Rangeman Guards the City

Rangeman began to roam the entire city of Manhattan, pausing now and then to warn people to cut that out and be nice.

That was Rangeman's primary message: Be nice, you there! Stop that! Give that back! And so forth.

After a couple of days he noticed that his GW9400

was water-resistant to 200 meters, and so he decided that he better learn how to swim. 

And because he thought it was unlikely that he would have to rescue someone in a YMCA swimming pool, he didn't train at the Y. Instead, he would suddenly start running toward the nearest water, whether that happened to be the Hudson river, the East River, the confluence of those two rivers downtown, the Harlem River, or what have you.

And since he reflected further that he was not likely to get advance warning of emergencies, he also did not plan swimming sessions, but interrupted whatever he was doing, whether it was eating, talking to friends, reading or whatever, to run to the water.

He was not a very good swimmer at all. It's not always a long distance across the Hudson or the East river to New Jersey or Long Island, but at first it almost killed Rangeman.

That was not said metaphorically, the way that people say that some strenuous but routine task "almost killed me." No. He very nearly drowned several times. Once, a passing tugboat struck him several times, until he was unconscious. He eventually washed up on shore in Brooklyn, and he might well have died on that shore, had not a playful cat happened by and jumped up and down on his chest until he coughed up a large amount of water and regained consciousness. 

He brought the cat back home, took very good care of it, and named it Lifeguard. He was not completely without a sense of humour.

Progress in swimming was slow and painful, but he was improving. He knew that he had a bad instinct of holding his head up too high. He was starting to overcome that.

One thing which made the swimming difficult was the frequency with which boats struck him. Were they doing that on purpose? It was difficult for Rangeman to believe that they were.