REAL PEOPLE/BACK ON THE BEACH
The Lifeguard Who Took a 50-Year Break
To snag his summer job, Eric Greensmith had to swim like a teen
IT WAS MY SECRET. When I decided to try out to be a beach lifeguard, I kept it to myself. Fifty years and 40 pounds had added up since the last time I’d held the job, and I wasn’t sure I could get fit enough to pass the running and swimming tests. In Sea Isle City, the Jersey shore town where I’d worked for four summers starting in 1972, there are no separate tests for lifeguards over 60. You have to be as fit as everyone else. For me, it seemed like it might not be possible—it might be almost laughable. But I wanted to try. I was getting ready to retire from my job as a hospital anesthesiologist, and I wanted a challenge.
I changed my diet and intensified my workouts, but I didn’t tell anyone why, not even my wife. As I lost the weight over the course of a year, though, I gradually started talking about my goal. No one laughed. Last May, I tried out and made the cut. So, that was my job last summer.
I’m still not as fast as the teenage guards. I’ll be honest, I’m irritated that they can swim and run faster than I can. That used to be me. But what I have lost in physical capacity, I feel like I’ve picked up in intensity, in judgment.
In a way, being an anesthesiologist is a lot like lifeguarding. If things start to go bad, in the OR or on the beach, you can preemptively make corrections, like adjusting the patient’s anesthetic or moving people away from a riptide. But if things go to hell in a handbasket, you have to jump in and fix it right away. And all eyes are looking at you.
I’m planning to try out again this summer. I recently got my license to operate a Jet Ski for rescues. And I am getting certified as a paramedic. I’m trying to make myself more valuable as an employee, if I’m rehired.
This would probably be my last season, though. My wife feels it’s a bit of a self-indulgence, and she’s quite right. She doesn’t want us to miss out on doing other things because I’m continually going back to the shore like a lemming. One more summer is our compromise. I just hope I make it. —As told to Niamh Rowe
Eric Greensmith, 67, is a semiretired anesthesiologist in Hershey, Pennsylvania.