An ER doc with surf in his blood
To be honest, I was just looking for a way to play hooky at the beach when I asked L.A. County’s lifeguard chief if he could think of a particularly interesting guard I might hang out with.
“Where do I begin?” asked Mike Frazer.
Of the hundreds of part-time guards who work the 75-mile county coast, Frazer said, at least 100 are teachers in their other lives, and maybe half a dozen are professors. An additional 20 guards are attorneys, and roughly 10 are either doctors or in medical school.
Frazer recommended I hook up with Paul Silka, a guard he used to share a tower with back in 1980, when they were both rookies.
And what exactly does this guy do for a living, I asked?
Emergency room doctor and chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
All true, Silka said. He started lifeguarding when he was a 19-year-old student at Pepperdine, and at 46, he still can’t wait to throw on the red suit and climb the tower, so he works about 10 shifts each summer.
“It gets in your blood,” he said, telling me to meet him at the first tower north of the Santa Monica Pier at noon on the Fourth of July.
As I suspected, the area near the pier throbbed with bodies, and walking the beach was like a game of Twister. You had to high step, dogleg and shimmy under umbrellas and over towels. Without a periscope, it was hard to see past the oiled masses to where water met sand.
Silka, tanned and fit, with a sun-tinted brush cut, was up in the sky-blue tower like a man on his front porch, taking it all in with careful eyes. Good-size waves roller-coastered in on a southern swell, tossing bathers around like rag dolls.
You keep a closer watch on the ones in their clothes, Silka said, because you can figure they’re not going to make the Olympic swim team. And you look for people with their hair in their eyes, or the ones clawing at the water after a big one puts them through a washing machine cycle.
“Mostly you watch patterns rather than people,” Silka said. “You want to be able to anticipate. Like right over there, you can see a little bit of a rip.”
Just up the beach, maybe halfway to the next tower, the backwash from a couple of waves couldn’t slip under the next surge, so it slashed sideways along the shore. It wasn’t a big risk at the moment, Silka said. Just something he and his partner, Cal State Channel Islands student Cooper Moeschler, will have to watch.
Like a thousand other things that need watching. But Silka likes the action, so the busy tower is his idea of a lucky draw when the assignments are handed out.
He had one eye on the family with rolled-up pants, braving the waves to scrape mussels off the pilings under the pier, and another on the weak stroke of a teenage swimmer.
And then a woman with a screaming baby appeared under the tower, asking if there’s an antidote for sunscreen in the eyes.
“Water, water, water, water,” Silka said to the woman, who had no idea she was getting free advice from an ER doc.
Silka has handled diabetic shock on the beach, neck and head injuries, waterlogged lungs, dislocations and on and on. Yeah, sometimes it resembles the emergency room, except for the salt-air breeze and the sand under his bare feet, and the idea that out here, the idea is to keep people out of the ER.
After I watched Silka work the beach for a while, at a little more than 20 bucks an hour, it no longer seemed necessary to ask for an explanation. Or why, after 27 years of lifeguarding, he wants to hang on at least until one of his three junior lifeguard daughters -- now 15, 13 and 11 -- joins him in the tower.
And why shouldn’t Silka -- a triathlete who swims with the UCLA Bruin Masters and thinks nothing of a bike ride to Santa Barbara from his home in the Palisades -- be able to? Just last year, Darrell Willey, a Venice High teacher, retired after 55 years of lifeguarding.
Silka said that when he started at 19, the senior lifeguards were also paramedics.
“Watching them go out and save people was just a huge inspiration,” he said, and in fact, that was when he first thought about becoming a doctor.
Bureaucracy being what it is, he’s still required to routinely be tested and recertified for emergency medical technician status, despite his job at Cedars, and even though he runs the lifeguard EMT program.
Just after 1 p.m. on the Fourth, the two guards at the next tower up the beach plunged into the surf to pull swimmers clear of a riptide, and Silka moved over to back them up. One guard, 20-year-old Luiza Campos, is a surfer and San Diego State student, and her partner, 39-year-old James Ament, is a bond trader.
“I just love it,” Ament said when I asked why a bond trader would wade into a riptide on a perfectly good holiday. Like Silka, he started as a mere lad, got hooked on the beach scene, the culture, the tradition of training younger guards to prevent tragedies, the adrenaline rush that comes from a good rescue.
One more tower away was 56-year-old Bruce Moncrief, who owns a landscaping business in Pebble Beach but can’t wait to make the five-hour drive south to spend his weekends lifeguarding.
“Where else can you have this much fun?” asked Moncrief, who was dripping wet from a quick swim to warn waders about the rough surf.
Moncrief said he probably loses money each time he makes the round trip, but who cares? Five years ago, when his daughter said she wanted to be a lifeguard, he thought it sounded like fun, so he took the 500-yard swimming test with her. Just for the heck of it. They both passed, and the daughter has since moved on, but Moncrief can’t imagine surrendering his red shorts.
“When I was a student at San Diego State years ago,” he said, “I saw a poster that said, ‘Be an L.A. County lifeguard,’ and I never got it out of my head.’ ”
By day’s end, Silka had calmed a lost little boy named Greg and a lost little girl named Emily until their families retrieved them from his tower. I swam out through the break with him once, when he tugged in a boogie-boarder who was off the board too far out and struggling to get back in, and Silka was back in the water a few more times after that.
The very next day, he was back in the emergency room at Cedars, where 241 patients came through the doors, a stream as constant as the tides.
But is that job any more important than his part-time job?
“Our youngest was in fourth grade, and it was career day at her school,” said Alicia Silka, Paul’s wife, who works as a human resources coordinator for an actuary. The daughter wanted her dad to come talk about his job. “Paul had just become chief of staff, which is kind of nice, so he asks our daughter if she wants him to talk about what it’s like being a doctor. And she says:
“No way, Dad. You’re a lifeguard.”
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