[aerovistae]

Okay so, I have to say, at first this was a pretty feel-bad story for me.

I then noticed a tidbit of information in another article about it that somehow made me feel different: Cole Summers didn't know how to swim. He was out on the water in a kayak, with no life jacket, with only an autistic child for company - and didn't know how to swim.

Somehow it stopped feeling like a tragic accident and more like carelessness and stupidity, and I just didn't feel as bad. I'm sorry it happened, and my heart goes out to his family, but this was avoidable.

Somehow among all the crazy stuff he learned and accomplished at such a young age, basic common sense seems to have been dodged.

[rendall]

It's hard to hear about any 14 year old boy dying, particularly one with such promise. To salve our feelings, to make sense of it, it might feel important to grasp some detail that makes it not so tragic. Resist doing that. It was a tragic accident.

[blobbers]

No, it was blatant stupidity of all the people surrounding him. Life jackets exist for a reason. They save people who can't swim! It's tragic that it is such a stupid preventable death, not an accident. It's like saying someone drove around their whole life without a seatbelt and then died in a car accident at 14. Angry at his stupid parents, or whoever gave him the kayak.

[Broken_Hippo]

"Life jackets exist for a reason. They save people who can't swim!"

Just wanted to add that they save folks that can swim as well. A lot of folks can swim a little, but not enough to get to shore if they are in the middle of a lake and wouldn't handle a current really well. Heck, even if you swim well, exhaustion is a danger. Life jackets help folks. Period.

[Firmwarrior]

To tack onto this a little, I can easily swim across a lake, but when I tried swimming in a peaceful looking patch of open ocean, I could barely keep my head above water. Play it safe out there!

[LouisSayers]

I was taught as a child to avoid "peaceful patches of ocean" as they can be rips (currents) that pull you out to sea.

The other lesson repeatedly drummed into us by our mother is to never jump into water without checking it first. There are also many stories of people becoming paralysed after diving into water.

The last lesson is to be careful of people drowning. If you get too close they can grab onto you, pulling you underwater and cause you to drown. If someone is drowning, either grab them from behind, or use a stick or I guess be at a distance where they can't pull you under.

One last lesson I learnt as a kid was to stay clear of dogs swimming - if they get too close they can claw you while doggy paddling.

[nosianu]

> I could barely keep my head above water

This is no longer about the original topic, instead I'm going off on a tangent inspired by your comment.

I'm curious if you could do something with this short comment: I only really felt I "got" swimming when I felt as comfortable under as above water, and more importantly, dynamically mixing the two. As long as my swimming mode, in the early days. concentrated on staying above water, from today's point of view it was maybe the quarter of the way to swimming safely at most.

Staying completely submerged during swimming while you don't need air saves a lot of energy, you can just swim through big ocean waves without being bothered, etc. Also, being used to spending most of the time completely submerged makes it easier to deal with when it happens accidentally.

A swimmer trying to keep their head above the water at all times, I don't think that this works very well unless conditions (of oneself too) are ideal or close to it.

Even then, I think I heard it in one American astronaut's interview about his training, additional high-stress training under water that you can't usually get because it has to be well managed by other people including safety divers, would still be missing from a normal person's experience. As a new diver I got into a very mild panic only once, fortunately close enough to shore (California kelp forests off a Monterey beach), and it was bad enough. I would not want to be caught in some eddy unable to surface with mounting alarm. Still, being comfortable doing most of the swimming submerged already is a huge step up from head-above-water mode swimming.

One should also have reviewed the local water currents and what to do when one is caught, but that's another issue.

[freetime2]

Yup I think it's really easy to overestimate your swimming ability. The first time I swam laps in a 50m pool, I remember being really surprised at how much effort it took to swim the length of the pool. And after about 500m or so I got a cramp in my leg.

If I were 500m from shore, weighed down by clothing, and dealing with waves and/or currents, that could be a disaster.

[rendall]

Agreed. Wear your lifejackets.

[rendall]

Sure, have feelings, whatever those are. Anger is valid.

This is more what I was responding to: ...and I just didn't feel as bad.

I wonder if your anger matches that which his caretakers feel at themselves.

[aerovistae]

To clarify my words, what makes me feel bad is fate reaching out of nowhere in an inevitable way to take someone away. A drunk driver driving in the wrong direction on the highway - literally nothing you can do but hope it doesn't happen to you, or that you're in a different lane (which I was - he passed by me on the inside lane, or I wouldn't be here typing this.) I dread something like this happening to someone I care about, and I hate hearing that it happened to anyone else, even a stranger.

By contrast I don't feel that bad hearing secondhand stories about easily preventable deaths. There were like 4 ways to prevent this - use a lifejacket, know how to swim, be with an adult, or at least don't fall out of your boat. I don't spend time worrying about how people I care about could die if they made a series of specific stupid decisions stacked on top of one another.

It's still sad for those involved, but from a distance I can no longer relate to it emotionally.

[actionfromafar]

Maybe it would be good practice to try. :) Just as an experiment.

[rendall]

Understood.

[emptyfile]

Going on the water, without knowing how to swim and drowning is NOT a tragic accident.

It's like going to jump with a parachute, by yourself, having never done so before.

It's a stupid, stupid risk and dying is not accidental or unexpected.

[chubot]

Eh this is a weird take -- if you are poor and everyone you know is poor, I don't think life jackets are the #1 thing you worry about, or even the #100 thing.

In rural communities, people are dying of many things, like not having medical care, drug addiction, murder, suicide, etc.

Obviously fate made this outing seem like a bad idea in hindsight, but I'd also say that leaving a 14 year kid to support a family of 4 is a bad idea in foresight.

i.e. if this is your takeaway, (respectfully) consider a different perspective

[jxramos]

This reminds me I need to teach my kids how to swim. I realized it recently having been around a bunch of rivers and lakes recently that they don’t have that skill and I forgot all about that while we were enjoying the water.

[freetime2]

Yup, drowning is a leading cause of death for children in the US [1]:

> More children ages 1–4 die from drowning than any other cause of death except birth defects. For children ages 1–14, drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury death after motor vehicle crashes.

Definitely worth taking seriously - and not being able to swim is a risk factor. My kids have been taking lessons since they were in preschool, but even then I don't let them out of sight when we're in the water because they still aren't very strong swimmers.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html