Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

This article has saved countless lives.

In Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning, Mario Vittone makes some timely points about how people drown. And how many die each year because everyone thinks a drowning person says, "If you please, good sir, I believe I am drowning," like they do on Gilligan's Island.

I'm acutely aware of this quandary, because when I was in high school I saved a child's life. Several families had convened on the waterfront for a late-summer get-together, and the kids were all splashing around in the water. I – the oldest – went snorkeling some distance away.

I'd circled back to the swimming area and had just stood up in the shallows, when I saw a that three-year-old boy had edged himself out too deep. In the space of that glance, he tilted his head backward in an effort to breathe, and as he opened his mouth, it immediately filled with water. I'm not talking about a slosh; I mean a wave sucked him, open-mouthed, completely underwater.

I screamed and ripped off my mask and snorkel, stomping across the rocky bottom in my annoying big diving fins, throwing younger bathers right and left as I floundered toward him.

I made quite a scene.

I also reached the sinking child in seconds, whereupon I jerked him clean out by the armpits and hauled him, at the same thrashing, half-stumbling pace, back to land.

Afterward I sat down on the bank, trembling, my flippered feet still in the water. Everybody stared. The kid was crying. "He was drowning," I panted.

Awkward silence.

"Oh, uh... thanks," said his mother. She was about ten feet from where her son would likely have died, or at least required full-on resuscitation, if I hadn't happened by the dumbest of luck to see him go under. No-one had noticed him out there, or what was happening to him. As Vittone points out, the kid hadn't made so much as a peep at any point.

I wasn't perturbed by the lack of fanfare. Like most rescuers I was as traumatised by the event as the victim. I was exasperated by the attitude of the grups, and that some seemed irked that I'd upset the little guy, as they believed, by randomly snatching him out of the water.

Which is why I'm sharing Vittone's article. His precise description of what drowning looks like took me right back to that place, over 40 years ago, where a child nearly died just feet from half a dozen cavorting others, and a few feet more from another half-dozen adults drinking and kibitzing.

The victim didn't gesticulate or shout. He didn't splash or flog around.

He just… sank.

Water season is upon us up here in the Northern Hemisphere. Let us read up in readiness.

Oh, and a secondary point: if a bay boy says somebody's drowning, somebody's drowning.


(Photo from the article linked above.)