State’s little white lie

This is what came immediately to mind as Ian Bowles and Gregory Skomal told the people of Massachusetts this week that there’s nothing to fear from the great white sharks that have taken up residence along our shores.

Bowles is the state secretary of environmental affairs; Skomal is the state’s shark expert, which I hope is not a patronage job. The thrust of their advice was not to swim with seals — i.e., shark food — in warm water.

Thank you, gentlemen. And may I add that you should never jump out a window more than five stories high.

Ian and Greg were, not coincidentally, standing on dry land as they announced the ocean was perfectly safe. Perhaps their proclamation would have carried a little more weight if Bowles donned a wetsuit and held his next news conference in the surf off Lighthouse Beach.

That’s not going to happen. The governor of this coastal state decided to build his vacation house 130 miles inland. Our lieutenant governor is from landlocked Worcester. They know the ocean like J.D. Drew knows how to play through pain.

Which is to say that as much as Frank Drebin comes to mind, there’s another fictional character that may be even more relevant to the moment: Larry Vaughn. Vaughn was the mayor of Amity in the blockbuster “Jaws,’’ Amity being an awful lot like Edgartown, “Jaws’’ providing a prelude to what could be happening in real life. When the gouged body of a tourist washed ashore just before the July 4 holiday, Vaughn, like Bowles, said there was no reason in the world why people shouldn’t swim.

Several bodies later, there seemed to be reason after all.

We dodged fate last summer. There were so many great whites at the Cape that they were just about ordering Tanqueray and tonics around the pool at Chatham Bars Inn. An awful lot of perfectly nice seals suddenly found themselves on the lower links of the food chain, though fortunately, no human swimmers lost so much as a toe.

But how long can our good fortune go on? Bowles and Skomal are betting forever; I’m not so sure. It’s only June and a Gloucester-based fisherman videotaped a juvenile great white swimming off Scituate. The fisherman pegged this youngster at 200 pounds. Skomal, a master of underestimation, had him at 150. Trust me, 50 pounds either way isn’t going to matter if you’re pretending to be Tom Brady with a Nerf football and you find the shark in waist-deep water doing a safety blitz.

A quick Google search reveals that mother sharks give birth to anywhere from one to 14 politely-termed “pups,’’ meaning there could be 13 siblings in the area. Answers.com also indicates that mothers like to watch over their juvenile children — and something tells me they’re not the most laid-back caregivers.

I called Skomal, a widely respected biologist, but his voice mail message said he was “in the field.’’ I’d prefer my shark expert be in the water, but that may just be me.

We live in a state where the government seizes up at the mere prediction of snow. Kids are required to sit in booster seats until just about college. And along comes something truly deserving of every ounce of our fear, great white sharks, and state officials take pains to say they’re no big deal after all.

I can only speak for myself, but I’m not going in the water. To be honest, I won’t even take a bath.

Cape Cod has the largest concentration of miniature golf courses and batting cages on the planet. This long holiday weekend, I’d urge you to make good use of every one of them.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.