing into the side of a red sedan.

Immediately, I threw on some shoes and then ran over to see if anyone was hurt. Per usual - and thankfully - no one was. After that, I went back inside to get some water bottles from the fridge, placed there for just such occasions (which just goes to show again how often these accidents occur).

Anyway, I was thinking about that situation later that day. How was I able to jump into action instantly when I saw the crash? I don't know about most people, but I think my natural reaction to something like that would be to wait for a minute, deciding whether it's my problem to worry about.

But I was a lifeguard for several years. And as a lifeguard, you're trained to jump into action instantly, to run toward the danger.

Being a lifeguard is certainly not as dramatic as being a firefighter or EMT or anything, but in some ways, I think it requires the most diligence focus, the most readiness, and an unusual kind of decisiveness. EMTs and firefighters get a call; something very obvious says, "GO RIGHT NOW."

As a lifeguard, on the other hand, your sign to jump into action is often both far subtler and much more ambiguous: a dark area on the bottom of the a crowded pool; someone who is swimming laps, but instead of being horizontal in the water, they're somewhat diagonal. And if you're not fully alert and diligently watching, you'll miss these things.

And then you have to make your own call; at every moment you are deciding whether what you're seeing indicates that it's time to jump into action. And the time between the warning sign and the moment you must to make the decision to jump, you have at most a few seconds. There's no time to ask, "Is that person in the area of the pool I'm watching, or is the other guard supposed to cover them?"

You just go.

And while the opportunities to jump during my daily life are far less frequent than they are as a lifeguard, they do happen. And as someone who has the training (First Aid, CPR, etc.), I think I want to be the kind of person who fosters that readiness and decisiveness, a visceral inclination to run toward the danger. So even though no one is usually hurt on my corner, it's the perfect training ground for when the warning sign of real need appears.