As summer temperatures reach their cruel apex, New Yorkers look around in desperation for somewhere to submerge themselves. The eastern end of Long Island dominates the city’s summertime imagination, but most of us living here are excluded (quite intentionally) from its charms. Unless we find our boss involved in some crudely outlined corporate intrigue leading to his murder and us hatching a scheme to parade around the Hamptons with his corpse, we can just forget about it. Instead, we seek out the those special watery places, open to the public, that are reasonably enjoyable without spending the night.

The closest of these are the city’s “secret” public pools, exposed each year by our generous press. We are told that they are not whatever cartoonish horor we think that public pools are. But we learn first hand that NYC public pools are a different cartoonish horror: a demonstration of the human disposition to slothfulness and pointless despotism. Last summer it was the sidewalk “mesh lining” swimsuit inspection. (No mesh, no entry.) We realize the importance of protecting innocent men, women, and children from their urges to look up mens’ boarding shorts, but it took the Parks Department three months to get back to our written query with a prudish answer: colorfastness. Because mesh linings are some indicator thereof? And enormous quantities of water are at risk of changing color?

This summer the outdoor inspection seems to have been lifted. Perhaps the command has realized that it makes more sense to just look at what people are wearing when they leave the locker rooms and enter the pool, where one or five employees are working / congregating / staring forward deliberately ignoring everyone and everything. It could work.

All of the Parks employees around the pool seem bent on treating the public with contempt. Other than making slight efforts to see that the often ridiculous rules are complied with, it isn’t clear what the thirty some people are supposed to be doing at the Tony Dapolito pool, for example. At least the lifeguards have a mission: saving us from dying in four feet of water. And blowing whistles, which they do a lot of. This increases proportionally to the number of rowdy kids who do not care if they are being whistled at. Also on one episode of Pool Watch we got to see them argue with a very old woman who wanted to use the pool ramp that was blocked with caution tape. (The Times says of NYC public pools in its update, “They are safer, and many have undergone renovations recently…”) Eventually they let the poor lady in the water. And a year later, the yellow tape remains. Safety first!

The climax of the pool affair comes you are kicked out. At around 2:40 some dude appears with a large wall clock hung around his neck (seriously). The lifeguards increase their whistle-blowing frequency slightly and make vague gestures for people to get out of the water. At 2:45, they blow their whistles continuously for about one minute. It is the worst minute ever. Then they break up the blowing a bit in order to scream “Clear the deck!” and stomp angrily around what they apparently call the deck. By 2:48, the troublesome public has been chased from the pool and into the locker rooms for the “3 p.m.” closing. Hooray for order!

Then again, we are living on a bunch of islands. Why are we even swimming in concrete basins full of chlorine? There are natural beaches in the area, yes? Served by trains and buses? Yes indeed.

Jones Beach is the big one. We are supposed to be thankful to Robert Moses for it, and also Tommy Hilfiger (or Nikon?). Of course it is only accessible by automobile, but the MTA shows surprising organization in busing morning crowds directly from arriving trains to the beach, a ten minute ride. There is some satisfaction in knowing that, at 11 a.m. or whenever you get there, all the parking spots are gone but you can just get off the bus at whatever stop you want—almost! The bus doesn’t serve the farther, gayer entrances, which is where any sane person would want to go.

So you have to walk. No one likes walking in the sand with beach “equipment,” but it’s that or setting up with the families and the lifeguards. Walkers are rewarded with a less crowded beach and the opportunity to swim in (de facto) freedom. There’s nothing behind the beach other than dunes and creepy guys cruising; it’s more or less the kind of state park beach you might find much further down the Atlantic coast.

And in the late afternoon you decide to go home and everything goes completely to hell. Sunburned as always, and parched, the walk out is twice as bad as the walk in. And then, at the bus stop, the line has already formed. There is no shelter from the sun in line, making the wait for the bus miserable. And the wait for the next bus, because the first will already be mostly full on arrival, and probably the one after that too. It is not unusual to spend a full hour in that cursed spot. And to forsake Jones Beach afterward.

Who needs buses, anyway? Long Beach has a train station—the train goes right over a trestle to the barrier island! That’s cool, and even better, Long Beach is supposed to be hip. So, get off the train, and wait in a short line to exchange your beach entrance thingy for some other beach entrance thingy, and then walk (with everyone) a few blocks to the beach. Pay no attention to the screaming woman trying to drive through the mob in her Mercedes SUV.

Along the beach is an extremely crowded boardwalk. It’s probably a good idea to walk to the right some distance, but we’ve never done this. Instead we just head straight for the water, right after we wait in a slow line to exchange our second beach thingy for a third. This is all for a $10 beach entrance, which seems a bit high considering the beach is ugly and droves of vendors are making a mint about ten feet from wherever you sit. Can’t they tax those people?

Whatever, Long Beach would be fine except for one thing: lifeguards, again! You can’t get away from them, as far as we can tell, and the allowed swimming area is extremely small and crowded. You will swim like cattle or you will not swim at all. (We’ve tried.) So you’re taking the train, walking, standing in various lines, and paying for the privilege of lying down on a small patch of sand that is too yellow. And overhearing conversations of 20 year-old Murray Hill dwellers. “Hip” has seen better days.

Why can’t we just go and jump in some convenient body of water—who’s fault is all of this? The poor, according to The Times: “A major reason the early pools were built is that hundreds of children were drowning each summer swimming in the city’s waterways.” Nowadays, New York waterways are the only swimming holes with a more cartoonishly bad reputation than public pools. You couldn’t pay one of today’s children to jump in a city “waterway.”

But the beaches continue to claim lives. Rip currents, or rip tides as they are called by the people that drown in them, exist in Long Island. Are they present when we go to the beach? Wouldn’t we like to know! Lifeguards operate like the Department of Homeland Security: the threat is always elevated, curiosity is suspicious, and information is not given freely. Sometimes apparently sanctioned groups will swim along the beach and exit the water wherever they please. So that was not deadly rip current day? But it was still twenty foot pen day.

Because some parents can not be bothered to watch their children swim, the entire adult population must be treated as rampaging brats when in the vicinity of water that is more than two inches deep. Because there are sometimes rip currents, the possibility of them will be used to justify just about any cordoning of where we may swim. Because the paper doesn’t believe in personal responsibility for the masses, anything in the name of passive safety will be lauded and any accident will produce an impassioned call for more safety.

And we will have to make a hell of a lot more money to buy our way out of this patronizing crap.