California Coast & Ocean

No One Knew How to Swim
I met Chang early one summer Sunday morning at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa, where she was working as a lifeguard during the summer before her senior year in high school. "You have to be realistic," she said. "You go to the river and have fun. People say, ‘Oh, it's hot. Let's go to the river.' People are not going to go start buying lifejackets to go in the river. But people need to understand what could happen." As she spoke, her eyes scanned the swimmers in the pool. I asked her to speak of her uncle.

"I was nine or ten years old. My mom, my aunt, a couple other relatives and my uncle went to the river. We had carne asada," Chang said, glancing at me to see if I knew the dish. "It was around 4 p.m. We always go around noon and stay until about 6 or 6:30 p.m. I had just been pulled out by my brother, because I didn't know how to swim and I was going down the river.

"The tree had a little thing in it you could hang off." "A rope swing?" I asked. "Yeah. And there was a little current. Once you got out of it you were okay. But then when my uncle went off the thing in the tree--I guess he just got caught in that current and that was it. No one knew how to swim, we couldn't do anything."

"Could anything have changed what happened the day with your uncle?" I asked. "Maybe if there was a sign in Spanish or with pictures?"

"Pictures help, but not very much," Chang said. "But if we had known there were underwater currents, if we had known that was dangerous, the adults would have said, ‘No, you can't go in there anymore.'"

Jenira Chang's family had gone to one of many spots on the river that is not a lifeguarded park. It is a common thing to do along the Russian River, some stretches of which are managed by local government, while others are private property. Where there is a rope swing on a bend in the river, you can figure that someone put it up with the intention of swimming and playing there, regardless of whether it is signed private property or not signed at all. What isn't so apparent is that conditions change rapidly, banks are slippery, and the bottom is unpredictable. A place that is safe to swim on one day may be treacherous on another, even with little rain.

Alcohol and Water Don't Mix
In search of local thoughts about safety on the river, I visited Sonoma County's Veterans' Memorial Beach and met lifeguard Kevin Dowdey. Were everyone to go to this beach, which Dowdey supervises with up to seven others during peak periods, drowning statistics would change dramatically. The United States Lifesaving Association www.usla.org estimates the chances of drowning on a beach with lifeguards on duty to be less than one in 18 million.

Dowdey pointed to a boundary rope that is staked out in the water parallel to the bank all along the beach, showing where the depth reaches four feet. Non-swimmers must not cross this line into deeper water. A summer dam constructed by the county slows the current and provides a safe, well-monitored recreational beach for people of all ages to enjoy.

"If we see anyone we're concerned about, we check it out," Dowdey said. "Parents must keep their children within arms" reach. We've been called in to help rescue people. Things happen, often outside the area of our beach." He gave me a copy of the Russian River Access Guide and encouraged me to tell people about the U.S. Lifesaving Association.

The ten river access points highlighted in the Guide provide a kind of security that many of those most at risk of drowning may want to avoid, including a prohibition on alcohol and dawn-to-dusk hours of operation under close watch of lifeguards. The unguarded banks of the river will continue to draw those who want to drink or avoid having to pay fees ($5 per vehicle at some sites).

Further along the river in Healdsburg, I met two young men from Oaxaca. In Spanish they told me they had been living and working in Petaluma, doing construction, for the past eight years. They believe most people from Mexico know how to swim, as they do, and said it is the people who can't swim who have problems. According to the coroner's statistics, at least a quarter of the Hispanics who drowned in the river over the past six years were known to be poor swimmers or nonswimmers.

As we talked, three young men beyond the park's fence were swinging from a rope tied under a bridge and jumping into the water. I caught up with them as they were about to leave. Through the fence they'd scaled to reach the swing, they told me they had learned to swim in the river with their families and only went into the water when conditions were good. They were community college students who grew up nearby, and they never knew anyone who had drowned in the river. When I asked why there were drownings every year, they looked at one another and said, as if stating the obvious, "Accidents happen when people are drinking. People do something stupid." Coroner's statistics confirm that regardless of ethnicity or language, in roughly half of all the drownings in Sonoma County in 2000-2006, alcohol was involved.

I winced when, on the way down Route 116, in Rio Nido, I saw a "Beach" sign with an arrow pointing toward the river sharing a post with another sign that reads "Liquor Store." The post is in a liquor store parking lot. Alcoholic drinks are even sold at the refreshment stand at this private beach.