What's That Pig Outdoors? by Henry Kisor Page A

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    As I grew older, sooner or later I would learn that conventional lay attitudes about deafness could severely—and unfairly—limit my horizons. The first occasion arose when at the end of my junior year I sought a summer job as a swimming pool lifeguard, and the experience was shattering.
    Traditionally, Evanston High swimmers worked as lifeguards at country clubs so that they could train in the pools during their off hours. At the Y, I had earned all the qualifications: the Red Cross lifesaving and water safety instructor certificates. As a junior leader and swimmingteacher I’d spent many hours sharing lifeguarding tasks around the Y pool. No one had ever suggested that deafness might be a hindrance to such a responsibility.
    That spring, after the competition season, I asked Mr. Sugden, the Evanston High diving coach, for a guard’s job the following summer at Sunset Ridge Country Club, where he ran the pool when school was out. “Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll set it up and get back to you.” April arrived, then May, but I still did not hear from him. As June came closer I began to wonder why, and decided to seek out Mr. Sugden in his office to see if anything was wrong. Before I could do so, my parents, while attending a conference at the school, ran into the coach outside his office. “Henry’s looking forward to his job with you this summer,” Dad said.
    Mr. Sugden looked at the floor in embarrassment. “I’ve wanted to tell him this,” he said slowly, “but I can’t figure out how to do it. You see, the club’s board of directors won’t let me hire him. They don’t want a deaf lifeguard. They’re worried about the lives of their children.”
    When my parents broke the news to me that evening, I was devastated. Nothing in my young life had prepared me for the rejections that were bound to come—especially arbitrary ones made in boardrooms by people I had never met, people who had never seen my capabilities, people who knew nothing about the deaf.
    The notion of a deaf lifeguard is not as farfetched as it might seem. Bathers in trouble rarely, if ever, cry for help. They can’t. They’re choking on water and can’t get out a sound. They either thrash madly or disappear quietly under the surface. That’s why lifeguards are trained to scan the surface with their eyes. They’re not listening for cries of “Help!” but watching for abnormal behavior in the water. When actual rescues aren’t being conducted, lifeguarding is almost entirely a visual task.
    As a group, I would later learn, the deaf are measurably superior to the hearing in the discernment of visual cues and the speed of responses to them. There’s nothing superhuman about this phenomenon. The loss of a sense forces the remaining ones to compensate, to stretch and exercise their capabilities beyond conventional thresholds. The average deaf person has the peripheral vision of a fish-eye lens, almost 180 degrees, and spots the tiniest movement within this range long before the average hearing person can do so.
    In practical terms this superior visual acuity has led some automobile insurance companies in recent years to give sizable rate discounts to deaf drivers. Because the deaf are more visually alert behind the wheel than the hearing, we tend on the average to have fewer accidents, and thus are better insurance risks.
    Many years later I laid this argument before an old childhood friend who had spent summers in college and afterward as chief of lifeguards at a string of beaches on Lake Michigan. He had known my capabilities at age sixteen, and he agreed with me, though he was careful to point out that a lifeguard’s deafness could be a liability on a large lakefront beach during a complex rescue operation involving several lifeguards and a series of barked commands. That would, however, be irrelevant at a small swimming pool