4th of July In a Pandemic

I was in the water when it happened. I’d been watching the group of Black people at the beach because it’s unusual—this is a very white space. I was determined that before we left I’d walk over and tell them I was glad to see them at the beach and hoped they felt welcome. I want Black people to feel safe in all spaces, and especially in my favorite places, and this beach is one of my primary hangouts in the summer. In normal summers, that is, not during the summer of Covid-19. This year I’ve only ventured out there twice, first for my birthday on June 25th, and yesterday.

It was crowded and we almost didn’t stay. It was the 4^th of July and even though there were gaps in the long line of cars parked along the sides of the road where the morning people had left, it being almost 3 p.m., there were large groups with grills and most places that would guarantee six feet of distancing were taken. But way at the end behind PJ’s Supper Club was a large empty piece of shade beneath a cottonwood, with only a group of teens sitting on the edge of the stone paver wall taking turns on two jet-skis, and a really beautiful Latin American Indigenous family, the three children swimming while the parents sat in front of us under the ample shade of the tree. They had a dirty jug of Kool-Aid on the picnic table nearby and though the children were fully outfitted, the parents did not have swimsuits or towels and sat or lay on the grass. We listened to the man talking on the phone, a mixture of Spanish and some other Aztec-sounding language.

The lake people were more annoying than usual. July 4^th. Saturday, too. Lots of boats dragging tubes and jet skis, all coming too close to the swimming area given the size of the lake. The water was warm since it had been in the 90s for a week already, with talk of 100-degree temperatures in the week to come. When I was there on my birthday, in the same far shady end of the beach area (with only a Latina woman and her two children in front of me) the water had been clear and cold. Now there was detritus, and gasoline, on the surface of the water. I waded in next to the jet skis and got out a ways before I put my head under.

The beach has a quick drop-off. There is a small sand beach and part of the lake with a sandy bottom, and that’s where kids congregate. Then, after pushing through a line of vegetation, the water is quickly over my head. I don’t know how deep it is, as I’ve never tried to go down to the bottom. Out in the deep end there are fewer people, and pretty much all of them are on (annoying) rafts or in floating chairs, drinking drinks, wearing sunglasses, just floating around not really paying attention to anyone else. Everyone out there is white.

Even in the crowd on shore, the group of Black folks stood out. The father was a very, very large man. There were several young adults and teenagers, all happily interacting. I hoped they felt comfortable, and watched just to make sure everyone was nice.

Several of these folks waded out but stopped before the drop-off. Lots of people stay on the sandy area and just duck down to cool off, not wanting to traverse that weedy barrier or get in over their heads. But then there was a commotion. A couple white guys in their twenties swam out and started diving. One came up with something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. The Black father was talking excitedly to them, sort of directing them. My first thought was that they’d lost a Frisbee or a ball or something and the white guys were looking for it for them. Because the actual truth of what was happening was too horrible to consider.

I heard the man yell, “My son! My son! Somebody help me please!” The young white men were looking back, confused, helpless. Others standing around started diving, too, but they couldn’t see anything. Someone threw in a few pairs of goggles and they stayed with it. But each time they came up, they said they couldn’t see anything or get to the bottom.

“Your son?” someone asked. “What’s happening?”

And someone else yelled, “Call 911!”

The father spun and shouted to shore, “Call 911!”

“It’s done. We called. They’re on their way,” a woman answered.

The perplexing thing was how none of the Black people were going in deeper. But we determined pretty quickly that they couldn’t swim. And thank God they didn’t go in, because more people could have gone under and not come up.

A scrawny, skinny white dude came running all the way from near where I’d been sitting, running in and diving wildly. But almost everyone else was just out there, just there with their heads sticking up out of the water, saying: “Where did he go under?” and “I can’t see anything.”

My mother had told a story of a drowning at the lake she grew up on. She was a teenager. I’d imagined it in a piece of writing, the lifeguard blowing his whistle and mothers yelling for the children to get out of the water, and the children all sinking down like turtles with only their heads poking out of the water, wondering if the whistle was for them, or what they’d done.

And this was so much like that. The mothers were getting their kids out, and others were calling in their older children and teenagers. There were so many rafts, tubes, noodles. Rafts in the shape of giant unicorns and giant lollypops and slices of pizza, a big round four-seater, rafts tied together so people could float and visit. Such a frenzy of floating devices. No panic. Just quiet and slow movement to shore. Everyone on shore standing, watching. All of us hoping that he would be found, or better yet, he’d come walking over from the bathroom yelling, “Dad! Dad! I’m okay!” Maybe the father didn’t see him get out of the water? It was our only hope. But the father and other family members with him still pointed, almost like that terrible photo on the hotel balcony in Memphis after King was shot with everyone pointing to where the shots came from. “There, that area there, he went down there.”

I had gotten on shore by then and climbed the bank, all of us looking at each other wide-eyed, not knowing what to say, unable to do anything but listen for the sirens. People were spreading out and searching wider. They couldn’t get deep enough. It was murky. I kept thinking about something I’d read or heard—that drowning people could move under water a long way, sometimes looked like they were swimming underwater but it was just their body moving, whereas people expected drowning victims to flail before going under, to bob up and down a few times waving their arms. But no. It didn’t happen that way. Sometimes people went under once and didn’t come up—not even if they didn’t hit their head. And his body could have been traveling, in any direction, in the deep water.

I went back to my husband, who was talking to his grown daughter on the phone. Over on our side with the indigenous family, who didn’t know what was happening. I told Steve, “Someone is drowning.” Not wanting to say yet, though it had been what, 6 minutes? Longer? Not wanting to say “Someone drowned.”

After that it was sirens, and the first fire truck of responders with life jackets in shorts and t-shirts. Then an ambulance with masked (the only people in masks) attendants in crisp white shirts and black pants. A sheriff’s boat had pulled in over the spot and anchored and more officials were jumping off the boat to search.

Then everyone on shore seemed to spontaneously form a line, holding hands, all along the beach. They were not wearing masks and were not socially distanced. Images in my head of police lines herding and cordoning off protestors after curfew just a few weeks ago in Minneapolis came to mind. The people walked in slowly, looking for the body with their feet, as I knew people did, but they didn’t get far before, of course, the water got too deep to go farther. They broke up and turned back. It was all helplessness. Complete helplessness.

Next came a diver with an oxygen tank and a big bag, his suit. I felt voyeuristic and wanted to get out of there. We knew two of the firemen but didn’t speak to them, not wanting to be in the way even to say hello. Even the responders, though, looked at us intently, wide-eyed, as if we could maybe tell them something that could help, or just to silently say to each other: this is happening and it is terrible.

When the first truck had pulled up I’d put on my sandals and started to move toward the barricade (set up to keep cars off the entrance road and provide PJs with expanded outdoor seating space) but the truck just went up on the lawn and around the barricade, so I just stood there watching. Now a short, older woman came up to me and asked, “Is it a drowning?” I told her yes. She’d heard the sirens and come from her house to also help with the barricade—it was her lawn the truck drove over and she let me know she was happy they did that, she would want them to do that. She said she’d lived in this town for 54 years and there had been two drownings, one a child, and the other a man in his 60s who died by suicide. I asked how they knew it was suicide, and she said he had Alzheimer’s and was going to be put in a home the following week. And also, she said, he just walked right in and kept going under and never came up. “Still,” she said, “This is a dangerous lake and I don’t think people know it. It drops off so suddenly and so close to shore.”

She was a “real Stearns County” lady. She asked if I was from the area, and when I answered “St. Joseph,” she asked my name, wondering if she knew my people. I explained I’ve only lived here for 15 years. Her husband had owned a local trenching company, whose name I recognized immediately, and now her sons ran it. We were not social distancing, but after trying to back up away from her a few times and her just following me, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I couldn’t get six feet between us. I couldn’t get my mask out of the tote bag by my chair. She told me about her nephew, who had just died by suicide a week before. He had hit a deer on his motorcycle, not wearing a helmet, and faced with brain damage had hung himself. We talked about cancer—I thought it might make her back away from me a bit, give me some space. I was thinking about viral loads and exposure times and the mask in my bag.

The Black folks couldn’t swim. It’s too much of a cliché. It’s a reality. All those white people who grew up with swimming lessons and had all their flotation devices and, for anyone under 10, pricey life preserver vests.

I have hardly left my house these past months. And even the two times at the beach, I was always thinking about distancing, staying away from people, while watching and wondering if things were inching toward normal or there would be consequences for what we were doing, gathering at the beach even with so many feet of space between us. Thinking about droplets and viral loads and the sun and breeze and water and how the virus couldn’t live in the water, as I looked at the gasoline rainbows on the surface. Thinking in some ways of risk and safety and life and the 4^th of July, of freedom, independence, looking at the families with grills full of food and umbrellas carrying on their annual traditions or maybe starting a new one, maybe just this year deciding, what with how bad a year it’s been and everything that has been happening, to go to the beach and spend the whole day, throw a ball around, cook out, enjoy the lake.

Update: This morning first thing, before I was fully awake, I checked the news for this story. The man, 20 years old, was pulled from the lake by a diver and given aid at the scene. He was airlifted– alive! after what had to be more than 30 minutes underwater– to a local hospital where last night he was in critical condition. However, checking news reports now, I learn he has died. He was 20 years old, visiting family from Chicago. It makes me think of the Lake Michigan beaches, where you can be above water for such a long way. It’s tragic, and terrible, and changes a family forever.