Under the circumstances, it was a relief to be invited by the Raes to spend six weeks of the summer in Grand Detour. I arrived around noon one day in late July, and Paul lost no time in taking me to Lowell Park, an easy bike ride from his house.

We pedaled south along a sandy road hedged with com taller than we were, under a scudding buttermilk sky. Then the Dixon Country Club golf course opened out to our right, and on our left the land dropped suddenly into a dense wood. Diamond glints pricked its shadows, betraying the presence, far below, of the river. We had to freewheel down through nearly a mile of trees (a sign en route warned, PARK CLOSES AT SUNSET) before we saw the water, a great luminous mass, about two hundred yards wide, sliding past a long meadow. The grass there was worn rather than mown, carbuncled with stumps. Three little buildings fronted on it: a bath house, an ice hut, and a food stand blue with hamburger smoke.

A line of oaks shaded the narrow beach, but I gathered from the restlessness of some old people sitting beneath them that they sheltered mostly mosquitoes. The most desirable place to sunbathe seemed to be a big raft anchored about ten yards from shore, jostling with damp teenagers. It bore a rough log derrick, on top of which swayed an empty chair. Whoever sat that high could gaze upriver and downriver (where a pier and rope of floating oil drums kept small children from being swept away), as well as at the east bank, a lushly forested rive gauche. Italic

I wondered where the famous Lifeguard was, and why nobody was swimming. Paul explained that the river was "closed for lunch." He pointed along the beach and there, walking towards us, was Dutch Reagan, spectacles on his nose and library book in his hand.

He was deeply tan, and at least four inches taller than when I had last seen him. His chest was bigger, his legs stronger and straighter. He wore a full-length black swimsuit, with LIFEGUARD stenciled across the front.

Apparently he had just been in the sun. He yelled a warning at some urchins leaning over the platform rails, sat down under an oak tree, took off his glasses, and opened his book. I craned my neck to look at the title: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He began to read. The day was hot and still. Presently he shrugged off the top of his damp suit, leaving behind pale ghosts of themselves.

When the one o'clock whistle went, followed by delighted yells and belly flops, Dutch remounted his chair, and I joined the splashing throng beyond the raft. Polio therapy had made me a strong swimmer, but I soon found why Lowell Park needed a lifeguard. Its sandy shore gave way to a few yards of mud where hidden currents swirled among slimy fingers. Depending on the amount of rain upcountry, the surface tow could be strong.

In the days that followed, I saw Dutch training for the annual river championship--which he later won in two minutes, eleven seconds. He was a specialist in the "Australian Crawl," as we called it in those days, employing both the flutter and the trudgen kick. His long arms and easy coordination made his stroke looked slow, but the glass-green water slid past him with minimal splash, and he pulled ahead of competitors with no apparent effort. Swimming had appealed to him from childhood (that little wet boy at Coon Creek, blue-lipped under the hot sun) as one of the few sports he could indulge in without spectacles. Its coordination of grace with power suited the natural economy of his movements. He enjoyed the feeling of going somewhere purposefully and rhythmically, with nothing to distract him en route.

Watching him--indeed, trying to imitate him--helped me understand at least partly the massive privacy of his personality. The swimmer enjoys a loneliness greater, yet oddly more comforting, than the long-distance runner. One tunnels along in a shroud of silvery bubbles, insulated from any sight or sound other than vague perspectives of water, and the muted thunder of one's own arm strokes and breathing. Others may swim alongside for a while but their individuality tends to refract away, through the bubbles and the blur. Often I have marveled at Reagan's cool, unhurried progress through crises of politics and personnel and thought to myself, He sees the world as a swimmer sees it. (It)

In the late afternoons, when the sun dipped behind the bluff and a line of green gloom advanced across the park, we left him to the mosquitoes and pushed our bicycles up a shortcut trail to River Road. The climb was hard on my leg, and Paul always found an excuse to dawdle at a viewpoint that showed the whole of Dutch's little world, from purple bend below Grand Detour to the dark water descending on Dixon. Memory (a snapshot album rather than a videotape) holds the Lifeguard at middle distance, gazing over the heads of his charges at the far shore suffused in sunshine.

We usually went to the country club on our way home, because Paul, like Dutch in the past, had a caddying job there, and was put in a few hours on the links. I would sit on the groundsman's porch and scribble at my novel, or after the last party of the day had teed off, fly model airplanes on the green. Some of Paul's clients were so good as to sneak us the odd "sundowner" in a Coke bottle, which we would guzzle on the way home, along with peppermints to hide the guilty fumes.

On August 3, 1928, we were wildly excited to see "Life Guard 'Dutch' Reagan" mentioned on the front page of the Dixon, Telegraph, under an eighteen-point banner headline:

PULLED FROM THE JAWS OF DEATH

At nine-thirty the previous evening, reportedly, Dutch and Mr. Graybill had been closing up the bath house at Lowell Park when they heard a man splashing in deep water. The swimmer, whose name was given as James Raider, had failed to respond to orders, whereupon Dutch dived in and sought him out in inky darkness. He found a desperate person who had already "gone down once." There had been "quite a struggle" before Reagan, "making his twenty-fifth rescue," had brought the drowning man to shore. Mr. Raider had responded to artificial respiration and been escorted from the park. No charges were filed against him.

The story haunted me then, and haunts me now. Indeed, how can forget it, knowing what I know? Black night, black water; Dutch flinging off his glasses, plunging into a limbo whose dynamics were as fluid as anything in Einstein's theory of relativity. No fixed point of departure (he dived off a bobbing platform); no fixable point of distress; only the memory of a sound somewhere, a sound no longer audible as he swam. He could not head straight there, anyway; the swift current forced him to project a curving parabola, whose cusp must intersect with that of the drowning man, already curving downstream. And having miraculously found him, grappled him, punched him out of his panic, taken him into an armlock, the Lifeguard had to reverse this physics of rescue, and swim back doubly encumbered, upstream whence he came, so that chaos could be brought to ground, death cheated, and Prone Pressure Resuscitation performed to Mr. Graybill's satisfaction.

I clipped the story from the newspaper and stuck it in my scrapbook. Yellowed and crumbling now, it survives as Dutch's first claim to fame, the earliest item of Reaganiana I possess.