Lake of Ire
But he soon found himself face-to-face with two brawny beach bosses who threatened to have him arrested. What happened next has ignited a passionate debate in Rogers Park over how deep swimmers should be allowed to go in the water. “Believe me, I didn’t set out to make this my cause,” says Greenman, a 27-year-old graduate student in philosophy at Loyola University. “I just wanted to go swimming.”
“So I said, ‘I’m not coming in. I have a right to be out to my chest.’ And he says, ‘If you don’t come in, I’ll call the squad car, sir’–he kept calling me sir–‘and the cops will haul you in, and the cops don’t like hauling people in from the water ’cause they get wet. And getting wet makes them angry. And you wouldn’t want the cops angry at you, would you?’
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“There must have been 50 people on that beach and they were all watching, and the first thing that happens is a woman starts clapping. Then another guy shakes my hand and another guy gives me the thumbs-up sign. I put out my hands and said, ‘Are you going to cuff me now?’ The first mate said, ‘Oh, just get the hell off of the beach.’
Other lifeguards say swimmers have to be accommodating. “There’s no hard rule about how far you can go–you have to be inside the rowboats, and we set the rowboats according to how high the waves are,” says Tom, a 20-year-old lifeguard at Loyola beach, who, like Susan, didn’t want his last name used. “Maybe the mate got a little out of hand. I don’t know. I didn’t see it. We try to be reasonable. But the swimmers have to be reasonable, too. They can’t go too far out, even if they can swim. Then the little kids, who can’t swim, are going to want to go out too.”
Greenman admitted Reisberg’s story took away some of his thunder. “I agree a lot of lifeguards do great things, and of course I’m very happy they saved his life. But reasonable people can agree that there’s a difference between jumping in to save a guy in wavy water and trying to arrest an experienced swimmer for the high crime of swimming above his waist.
