by Aria Quill

Created on: August 26, 2008

Undertow Water Safety

Today, I read an article in the local newspaper about a young boy and his step grandfather who died tragically in Lake Ontario.

As an older person from another generation I too have lived along the shores of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River since I was born with the exception of a 10 year span.

As a young person I lived in a place called Burlington on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario.

During my youth it was not uncommon for young people under the age of 12 to go to a place called the Second Tower (named after the second tower of hydro lines spanning the border of the lake). A group of my friends and I would treck quite some miles on a hot day to go to the beach and swim under the tower as we called it then.

My parents were not aware of the word "undertow" let alone the meaning of it. This is an amazing fact as my Mother's father was a police officer and was quite aware of death and the goings on of life in her community growing up. But none the less the word "undertow" never came up and we would go to the beach during the summer and it was a great place to spend the day. We were always well behaved and always unsupervised. The water along the lake was choppy and full of seawed from time to time but spending a day in the sand and cold water of the lake was par for the course at that age.

Then one day my friend's father mentioned to watch out for the "undertow". We all said yes and off we went. I didn't remember seeing an "undertow" or knowing what it was or who it was. It was just a word to be watchful of. Nobody actually explained it but we knew it could get us down at the Second Tower.

I use to have an older brother who prided himself in knowing everthing in the universe as he was in every sense of the word a pioneer in his own time in realtion to outer space. When the subject of the undertow came up he had a lengthy description of just what it was. We of course thought he was a blue bean short of the pot and forgot about what Mr. Google was even trying to say.

We played at the Second Tower and still no "undertow" ever got us. Later in life I realized that the undertow was a spinning of water that was buried below the surface and could wash someone back out to the lake faster than a jack rabbit.

To look at the water rolling into the shore one thinks that this is calm and reaching it's destination without furver but about 4 to 6 feet off the shoreline there is an underwater turbulance that catches the individual adult and child alike and

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