That smell—A strange, high chemical tang that colonized your nose and vaguely dizzied your mind whenever you reluctantly allowed your head to be squeezed through the tight keyhole opening, or felt the decisive snap of the bulbous collar being fastened by large hands around your small neck. The kind of odour not found in nature; the kind you get when you encase kapok stuffing in heavy, treated cotton, mix it with a little Coppertone and Off! rubbed from your skin, then bake it in the sun and soak it in fishy lake water at the bottom of an aluminum runabout, summer upon summer. (And relegate it to a cobwebby cottage shed or mildewy boathouse amidst paddles and fishing rods and gasoline cans, winter upon winter.)
Maybe the whole point, you thought, contemplating the ugly bulk of the Canadian Coast Guard/Department of Transport-approved lifesaving device being wrapped and tied and snap-fastened onto your upper body, was to humiliate children. That flagrant orange, visible to the naked eye from 20 leagues over the sea—certainly you could have served as a dandy human buoy for those teenage waterskiers you wistfully contemplated, fine sculpted forms in their bikinis and fetching, slender white waist belts. The way the jacket bulged out from the chest, making you feel like one of those displaying frigate birds in National Geographic; once the monstrosity encased you, movement seemed futile. And once you accepted that there was no way out, you had little choice but to sit there, with the woebegone resignation of an injured pet in a head cone.
The actual point, the argument went, was saving lives, but really, wasn’t it going a little overboard, putting you in a garment apparently made for WWII battleship ensigns torpedoed into the ocean during a hurricane, so that they might float unconscious for days on dark, tempest-tossed waters until rescue? That intended scenario seemed very far away, as your family putt-putted, ever so safely—ever so orangely—across a mirror-calm lake in the bright July sunshine.
Our complaining discomfort did not go unnoticed. Stringent approval standards still apply to the lifejacket and personal flotation device, but choices in colour and cut abound now for recreational boaters that were not available to those of us who sprouted in the ’60s. It’s true, the old behemoth life preservers would never have met Martha Stewart’s style standards. Still, looking back, you have to admit, knowing that a couple of people were there to place safety over vanity…it’s a good thing.
This story originally appeared in our May ’98 issue.
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