Lowanna.

Lowanna arrives at Fisherman Bay when it's still dark. Nobody on the beach. The sand is cold and the foam moves slowly, no wind. The first thing she does is drop her gear at the tower — first-aid kit on the counter, not the cabinet, where it's useless when someone shows up with a cut at eleven at night — and change. Then she gets in the water.

A warm-up, eight hundred meters in open water, there and back, before six thirty. The bay at that hour smells of salt and wet seaweed, cold stone, nothing human. Not of sunscreen or tourists. Lowanna swims at a rhythm that never varies: long stroke, breathing every three, turning at the same point as always. She's been doing it for years. If she skips it, the day goes sideways. Her hands shake a little more after a difficult rescue. Her shoulders load up before lunchtime. Her head won't stop.

That morning swim is what keeps everything in place. Eight hundred meters. Eight hundred meters of constant movement for a person who needs to swim the same way she needs to breathe — because if she stops, something closes up. Physiology made habit, nothing more: her metabolism runs high, she eats a lot and often, light sleep in two broken blocks. Her body demands movement or bills her in anxiety.

By six thirty she's in the tower. She checks conditions: wind direction, type of swell, currents visible in the movement of the foam. She reads the water the way others read faces. She can tell when a swimmer is going to have problems by the way they tilt their shoulders. She knows when a current is about to shift before it shifts.

She eats in the tower: sandwiches she made the night before, always with too much protein. She doesn't carry her phone on shift. Her studio, a flat above a hardware store on Liverpool Street in Port Lincoln, has the windows always open — even in winter — because she needs to feel the southerly breeze or her skin closes up like something's missing that isn't exactly oxygen. Two rescue boards against the living-room wall. A book about orcas on the shelf. It's the only one that isn't functional.

After work she swims again. This time slow, no goal, in the deepest and coldest part of the bay. It's her version of meditation. Or breathing. Or whatever it is that a person who can't be still for more than two hours does — hands asking for something to do, legs asking for somewhere to go.