By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH — Men have threatened Terry Helgason-Smink.
To knock her down. To kiss her.
Some stand amazed at her pearly whites. Others stand abashed at the arrogant glow of her lime-green shirt, and that yellow-sleeved parking ticket she just tucked under their left windshield wiper.
Some people can’t keep their eyes off of Ray Tartal.
Embodying the ideal blond-haired, sun-bleached lifeguard, over seven years of patrolling the surf, he’s saved dozens of people from drowning.
And for more than a third of his working day, he gets to work out and keep his body as tight as Ulysses’ bowstring ready to release a quiver of arrows.
This is a tale of two types of summer patrol officers, with power over two of the town’s most visited areas: its streets and its surf.
One is thanked for his work; the other has a thankless task
If you’re a lifeguard, you’re buff and admirable. You save lives, and look fine doing it.
But meter maids? Well, meter enforcement officers, they’re called now.
Despite official name changes, you’re stuck (see sentence above) with the legacy of that patronizing cognomen.
And there’s always people who call you “Rita,” because of the Beatles’ song, which in part goes, Standing by a parking meter, when I caught a glimpse of Rita/ Filling in a ticket in her little white book./ In a cap she looked much older,/ And the bag across her shoulder/ Made her look a little like a military man.
Terry Helgason-Smink doesn’t look like a military man. She looks determined, especially after she sees those flashing double zeroes.
Bob Dylan’s line, Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters, from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” seems more appropriate.
Helgason-Smink is polite, wishing anyone a nice day who bothers to look at her while she sallies forth down the street, even when she hands over one of those tickets.
Women, almost always less aggressive than men, have muttered under their collective breath, “I can’t believe this,” when they see her assiduously poking at her hand-held printer terminal, recording the make and model, VIN and license plate numbers of their cars. She also records for posterity the vehicle’s color, number of doors, how long the meter has been expired — you can tell this only on the meters that you pay for at a central pod — when tags expire, whether the vehicle is a convertible, truck or van.
In varying degrees of plaintive tones, both genders also have asked her to please, please, please not write them a ticket.
More often than not, no can do.
Last year, Helgason-Smink so incensed one business owner, he came out twice from his store to give her a piece of his mind — as well as bits of spittle that flew exasperatingly from his lips. She feared for her safety and filed a police report.
The police talked to him, and he was not allowed to approach her again.
One time a very angry man, with his wife and son in the car, pounded on the hood of his automobile, screaming that he would never pay the $20 ticket for which she was writing him up.
“You know when you can tell people are on the edge of insanity?” she says.
He started to back out without waiting for the ticket, when Helgason-Smink told him since she had taken down his vehicle identification number, he was going to get a ticket anyway. He stopped, rolled down the backseat window, and told her, “Give it to my son. You’ll make his day.”
Wah-wah, dude.
Getting a ticket in this sand-encrusted pocket of beachy-keen living seems as inevitable as paying taxes and finally bowing to the well-oiled scythe of the Grim Reaper.
And it’s a great source of income for the town.
Rehoboth Beach rakes in nearly $3 million from the bucks and change shoveled over by tourists who use the parking meters and pay for parking permits throughout the summer season, said city manager Greg Ferrese.
Parking fines, collected by 14 meter enforcement officers, bring in about $525,000 for meters, and $75,000 for permits.
Running the parking department costs a bit less than a three-quarters of a million bucks. This makes perfect sense when one realizes that the people you love to hate make from $10.75 to $12 an hour.
That leaves plenty of money for capital projects, all of which are planned, Ferrese says, on the assumption of a population of 50,000 — the July 4 estimate, from a town that officially has all of 1,495 residents.
Money aside, being reflexively loathed for doing her job has given at least one meter maid a stoic philosophy of life.
“You are going to get a ticket,” says Helgason-Smink, 47. “It’s all about how you handle it.”
This is true. But some of us were born petulant, ready for a fight, incensed at paying a quarter for the privilege of 10 minutes of peace, or up to $1.50 per hour to park in those prime spaces bordering the beach.
“I’ve gotten tickets,” she confesses. “I understand. But some people you just can’t calm down.”
Parking tickets bring out the inner brat in all of us.
“No one wants to get caught,” Helgason-Smink says. “People want to do what they want to do.”
There’s also class distinctions involved.
“It’s the people who have money — you can tell by their cars — who are the worst,” she says. “Some are sweet. But many people are just miserable.”
Maybe it’s the combination of her burnished gold skin, sun-reddened cheeks, constant smile and “Have a good day,” modified by that reflecting shirt she wears.
Come to think of it, that town decal on her shirt — those seagulls floating around the lighthouse that make up the “The City of Rehoboth Beach” insignia – aren’t they really taunting, still-life metaphors for those meter maids circling around cars?
The Maryland-born Helgason-Smink has been coming to Rehoboth Beach for the summer ever since she could remember.
Her mom and dad came here for the summer before and after she was a glint in their eye. She loved working at Funland, spinning cotton candy, running rides. Just like her mom did, when it was Dentino’s.
Helgason-Smink’s daughter, Amanda, 19, continues the tradition. She worked three summers at Funland before becoming a waitress this year, and shares a cottage with her mom and grandmom.
“I love Rehoboth Beach,” Helgason-Smink says. “It’s quaint. Full of old cottages.”
It’s fortunate she’s a great walker — a streetwalker, she says, tongue in cheek.
Her fevered stride is a moving advertisement for cardiac health. She lost 10 pounds walking last year, her first season on the job.
She can eagle-eye meters from across the street and in direct sunlight. People get a five-minute break on their meters once they run out.
When the meter starts flashing, it’s all over but the shouting — sometimes literally.
“When I start writing,” she says, poking out a ticket for a maroon Cadillac from Pennsylvania, “sometimes I hear rushing flip-flops and people calling.”
Rehoboth Beach is sometimes split into three different sections for the meter maids: north and south of Rehoboth Avenue, and the first two blocks of Rehoboth Avenue.
These are monitored by the walkers. Meter maids on bicycles patrol the permit parking areas.
As she walks through the neighborhoods, Helgason-Smink says hello to many of the old-timers sitting on their porches. Some know her by name. When not metering, she works for several of them, painting, gardening or cleaning.
The most tickets she’s written in a day? More than 50 and less than 75. She refuses to be more specific. Her colleagues do more than that at times, she says.
It makes her laugh when people think that, once they get a ticket, they can just leave the car there. If 90 minutes pass, and the ticket’s still there, you’re going to get yet another ticket.
The good far outweighs the painful in her job, she says.
“I get to walk for a living, and stay at the beach every summer,” she says.
It’s a fine job, but Helgason-Smink has set her sights higher with a job where you walk for a living and can stay in Rehoboth Beach all year long.
A mail carrier. “Now, that’s a dream job,” she says.
****
But not if you’re just out of high school or going through college.
Sitting on a bench outside the Rehoboth Beach patrol cottage at Baltimore Avenue on the boardwalk, Ray Tartal, 23, looks like he’s made out of sun and sand.
It’s not just his straw-colored hair, bleached by two decades of summers. Or the sand seemingly beaded on each strand of hair on his arms or legs. Or even the tattoo of the sun on the upper back of his 5-foot 9-inch, 170-pound frame.
It’s his attitude: Like many of his colleagues, he’s laid-back and taut, physically fit and gentle.
There’s a reason.
“It’s like a glorified job,” he says. “Baywatch on the beach, saving lives and being paid to work out.”
Lifeguard of the Year for 2007, Tartal has been patrolling the beach for seven years. He started when he legally could, at 17, becoming certified in CPR and First Aid, and passing a pre-employment physical test.
The test included running a mile under 7 and a half minutes, running a 40 yard dash, doing 40 push-ups in one minute, 50 sit-ups in a minute, swimming 10 laps in a 25-yard pool, sprinting 50 yards under 40 seconds, and performing a 25-yard underwater swim.
And then there are the practice pool and ocean rescues.
Most of his days are calm, but you can tell by the look of the ocean if he’ll be busy.
“Sometimes, I do rescues all day,” he says. “Nothing makes you feel better than pulling someone out of the surf and saving them.”
It’s one of the best jobs at the beach because, “You’re not serving french fries — you’re making a difference.”
Tartal just earned a degree in business from York College in Pennsylvania, and works part-time with his father at Floors and More in Lewes.
He’s the oldest of three brothers. Jake, 21, was a lifeguard for four years before joining the Coast Guard; Aaron, 16, will be joining the patrol next year.
Lifeguards double-up with everything, including sitting and watching, and working out, which they do for three hours every day, six days a week.
You have to be in shape. “There’s nothing more tiring than making a rescue,” Tartal says.
Kent Buckson, captain of the lifeguards, says physical prowess is all-important.
“I like to find lifeguards who are competitors and athletes,” he says. “The ocean is our competition.”
He calls the work-out regimen of the lifeguards a “fountain of youth” for himself.
“It motivates me all winter long to stay in shape,” says Buckson, 41. “I want to lead the guards and not follow them.”
According to statistics, last summer (from Memorial Day weekend to the third weekend of September) the 70 lifeguards (who get paid from $10 to $13 an hour) of the beach patrol found 427 lost children (averaging close to five a day), performed 333 rescues (averaging about two a day), and cleared the beaches five times because of bad weather. Two staff medics treated 547 people for cuts, splinters, jellyfish stings and neck injuries.
Rookie lifeguard Sarah Andrade, 18, was inspired to become a lifeguard because she enjoyed watching her older brother do it.
“I love the atmosphere of the beach and I got to know a lot of the guards,” she says. “They were in shape and perfect.”
It keeps her toned for soccer. She graduated this spring from Caesar Rodney High School, and will be attending Haverford College in Pennsylvania in the fall.
She’ll be pre-law; she wants to be a district attorney. Her father and older brother are lawyers.
Unlike Tartal, who has saved more than 50 people during his career, she has yet to save anyone.
She has practiced plenty, of course.
“The adrenaline will take over, I hope,” she says.
And with experience, her attitude will become like that of Tartal’s, both laid-back and ready to spring at a moment’s notice.
There’s nothing like it.
“You get to be at the beach every day and get paid for it,” she says. “It’s the best job in the world.”