Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley Page B

the wave wash where a rip begins—like the four in Queens mentioned earlier—can be knocked off their feet and sucked out to sea in a matter of seconds.
    Beaches are, by nature, unstable. The mixture of sand, pebbles, rocks, shells, vegetation, and water that makes up a beach is soft and malleable, and its contours change with every wave that passes through and over it. All day long erosion creates small depressions, in random sequence, up and down the beach. Water from returning waves will gravitate toward the depressions, scouring them deeper and wider and creating, very quickly, a strong seaward pull—a rip.
    If a child is standing at the edge of such a depression, the ground will suddenly disappear and the child will be sucked away from shore. If the natural slope of the beach is long, gentle, and shallow, the child may be able to struggle out of the rip, sideways, into calm water. But if the slope is short and steep, the child will be in turbulent, deep water before he can catch a breath.
    Rips resemble runouts in both appearance and solution. Like a runout, a rip is a strip of rough, murky, foamy water moving directly away from the beach. A rip begins right
at
the beach, however, and it tends to be narrower than a runout, anywhere from a few feet to a few yards wide. It doesn’t travel as far—dissipating, usually, just beyond the breakers—and it can end as abruptly and unpredictably as it began, while other ones may be forming at other spots along the same beach.
    A swimmer caught in a rip has the same options as a swimmer caught in a runout: swim across the rip until you’re out of it, or let it carry you out until its force fades away. Whatever you do,
don’t fight it;
don’t try to swim straight back to the beach. That way lies exhaustion, panic, and, perhaps, drowning.
    To me, one of the saddest aspects of drowning is that it is so often unnecessary, the result of compounding a simple error or two.
    Years ago, I wrote a piece for
The New York Times Magazine
on how to swim safely in the ocean, and in it I quoted a description of a typical drowning victim, told to me by a veteran Red Cross safety expert named Mike Howes:
    â€œHe [the hypothetical victim] decides he’s in trouble, so to attract attention he waves his arms over his head, which puts a lot of meat out of water—where it’s heavier—and makes him sink. He struggles up again, gasps for breath, then waves his arms again and sinks again. If he left his arms in the water and waved them slowly up and down, he’d stay on the surface. But he doesn’t, so he gets water in his mouth; his epiglottis slams shut, and he panics. He coughs, sinks, coughs under water, gasps, and—well, that’s it.”
    What most swimmers fail to realize is that if they are uninjured and even marginally competent, they can save themselves. In all but the roughest and coldest seas, they can stay afloat indefinitely. They can also, without great effort, propel themselves toward shore. They may end up several miles from where they entered the water, but they’ll be alive to gripe about the walk home.
    One day in my late teens I was swimming with a friend off the south shore of Nantucket when we found ourselves trapped offshore, beyond the breaking point of endless, tremendous waves. There were no surfboards, body boards, or boogie boards back then—at least not on Nantucket—so all we had for flotation and transportation were our own air-filled lungs and our own strong young arms and legs. We had been riding the waves happily for an hour or so and had paid no attention to where we were in relation to the shore. We weren’t aware that we had been swept away from the long, sloping beach where the waves broke in regular, predictable rhythms and carried us all the way in to knee-deep water. Now, we were surprised to find, we were far offshore of a steep, relatively short beach and a precipitous hidden