This is an opinion column

A tall, naked man staggered down the shore. Two women sunning themselves on the mostly deserted beach looked up in shock. And no, this is not an X-rated column. My friend and I were lying on a beach towel, the roar of the surf off the Carolina coast forcing us to talk louder and louder. There was a lot of “What did you say?”

But one thing I heard clearly: “There’s a naked man walking right toward us.”

As it turned out, that naked man was my husband. When he got close enough, we threw him a towel. After he caught his breath, he had a question for us: Didn’t we hear him shouting for help?

Well no, we didn’t.

He’d been caught in the strong rip currents off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. They pulled him away from his friends on the shore and he struggled hard to get back. His swim trunks loosened and slipped down his legs, wrapping them like a rope. Only one thing to do, he reasoned: kick them off. So he did, and that saved his life. And it’s been a good one. That was more than fifty years ago, and we’ve had many beach trips since then.

It’s now the season for such trips. There’s surfing and sunning and watching children bob in the waves and build sand castles that wash away with the tide. We should watch those children closely. There have already been ten drowning deaths on the beaches of Alabama and the Florida panhandle so far this season. And we’re just getting started.

Swimmers go out too far and go under. Family members and strangers rush to save them and then go under, too. People ignore red flag warnings and think they’re stronger than the surf in the Gulf of Mexico, but they’re not.

Back in the day, our mothers knew this. Wise women, they were cautious. Mine taught us about the undertow, which we pictured as a long green plume that could crawl up on the beach and snatch us out from under the umbrella.

We didn’t have a flag system when I was young. We hoped that a common sense system would work. Rip tides were real. The sun could burn you.

The lunch you ate half an hour ago could cause cramps once you got in the water. You had to wait to get back in. And then wait some more. We fussed, but we waited. We followed the rules.

And there were more of them, too. The cute lifeguard, the one we used to flirt with when we were teens, was up on that platform for a reason. Leave him alone to do his job, our mothers told us. If you can’t swim, don’t get in the water. No matter how salty it tastes, it won’t hold you up. Waves can be hard or gentle, but they can always knock you down.

The tide, when it rushes in, waits for no man, as they say. It has its own schedule. We’d better pay attention to it.

In spite of all the rules, we go to the beach if we can. It draws us back year after year. And if on one trip, you find your bathing trunks slipping away, just hope the beach is as deserted as it was all those years ago when my husband had to make a decision to let his go.

Contact Beth Thames at [email protected]