ON WATCH

Rising University of Iowa sophomore Ava Janda has discovered that sometimes the best screen is a horizon.

Seven feet above the sand at Lake Forest Beach, Ava Janda spends much of her summer gazing at water and bobbing humans. Scanning, scanning, scanning.

Lake Michigan can look calm enough to nap beside one minute and mischievous enough to command respect the next. Janda knows that. The 18-year-old Lake Bluff resident and 2025 Lake Forest High School (LFHS) graduate has spent four summers lifeguarding at the beach, the last one as manager of the lifeguards. She also knows something else. The phone in her pocket is no help from up there.

“My generation is attached to phones,” Janda says. “When I’m sitting up there as a lifeguard, my phone isn’t near me. It allows me to be in the moment—something all of us should strive to be in more often.”

Not a bad lesson to learn while sitting in a chair.

Janda swam and played water polo at LFHS and is now a sophomore-to-be at the University of Iowa, where she majors in chemical engineering with a concentration in sustainability. But some of her most valuable education has come while overlooking a beach she once sprinted across as a kid.

Back then, lifeguards seemed larger than life.

“They were so cool,” Janda recalls. “They had so much power.”

She laughs remembering the times she got yelled at for venturing onto the big rocks or swimming too far from shore. These days she’s the one doing the reminding. And answering questions.

The most common one from adults is, “How many times have you saved someone?”

The most common one from kids?

“When are you leaving?”

The youngsters want access to the sand pile in front of the lifeguard chairs.

“Some kids,” Janda says, laughing, “they’re always plotting.”

A typical shift includes 40 minutes in the chair, followed by a 20-minute break. Then it becomes an hour on, 20 minutes off. Seven lifeguards work each shift.

Focus matters. So does preparation.

Janda took American Red Cross training as a semester-long course at LFHS. Last summer she put it to use when a 7-year-old girl’s feet became tangled in a buoy line.

“She swallowed a lot of water,” Janda says. “I went in and helped her.”

The child ran to her parents after reaching shore. Janda heard a stream of thank-yous. It remains her only save.

Remarkably, there have been only two saves at Lake Forest Beach since she began lifeguarding at age 15.

“That’s pretty good,” she says.

What she enjoys most is seeing today’s children experience the same freedom she cherished as a beachgoer.

Running. Swimming. Laughing. Plotting.

All under the watch of a young woman perched seven feet above the sand, occasionally counting seagulls and waves, and keeping an eye on a body of water she describes in one word.

“Unpredictable,” Janda says. “One minute it’s calm, the next it can be wavy and dangerous.”

Which is why she keeps scanning, scanning, scanning.