Drowning Makes No Sound

 

Cedar Valley News
July 13, 2026
Drowning Makes No Sound
By Teresa Nikas

 

At a backyard party two Saturdays ago, I caught myself counting children.

There were twenty of us in the yard, and nine or ten kids, most in the aboveground pool. Burgers going. Somebody’s speaker. An ordinary July afternoon. And I stood at the edge and counted heads in the water, and counted again a minute later, the way I have at every party with a pool for thirty years.

It is not a virtue. It is a habit, and I came by it the way an editor comes by most things. I have set the notices in type.

A newspaper is where a town writes down what happens to it. Weddings, ballgames, the fair. And a few times in a career, the other kind of notice. The short one, with a small name in it, which you set slowly, and check three times, and never forget.

Last month, the federal safety commission published its count. Three hundred seventy-nine children under fifteen drowned in pools and spas in a single year, up six percent. Nearly eight in ten were younger than five. Drowning is the leading cause of death for children between one and four. Ahead of illness. Ahead of cars.

And the number underneath the numbers, the one the coverage skips: more than seven in ten happened at a home. Not a lake. Not a public pool with a guard in a tall chair. A backyard. The child’s own, or a grandmother’s, a friend’s, a neighbor’s.

It does not happen the way you are picturing. It does not happen when nobody is watching.

It happens when everybody is.

It happens at the party. In the ten minutes between the burgers and the cake. In a yard holding twenty adults, every one of whom would give a hand or a life for the child, and not one of whom is, at this moment, watching the water. Because Karen is watching. Or Dave is. Or somebody is.

And here is the part which undoes people, and the reason I count.

Drowning makes no sound.

There is no splashing. No shouting. Nothing like the movies. A small child slips under in the middle of a party, and the party goes on, and the speaker keeps playing, and nobody hears a thing, because there is nothing to hear. Silence is not evidence of safety. It never was.

The same commission recalled five million aboveground pools this year. Not because they leak. Because children were climbing in on the compression straps outside. The ladder was up and put away. The gate was latched. And the strap turned out to be a ladder nobody had thought to look at.

Washington has convened a roundtable on all of this. I hope it does some good, and I mean it.

But the thing which will actually save a child in this valley this summer costs nothing, needs no expert, and takes five seconds.

At your next gathering with water in the yard, say it out loud.

"I have the water for the next twenty minutes."

And when your twenty minutes are up, hand it to a person by name, out loud, and make them say it back. Not a glance. Not an assumption. A sentence, spoken, with a name in it.

And I know why you will not want to. It feels rude. It feels dramatic. It feels like telling your host you do not trust her yard. So, you swallow it. Everyone in the yard is swallowing the same sentence, for the same reason, and so nobody has the water. Say it anyway.

It sounds too small to matter. It is not. It defeats the precise thing which kills these children: twenty good people in a yard, each one quietly assuming somebody else has it.

Then look at your own pool. Take the ladder down when the swimming is done. Look at the straps.

I have set a great many pages of this town’s summers. The fair, the ballgames, the swimming hole, the whole loud happy business of it.

I would like this to be a summer nobody hands me the other kind of notice.

Say it out loud. Somebody has to have the water.

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Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If you take the water at your next gathering, come and tell us; and if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the drowning figures, the residential setting of most child drownings, and the recall of aboveground pools prompted by the climbable compression straps are real, per the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.