OPINION: To hear the roar of waves, instead of the roar of engines

Barbara Selvin is an assistant professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism.

For beach-lovers, a day at the ocean provides relief from the strains of daily life. The water and the weather, the waves and the wind, the sun and the clouds, the sand and the tides - nature's rhythms restore the soul.

But tuning into those rhythms is harder when officials' motorized vehicles come bouncing along the sand every 10 minutes.

While I was lolling in the hot sunshine at Robert Moses State Park on a perfect day last month, a Polaris Ranger 6x6 - a six-wheeled contraption that looks like an old Army jeep - passed a few yards behind me, loaded with five or six lifeguards, heading east from Field 4 to Field 5.

Ten minutes later, it, or its twin, drove back, again filled with lifeguards.

Not long after, a four-door white pickup truck belonging to the New York State Park Police drove past, up by the dunes. It made a half-dozen trips over the course of the afternoon, its windows rolled up to preserve its interior cool.

Then two park policemen came along on all-terrain vehicles, stopping to roust swimmers from the water beyond the green-flagged swimming area.

Another Polaris Ranger drove by, this time empty except for the driver. Its exhaust fumes lingered in the air.

Altogether, the ATVs, the pickup and the Polaris Rangers made nearly 20 trips along the beach during the four hours I was there, an average of five motorized-vehicle trips per hour.

It didn't used to be this way.

I've been going to Robert Moses State Park since 1978. My husband, a Bay Shore boy, has been going since his mother took him there by the now long-retired ferry from Captree Island.

To be sure, in the past the occasional police jeep patrolled the beach. But lifeguards used their feet. Packs of five or six guards would jog past several times a day. Watching them was a lot more fun than watching out for traffic.

Some days later, I called the park office to ask why lifeguards, the fittest people on the planet, need a ride between beaches. George Gorman, a state parks spokesman, couldn't say.

No doubt the Rangers make things easier for the staff, but that's not much of a reason to spoil the day for beachgoers.

Gorman noted that lighter vehicles like the Polaris Ranger are less damaging to the beach than older, heavier SUVs.

I'll buy that. But the memory of that huge, air-conditioned police pickup still bothers me. And those incessant lifeguard drive-bys really made me mad. The one lifeguard I saw chasing swimmers from the out-of-bounds waves came by the old-fashioned way, on foot, carrying a buoy. But the guards in the Rangers that day just cruised by. (On another visit, though, I did see a guard in a Ranger stop to blow his whistle on illicit swimmers.)

The Rangers are probably fun to drive on the sand. Maybe the park staff loves its rugged toys. But why poison the air? Why risk running over beachgoers, as a Long Beach police officer accidentally did on the Friday before Memorial Day, breaking a sunbather's spine? Why sully the serenity of the beach?

State parks should be leaders in conservation, especially during a summer when an undersea oil gusher - a ramification of our society's wasteful energy habits - has contaminated other people's beaches.

Parks staff should stop unnecessary intrusions on the beach experience with internal-combustion engines. We come to the beach to find ourselves in the whisper and crash of the surf, the endless horizon, the smell of the salty air. Watching out for cars - that's part of the everyday world. It has no place at the sanctuary of the beach.