Being the ultimate seducer, the curling breakers and ripples will wink knowingly and offer a gentle invitation to the water. Lake Michigan is like that. So beautiful, so warm and frothy; so innocently luxurious in summer.
And then Lake Michigan will kill you if it can. The water closes over your head. You won't have time to scream and thrash. That's how drowning works.
Drowning is usually quick and final when the currents catch your body and suck you down.
No hard feelings.
It's just nature. Geology. Water dynamics.
If we had written this last week, two people who were killed this weekend in the water just off Gary's Wells Beach shore — drowned in powerful currents — might be alive. But, of course, that is not really true because swimmers ignore warnings routinely.
Lake Michigan kills with a consuming impersonal, efficient regularity as if it were a large beast merely answering to its nature.
You can never know for sure who has saved their lives by not following a course they might have done.
I like to think I've scared at least one mom or dad into keeping their teen-age kid out of Lake Michigan. But there's no way to know for sure.
Few who leap into Lake Michigan in 2016 pay much attention to what they risk or heed any warnings. So thinking a stern warning would have saved them is conceited hubris.
But if David Alden II, 37, of Hobart, and Kyle Reibly, 26, of Griffith, had changed their decision based on any external advice, they would not be dead today. They went to help someone they thought was in trouble. They were noble, but they miscalculated.
Then Lake Michigan killed them instead.
Writing this now might not save the next victim. In fact, I am very sure it won't. But writers always hope that somebody listens to common sense.
A child almost died Sunday but was saved by a woman who also almost died before she was saved.
Another teenager was in critical condition Monday in Michigan City. The riptides near Washington Park almost killed him, too.
Two weeks ago, 14-year-old Gabriel Boose drowned in the same Waukegan Beach harbor channel that claimed a 21-year-old's life six years ago.
Boose's two older brothers who shared the daring swim between twin harbor channel breakwaters almost perished trying to save Gabriel before a boater fished them from the water. But Gabriel was gone.
Waukegan officials have tried unsuccessfully for years to keep swimmers away from the channel.
Gabriel Boose's family later expressed what seemed to be total obliviousness to the dangers they had faced. Only the children's begging to visit the beach was heeded.
Since 2010, the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project has educated, cajoled, and contributed in every way volunteers can. It even argues against stigmatizing victims and their relatives for fatal choices.
The Project has performed 292 safety presentations in seven states. For example, they teach groups how to designate "swim watchers" who are always observing members of their group in the water. They teach how to float and not fight rip tides. Surviving can be a skill.
Based on the events of last week, it's an open question if those who will become most in need of education are paying any attention.
But the toll for inattention is fearsome.
Forty have perished so far in the Great Lakes in 2016, 20 of them in Lake Michigan. Since 2010, Project advocates have tracked 478 Great Lakes deaths.
That's 74 drownings in 2010; 87 in 2011; 101 in 2012, 67 in 2013; 54 in 2014; 55 in 2015. Half of all Great Lakes drownings happen in Lake Michigan, and half of those came in the bottom third of Lake Michigan where the tides and waves rule.
The fatalities share a distressing commonality and even predictability.
First, it's a guy thing.
Most victims are young males (75 percent) who seldom wear even the new generation of sleek, nearly invisible swimming life vests. Eighteen of the 20 who died this year in Lake Michigan were males.
Lake experts say males heed a cultural urge to overestimate their swimming skill and physical strength in waters that seem passive, but aren't.
Male vanity can be an expensive affectation.
Ever since people have lived along Lake Michigan's southern shore, they have loved the summer waters. Indeed, the lake is what draws many people to live here.
Maybe nothing ever will dull that affection. But Lake Michigan is not a placid public pool.
The price for not recognizing the difference has been staggering.